Well I'll go 't foot of our stairs

  Hi from a still largely inactive blogger here in Chiang Mai, if this sciatic problem doesn't go soon I think I will be classed as a "blobber" rather than a blogger 😣

So just to remind you of the type of content I wish I were posting here is a snap taken from a walk I took in Chiang Mai. It is of the wonderful Wat Phantao and because I have some tech that compensates, in some small way, for my minimal photographic skill I have been messing around with the original image and this is the result.

May I ask for some input here, when I was using my previous services for my blog, I would also reduce the photo so that it did not take too much of the limited storage the site offered and to ensure quick loading of the image.

But I have no idea what Google, in the guise of Blogger does in handling the image. Does it load quickly enough, or do you need the reduced file size as below? Many thanks.

Not that there were not good times yesterday, a couple of rather good video calls made the day. I doubt very much that there are youngsters reading the highly informative and knowledgeable contribution to society that I make in this blog, but it wasn't so long ago that making a long-distance call was both expensive and full of problems. You even had to book the call, only an audio call, in advance.

Even when I got my first phone of my own I had quite a task convincing the phone company, the post office that I needed a private line, not a shared "party" line 😩.

Now click the app and away you go, and in full real time video. They put men on the moon before they could do that.

Meanwhile I see a so-called meeting was held between Antony Blinken and Sergei Lavrov, the first since the Ukraine war.

It is reported, at least by the BBC that Antony Blinken told Sergei Lavrov to "end this war of aggression".

Ha! I bet that will make a difference.

This most important meeting, we are told, lasted less than 10 minutes - they spoke "on the move". So they were walking somewhere and Blinken said this to Lavrov, mmm corridor diplomacy I suppose.

And to close just on other point that related to yesterdays blog where I had a bit of a poke at the trend for electric cars to be the solution to all pollution.

Just be pure chance this was reported yesterday in Chiang Mai News in English.

"Mrs. Suwida King Kao, senior officer of the Air Quality Improvement Program in Thailand academic cooperation project and other representatives of the group visited the governor of Chiang Mai yesterday, March 1, to discuss air quality. 

Apparently, the French are sponsoring the project and you won't guess what they talked about - it wasn't fires.

Instead, they talked about preparations for a study into the implementation of an "eBus" service in Chiang Mai and the use of electric vehicles. The study will look at public transport routes and the use of minibusses and "red four-wheeled vehicles" on fixed bus routes. The study starts this month and is expected to take a year."

Don't get me wrong I welcome moves to introduce such services in Chiang Mai but the main 2.5PM issue is seasonal and unlikely to be just because there are so many more vehicles in these months, maybe the fires have something to do with it?

Coffee.