Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Here are the first batch of pics from the last several weeks. Hundreds more will follow, but Martha is currently monopolizing the computer I need to use so that she can finish the final draft of the thesis. (!!!) In the mean time, I hope you’re satisfied with lots of Sammy photos. Â 🙂
http://www.permanent-expatriate.com/july-august_2010/
Thursday, August 12, 2010
This is me trying to pull this blog out of mothballs. The last several weeks have been quite busy. Here are some highlights:
- Visitors! We had our friend from Maui here for 6 weeks, and also 2 friends from Toronto here for 10 days.
- Travel! While our TO friends were here we spent a weekend in Lyon, toured CERN, endured a hectic evening dodging death by psychotic traffic in Geneva, and lastly visited Gruyère and saw the H.R. Giger Museum there. These activities generated hundreds of photos, which I am now editing and making ready for online viewing.
- Sammy! He now has 5 teeth fully emerged and 3 more en route. He stands on his own, bends at the waist while standing, and has made his first attempts to walk unassisted.
- Martha! We are on the cusp of knowing when her defense and our Ontario visit will be. We are still shooting for the end of September, but noting is certain yet.
This will have to do for now until I get photos posted and have more spare time.
Here are pics of Sammy and Neuchâtel from the past month, broken into two batches for your viewing convenience:
http://www.permanent-expatriate.com/june2010-1/
http://www.permanent-expatriate.com/june2010-2/
Many of my friends have already voiced their opinions on events in Toronto over the past weekend. Some of the more worthy writing on the subject can be found on Facebook here and here. It’s taken some time for me to sort out my own thoughts and feelings about what happened and what it means. While I generally consider the fist-waiving hoi-polloi humorously naïve and the wanton destruction of property repugnant, my default sympathies lie with the protestors — even those of the nitwit lumpen-pop Black Bloc flavour. I have a romantic penchant for grandiose, self-important, yet self-destructive gestures, to which any woman with whom I’ve ever been in a relationship can attest. But that’s my heart. Let me try to use my head and start from square one.
(Continued)
This article is a lengthy explanation of why my family now lives in Switzerland. (The crack comparing Ph.D’s and migrant fruit pickers hits very close to home.) I recommend it to everyone, but especially those of you in the world of research science.
From Miller-McCune: “The Real Science Gap”
I wonder at all that wastes away before me. It seems that so much of what I’d taken for granted is passing away so fast. Is the Eschaton becoming more immanentized more quickly, or am I simply becoming older and thus more sensitive to changes in the wind? My son will not know the world I knew. Should I be joyous, or should I be sad?
Things here in Neuchâtel are pretty good. Here’s a scattershot of recent events:
- Sammy is now a master of pulling himself up, forward crawling, and cruising the furniture. As I type, he’s walking his morning laps around the coffee table.
- Back in April, Martha and I seriously revamped our diet. As of this writing, I’m down about 30 lb. from my pre-Neuchâtel weight.
- We had friends from Toronto visit us last week, and lots of fun was had by all.
I’d write more, but Sammy’s now crying. Here are photos from the last few weeks:
http://www.permanent-expatriate.com/may2010/
Sorry to be silent for so long. Here are some pics to tide you over until I can write something substantive:
http://www.permanent-expatriate.com/april2010/
Martha is now safely on her way back home and Sammy is enjoying an unusually long nap. I thought I would take this time to post some random bits:
- It’s difficult to find non-white bread here without nuts and seeds baked into it. (Or, more accurately, the only brown bread I’ve found without nuts in it is crappy supermarket bread, good only for feeding to birds.) This would be a total non-problem if it weren’t for Sammy. Like all book-trained North American parents these days, we’re paranoid about food allergies in general and nuts in specific. I decided to take the plunge a couple of weeks ago and start slowly giving Sammy some of the local bread. After several meals involving different bread varieties and compositions, I think I can be confident that he doesn’t have a nut allergy. Now if only feed himself some other way than cramming his mouth full of food and then gagging when he swallows.
- Internet banking here is a fair bit more secure than in North America. Along with our bank account info, we were given a RSA SecurID key. We need to input the current number whenever we log in (in addition to the username and password) and again whenever we make any kind of payment.
- It took a while, but I finally found pita bread here. The packaging identifies it as “pain libanais”. This makes me wonder about the etymology of the word “pita”.
- I also recently found, after much searching, some actual local microbrew. (Another post will have to be devoted to my opinion of Swiss beer. For now, let’s leave it that Switzerland is like North America in this respect: the beer you can get in the big stores is mostly crap.) The stuff I found is very tasty, but with lots of lees in the bottom. Care must be taken during pouring and drinking.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010