From Catching Fire to Snow and Ice

When we went to the Atlanta History Museum in October we had no idea that Catching Fire was filmed there. They had a special day in Jan to show how it was during the movie and had some artifacts out. This is the Swan house and was used as the president's mansion. All of the shots inside were in the house and the wedding party held for Catnis and Peeta was here too. We loved the movie (and of course all the books) and it was fun to be where they filmed it.

I think Christine could be in the movies

The dining room where Pres. Snow sat

This was the room they made into his office, but they painted it white. (And then repainted it green, back to the original)

A room upstairs set up to be Snow's office.

A Japanese-looking decoration in the entryway.

Giving our speech

So now on to the cold...

On January 28 there were predictions for snow, but unfortunately no one thought it would actually stick. It did. 2-3 inches of it! Coming from the north you'd think, "What's the big deal?" But here in the south there are many factors that made it quite a disaster. First of all, there was no pre-treatment on the roads which caused it to turn to ice when the snow hit. Second, there are no plows to get rid of anything that accumulates. Third, once everyone saw that it was sticking, ALL of Atlanta decided to go home at the same time. Traffic here is bad on a normal day, not to mention the aforementioned snow/ice, with drivers that are not used to driving in it. That all combined with about 1-2 million people trying to get home all at the same time made for quite a mess. WOW! It was crazy. Stories on the news were unreal. Buses getting stuck, kids having to walk home, or spend the night at school, etc. The roads turned into a huge parking lot and myriad of people left their cars and ended up walking. Mark left work (12 miles away) at 12:30 pm and it took 3 hours to get home! He was quite distraught until he found out how long it took others to get home. Some more than 15 hours! He didn't complain after that. We were glad to have him home safely. Adriana made it home without any problems. Then we had the rest of the week to play in the snow and party! We were just glad to have electricity and heat, unlike in CT a few years ago.

We even pulled out some old snow pants of Adriana's.

It wasn't the best packing snow, so our snowman became just one ball. We made a joke out of it because while in Japan we learned that they do snowmen with 2 balls. So in the US (Northern states) snowmen have 3 balls, in Japan it's 2, and in Georgia it's 1!

The snow is all gone now, but we had a great time and the girls couldn't get enough. After this very cold winter, we are ready for Spring!