hi, we're still here!!

It's just that blogging about Switzerland has become like a fish blogging about water. What can I say that is still interesting??  (Or was it ever interesting in the first place...)

Here's a picture from when we were in the park having a barbecue in the dark. The chef for the barbecue is a "couch surfing chef" -- meaning, he goes from town to town and stays with someone and then hosts a cookout and people kick in food and money to him. It was interesting and the food was really good. The wine "glass" I'm holding is a plastic, screw-together one that Scott got for me to use camping...but we never go camping. So an outdoor event seemed the perfect time to break it out! We had fun, but it was super dark and late by the time we got any food, I was starving!

After this, we found our way through the dark, scary paths of a super spooky nighttime Swiss city park...to the tram and went home. See how exciting life is?

it was great!

We had a white Christmas...



And a really cute Christmas tree...



And a pair of awesome art collages of our favorite non-people...



We had a great Christmas -- hope yours was too!

down the memory hole

Our main laptop computer has been buggy since the day we bought it. We had to special order it with an English-language operating system and American keyboard. Then it was a piece o' crap and starting BLUE-SCREENING (hello? Is this 1997??) and showing 90% of the hard drive was full (not), and we had to finally take it in to get it fixed. Them dumbasses what fixed it put a new version of Windows and it's Home instead of Business...and it's in German. EFF WORD.

Plus, when they did all that, they erased all my files -- all my kindle books, my iTunes, my photos, CVs, tax documents, etc. GRRRRR.

So now I'm starting over. No pictures or history or bookmarks.

We are STILL trying to download Office, let's hope that eventually works. You know, since we've already paid for it and all.

Technology sucks, even though it's awesome.

...and a new car!

We loved our Subaru, but... It was like a college kid's car, a bit too loud on the highway, a stick-shift, a little gutless, stripped down, kinda tin can-y. So I've wanted a more grown-up car for a while now. I decided I like the Audi A3, and Scott gradually came to like them as well. At the point of, "I like this kind of car, and I'm not too fussed about the color," I'm pretty much out of the car talk by then. But Scott spec'ed it all out and knew exactly what we wanted and needed. He spent months (for reals) finding all different potential cars for us, finally finding THE one just last week. He told me about it, I said yeah, baby! And we both said, Sold! We went and bought it yesterday and I LOVE IT.

Here's the new love, a 2010 Audi A3 Quattro, used, has 10k km on it, that is black-blue and has heated seats + all sorts of other features that Scott can tell you about if you're into that sort of thing.


Ahhh, lovely. And an unbelievable pleasure to drive or be a passenger in. My goodness, this is why rich people buy nice cars (and why we buy used, very low-end models of nice cars LOL).

Funny story -- we went to the bank to get a car loan, because we're Americans and we think car loans are how you buy cars. And because car loans are usually like 3-4% (or at least that's what I remember). So this very cool lady helping us is desultorily showing us the personal loan they can give (they don't do car loans, only leases [the worst deal ever] or personal loans), what it looks like for a two-year repay and how much the interest is. The rate is 11.9%, which is making me all glum coz that is totally ridiculous for a car loan (which it wasn't). The lady starts to look like she REALLY wants to say something, so I catch her eye and say, "what? Say what you're thinking." She bursts out with how she would never pay that much interest, she'd rather (wait for it, it's totally predictable) go on holiday with that 3k of interest LOL. And then she pulls up our account there and gets even more agitated, "you have all this money in here, why don't you just pay for the car??" And I'm all, "but that's my savings, I don't want to spend that!" We just look at each other across the wide, wide bridge of cross-cultural confusion. And then we both started laughing, and she's like, "really, just pay for the car, you will still have plenty of money in the account and you can make the 'loan payment' to your savings account instead."

We laughed a lot, thanked her, shook hands and left the bank, then called the car dealer and said to just send us the invoice. It was fun, actually. I've not been used to people talking me out of doing business with them. But that is SO Swiss, I should have predicted it beforehand. They would do anything to get around paying even like 0.5% interest on something. Which is ironic, given that you can write of *any* interest on your taxes, even credit cards 'n shit. I'm guessing mostly foreigners are taking advantage of that allowance.

So yeah, now I'm freaking out ever so slightly that we spent such a chunk of our rainy-day fund. Eek. But then again, I have zero buyer's remorse. LOVE THIS CAR!

(I should probably still write a long post about our US trip... I am feeling so lazy lately. This is highly unusual.)

old skool

I realize that I don't have a "follow" button, an RSS feed button (I'd add it if I knew how, though) -- and hell, I don't even have a blogroll. This blog is old like me, and behaves accordingly. I owe an update about our US trip, which is still forthcoming. When I get around to it. ;-)

fasnacht etc.

We did make a run out of town for Fasnacht again, as per our tradition. However, we didn't go to Muerren (waah) and we only left town for a couple of days. When we drove in on Monday afternoon, the road was closed to get to our house, so we had to find a sneaky back way to reach our place. After just a minor road-frustration-related temper incident, we got home and all was well. Anyhow, we went to Martigny to visit Martin and Molly and had a good time, as usual. I don't think I have any new pictures of Martigny this time, but y'all have seen it by now. We did take a few little day trips and here are some pictures are from those outings. First, we went to Montreux (well, it was actually Villeneuve, which is just next-door to Montreux) where we ate in a cool little restaurant right on the lake (Lac Leman/Lake Geneva). Here's a picture of Cop 1 and Cop 2 outside the restaurant:


We then headed a bit down the road to Vevey, home of Nestle, which has a food museum (yeah, no idea what that is) right by the lake. And in front of the food museum, in the lake, is this:


WTF(ork)?!! Cracked me up... Here's another shot across the lake with sun coming through the clouds:


A bit further along the lake, there is a town square, an ice rink, and a carousel. This very cute picture of Scott and the doggies is just across from the carousel and ice rink:


A couple weekends later, Janet and Maya and their friend Carl came for a visit. A fun time was had by all -- including when the lot of them went to Freiburg (Germany) and gave me the opportunity to stay home with the dogs. Having been there many times (and knowing how freezing it can be), I was just fine with that option. Meanwhile, Scott took some cool pictures from the tower of the Muenster there:



I never climb the Muenster towers because they are often quite narrow, steep, and claustrophobic, but Scott has no such limitations. Luckily because of him we have a lot of nice tower shots. If it were up to me, we'd be limited to random mobile-phone captures, like this one outside my ENT doctor's office, for what is clearly going to be the concert of the decade:


DON'T MISS IT!!

wevs

I don't think this guy actually lived in Switzerland very long. Or if he did, he never got past his own blind spots to see anything real or objective. Putz.

Also, here's the weather today -- cold and icky.