Do you prefer 'em baked, fried...or smoked?

So one day I'm just working away at my desk, and Scott sends me this photo he took at the grocery store - a nice, high-end grocery store here in the lovely Basel. First of all, how great is it that I can be at work and Scott is off doing lovely things like shopping for our household?? Awesome...

And secondly, uh, CRACK STICKS?? I got some nice chuckles out of this one. I mean, you very occasionally get some funny translations here, but it's not like we live in Japan and get Engrish happening all the time. So a diverting bit of humor that day.

Then, a couple of weeks later, Scott and I went to Interlaken to spend the day with some friends. Well, actually, Scott and his friend went skiing just up the mountain, and me and my friend spent the day browsing around Interlaken, and sitting in outdoor cafes and terraces enjoying the view. But then we had to go to the little local Coop to get some dog food before they closed (it was just a few minutes until closing time, so it was time for last-minute items, and was a Coop Pronto - so a small convenience-type store with 'longer' opening hours). So both checkout lines are about five people deep, and this woman is frantically trying to cut in line (believe me, I can tell now) in the special passive local way...and her emergency purchase? A big old box of Crack Sticks.

Clearly she was jonesing...

Rainy, with a chance of landscape-altering temblors

I know this picture is a couple of months old now...but I mean, LOOK at the effing scenery, the blue sky, the picturesque-ness of it all! I am reminiscing of days gone by spent in Muerren in all its loveliness. Because, as was true several months back, I'm still sitting here looking out on an ever-larger construction site. There are now four buildings going up just in my small area of the campus...and the noise, my god the noise. Some days you can't even have a phone call because of the ever-lovin' noise. I found that it wasn't the construction noise giving me the headaches, so much as the noise was making me unconsciously tense my neck and shoulders (more than usual even) and that was causing headaches. It's also drab, grey and rainy out today - which isn't unusual for Basel...usually for every good day of weather, there are 3-4 bad ones (over the course of a year).

It doesn't help that the swiss build buildings that are designed to last for the next thousand years. Seriously, they build what have to be the strongest buildings in the world. Let's not forget that, despite mostly lacking sizeable active earthquake activity in the last few centuries, there are 'active' faults in the Basel region. And that Basel itself was hit by a landscape-altering, huge earthquake many moons ago. (This girl hates and despises earthquakes, so is hoping the Basel fault will hang on for another century at least.) But the California building earthquake codes got NOTHIN' on the swiss ones, from what I can tell. And even though I know it's probably daft of me, when they are pounding deep into the ground right outside my (17-storey) building, putting their reinforcing steel beams and concrete pillars 12 or so storeys into the earth, I find myself wondering...could their construction efforts actually set off an earthquake? Probably not, but I'm not overly rational about earthquakes in the first place. Sometimes when they're really getting their shit going outside, it can feel like an earthquake, and I always skip a beat before I realize it's not.

Oh, and the other day when I was walking outside the front of my building, they were lifting this huge steel beam (like 40 feet long) with a crane right over my freaking head (freaking being the operative word, as I was as soon as I looked up). One little slip and I would have been splattered like a bug. There's no hard-hat in the world designed for this kind of thing - never mind the fact that I'm just a squishy-headed, office-working target. Sheesh.