Lift Up Your Hearts!

If a good neighbor is one who watches out for your home while you are gone, and a great neighbor takes care of your mail and pets (even if there are 10,000 of them), what can you say about a neighbor who will take you to the airport at 4:30 in the morning?  That was the first leg of our trip to Hawaii.  (Technically, “Hawai‘i,” with the left single quote, but I’m going with the simplified spelling.)

Hawaii?  What were we doing there?  That’s what I asked myself. (More)

Stephan's thoughtful parents gave Porter a jar of Speculoos à Tartiner for Christmas, and I can't wait to try it.  It's made by Lotus, the same folks who make the incredibly delicious Biscoff cookies Porter occasionally brings home from a plane flight.

I don't have as much quarrel with the TSA as many people do, but I am tired of having my luggage singled out for hand inspection nearly every time I fly.  On my most recent trip to Switzerland, I wasn't particularly surprised to find the tell-tale TSA notice in my checked bag when it and I were finally reunited (that's another story), because I was carrying a large, metal cylinder filled with dangerous ... candy canes.  The can did a great job of protecting the fragile candy, but must have looked intimidating on the x-ray.  There is no packing job so good that the TSA can't make a hash of it, but the only victim of their efforts was one crushed chocolate truffle.  We promptly destroyed the evidence.

On the way home I thought I had a chance of escaping.  I had a few bizarre encounters with airport security—none of which involved pat-downs, I'm glad to say—but it wasn't until I landed in Charlotte that my checked bag became a problem.

First, I was singled out for special treatment at Customs, because I'd answered honestly the question, "Are you bringing any food into the country?"  That always gets me into trouble, although normally as soon as I explain that the food is chocolate, cookies, and similar items, they lose interest.

Not this time.  Everything, including my purse, went through a scanner.  "What's in the jar?" I was asked.  "It's kind of like peanut butter," was the best I could do, but it was sufficient.  The pleasant Customs officials released me, and I thought I was home free. (More)

It is fitting to end my November Thanksgivings with gratitude for a wonderful visit with family and a safe journey home.  Despite Heather’s prediction that I would post more about our activities than she would, you’re not likely to hear much about them.  I was too busy living the adventure to write about it.¹  Of yesterday’s voyage from Pittsburgh to Orlando I have much to say, and the illusion of time to say it.

It was a long day—nearly 16 hours door-to-door—but I can’t complain as Porter still had some 13 more hours to travel after I was safe in our own house.  If it weren’t for the final blow from JetBlue, I wouldn’t have minded at all. (More)

This is a short post, because I don't have a lot to say about electricity in Switzerland, but I like their home outlets.  I'd rather the world adopt our 110 volt system, for safety reasons, but if I could I'd change our plugs to the Swiss type.  See how sturdy the prongs are?  No worries about accidentally bending them when you stretch the cord too much, straining to get the vacuum cleaner to reach to the far corner.  Some outlets are combined with light switches, and many are recessed—a neat safety device that makes it impossible for the prongs to be connected to the electricity and touching your fingers at the same time.

   

Maybe this post should be "readjustments," since I'm now home and experiencing reverse culture shock, but it's still worth talking about transportation.

Basel is a city, albeit one of the nicest cities I know.  It's the third largest in Switzerland, a little smaller in population than Providence, Rhode Island or Tallahassee, Florida, but a lot more dense.  I'm not fond of cities, in general, but if you wanted to design a situation that is perfect for public transit, walking, and biking, you could hardly do better—and Basel made a conscious choice, back in the 1970's, to encourage those modes of transport. (More)

...when you take a nice hot shower and only find out later that your husband had turned off the water heater three days before.

One of the fun things about spending foreign money is that it doesn't feel like real spending.  It feels like play money, Monopoly money.  I don't know at what point I crossed the line, but I'm definitely past that.  Swiss francs are now real money, and I look at the green American paper in my wallet and think, "What is this?  Do people actually accept this as payment?"  No doubt that will not last long, once I am home, but it's a weird feeling.

I've long been in favor of following the lead of the many countries that have replaced their lower-denomination bills with coins.  Now that I've worked with such a system for over a month, here are some observations: (More)

While Joseph was undergoing a secular baptism of sorts at the American Embassy in Bern, Grandma had no official business other than to receive the diaper bag when it was rejected at the door for possible terrorist connections.^* (More)

Living with other people for several weeks is a good way to experience new foods and new food combinations.  If those other people happen to live in another country, the opportunities multiply.  And if they also subscribe to a local organic farm's weekly vegetable delivery, well...you get to try Swiss chard.  Verdict?  Not bad, though I think I'll like it better mixed with other things, such as in an omelet or on a pizza.  It's related to beets, but I find the taste more like spinach.  As it was with Heather and Jon's Community-Supported Agriculture farm in Pittsburgh, the weekly vegetable lottery is fun to play, and Stephan (like Jon) is particularly good at figuring out how to make good use of fennel, fresh tarragon, and eggplant as well as potatoes, lettuce, and zucchini.

What's a visit to Switzerland without trying a new variety of chocolate?  When Stephan brought home a bar of dark Ovomaltine, I was at first skeptical. (More)

We interrupt the writing of my review of Ender's Game to alert you to the fact that Janet has now posted Joseph's birth story.  I'll add some comments later.

I like the trash collection system here in Basel:  You buy special blue garbage bags, each 35 liters in size (about 9 gallons), which is considerably smaller than an American "large kitchen trash bag."  They are, however, much tougher, and can be well-stuffed without ripping.  You pack your trash as efficiently as possible into as many bags as you need, and put them out in the street at the appropriate time for collection.

That's it.  The cost of trash collection is included in the cost of the bags, and thus you pay proportionately for the amount of trash you produce.  There is significant incentive to minimize your waste, yet the capacity to dispose of more is there if you need it.  Ideally, you would pay by weight rather than volume, but the system is so easy, it is a worthwhile compromise.  I think of a friend's complaint that she can't help feeling annoyed at seeing her neighbor's routine weekly pile of 10 or more large bags as she makes her own family's one-small-bag contribution to the landfill collection; she would welcome such a system in her town.  As would I.

Recycling is different here, too, though I haven't decided if it's better or worse.  Plastics and metals must be taken to a recycling station instead of being picked up at the curb as I'm accustomed to, but such stations are only an easy walk away.  Only one type of plastic is recycled ("PET," known in the U.S. as PETE or #1); our county recycles any type of plastic as long as it has a number code.  On the other hand, paper is picked up at the curb, and they recycle all sorts of paper, including office paper, which our county excludes.  Not worse, not better, just different—and not any more different than the variability from community to community in the U.S., as we discovered in moving among New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Florida.

Temperatures in the mid-90's do not surprise me in July:  I live in Florida.  I'll confess I was hoping for something more reasonable in Switzerland, however.  Somehow calling the temperatures "mid-30's" doesn't improve the situation as much as I would hope.  I miss air conditioning; I miss ceiling fans.  Even when we lived without air conditioning in Boston I could find relief at the grocery store.  Not so, here.

But there are compensations.  The apartment is wonderfully designed for cross-ventilation, and the lack of screens means we make the most of every breeze. We have two fans, and the temperatures cool off enough at night to make sleeping reasonable.  Still, there's not much incentive to be very ambitious, and Janet is really wishing she could take advantage of her membership in the pool that's only a five-minute walk away.

How about you?  I gather it's been hot for a lot of folks.

Baby update:  Doing fine, eating lots, filling out, doesn't like the heat but still likes to be held.  Has perfected the knack of filling a clean diaper within 15 seconds of the change.

My original impression of Basel as a quiet place has been irrevocably shattered now that I'm here in the summer instead of the winter.  In this season construction projects are in full swing, and the noise of machinery is nearly incessant during the work day—including some sort of saw that reminds me of a high-volume dentist's drill and sets my teeth on edge worse than the World Cup horns.

That unavoidable annoyance notwithstanding, I realized this morning that in some ways Janet and Stephan's city apartment is closer to nature than our own suburban house.  (And our back yard, for its size, is an especially wildlife-friendly area.)  Light and air stream through the many windows, and when I look up from my computer I rest my eyes on a view of the blue sky, the trees of a nearby park, and a window box garden of herbs and wildflowers.

When I look up from my computer at home, I see a wall.  Well, I also see pictures of our grandkids, which is a delightful view itself, but here there is something restful to the eyes in focussing on the distant trees, and soothing to the spirit in watching the birds soar and the wildflowers move in the breeze.

Who'd have thought one could feel so close to nature in the middle of the city?  The peace it brings almost cancels out the noise.

I left the new family to their own devices on Saturday morning, when Stephan's mom whisked me away for an adventure.  There is a small farm in nearby Riehen which, as I understand it, specializes in biodiversity/heritage breed conservation of berry plants.  On this day, they opened their farm to the public for tasting!  We could take nothing away, not even by purchase, but were welcome to taste and enjoy all we wanted.

(Somewhere therein is a metaphor for life, I'm certain.) (More)

The day I arrived in Basel on this trip, I felt in need of some "chill-out" reading that wouldn't tax my jet-lagged brain cells.  Fortunately, Janet and Stephan's bookshelves are well stocked, even after eliminating the books in German, French, and Japanese.

For much of my life, Isaac Asimov was one of my very favorite authors, first for his science fiction, and later for his non-fiction.  (I had the pleasure of astonishing him once at a science fiction convention by presenting to him one of his American history books for autographing.)  Asimov kept writing—surely he must hold some record for the quantity and scope of his works—but life took me in different directions and I neglected him for many years, except for re-reading his delightful Black Widowers mystery stories.

But there on the bookshelf was Gold, a collection of some of his last short stories and essays, and it was just what I wanted.  (More)