Adventures in Menu Translations

Pigtail of iridescent shark. Huh?

Possibly Forever After All

I found my diamond! Reto called the jewellery shop people and they said there was nothing they would do for me (apart from replace the stone at my expense), so I decided the time had come to actually look for the original. A quick minute or so of sweeping found it. It was on the floor under our toilet. I should have tried that days ago, but the potential for not finding it was a bit discouraging.

Hurray for my reputation as the finder of things remaining unsullied (incidentally, I also found the lost beanie in that post). And hurray for my marriage not falling apart (symbolically or otherwise)!

Hello!

No has recently discovered the joy of waving. If she sees herself in the mirror, if anyone comes into view, if she drops a piece of fruit on the ground, if anyone says hello/bye/hoi/gruezi/tschuss/adieu/ciao (etc) within earshot, she waves like a tiny maniac. This arvo on the train she apparently wanted to engage a few strangers and it was so adorable to see them fall victim to her charms. Even the particularly childproof-looking man next to us who had both a book and ipod to absorb all his attention couldn't stand more than a few minutes of No's charm offensive before he was waving back and pulling silly faces at her.

And they say the Swiss are a cranky bunch of grim-faced meanies.

Not Forever After All

Let me preface this by saying it's never me who loses things. I am the finder of things, everyone else loses stuff. When we bought our wedding rings, I thought to myself "The day Reto loses his, I'm going to be really annoyed".

*

The diamond has fallen out of my wedding ring! I'm so annoyed! I hardly wear the ring around the house these days, too, so having had a good rummage around my handbag and my jeans pockets, it seems really unlikely that I will find it again (not helped by the fact that it's pretty small). Fortunately Reto is on the case of harrassing the jewellery shop where we bought our rings to see if there's anything they'll do about it, so hopefully there's a happy ending somewhere out there, but in the meanwhile, grrr!

On a more positive note, at least I didn't lose the whole ring (that would have been really really terrible, whereas just the stone is more annoying than anything else). Also, if I do have to have the stone replaced I'm thinking of getting something else, perhaps a sapphire, because what do I care for diamonds?

(wedding ring, forlorn and empty, and just in time for our anniversary)

I got my annual letter the other day to go and renew my B permit (as in my Swiss residency permit). Normally it's pretty straightforward - turn up, give them a photo and the filled-in renewal form, pay the fee and a new permit gets posted out to me. This year they're making me give them my fingerprints and they want to take my photo themselves, and so the process has involved going to the foreigner office to hand in a form, being sent another form telling me to go to the post office to pay for the new permit and then going to the passport office to have all the biometric stuff done. 3 separate trips to places? Including no doubt having to queue for about 25 years at the passport office because it always seems to be chockers? Sigh.