Happy Birthday Mary!

... who doesn't read this blog! Don't worry, though, Mary. I don't hold it against you.

Maggot-Free

I'm very unhappy to say that someone (according to my crappy blogstats thing) found my blog by googling "fiance unemployed wedding -maggot at the wedding". Hmm. While my fiance may well have been unemployed when we got married (and indeed also when we got engaged, and for the entire time in between, and also now and for the next fortnight. Then again, who am I to cast stones? Some of the best people I know are unemployed. By which I am obviously referring primarily to myself), there was definitely no maggot in attendance at our wedding. Or at least none that I know of.

Interestingly, googling "fiance unemployed wedding -maggot at the wedding" doesn't actually bring up anything about this blog on the first page of hits. Apparently someone was seriously researching the topic to be able to find me.

Grr

I would have hoped that my recent name-changing frenzy might have solved all my problems with being called stupid things in this country, but apparently not. I am still getting quite a bit of the "Robin" stuff (although I am resigned to that happening forevermore. Happily I also enjoy being OUTRAGED about it, so it's fine), but there is also quite a lot of "Mrs Reto'sFormerSurname" going on, which I don't enjoy at all. If I had wanted that I would have taken his name instead of making him agree to our new icecream-themed option. Grr.

Mr K

For reasons I feel no pressing need to go into, I made an amigurumi kitty cat a while ago. I was toying with the idea of giving the finished product to one of the small people I know, but when he was finished I realised he was far too adorable to suffer the drool and vomit of tiny people, and was much more suited to a happy life at Chez OurNewSurname. And so here he is. Introducing the many faces of Mr Kitty:

there's "at-ease kitty" (note the hint-o-crankiness about him)

"cranky kitty"

and "cranky kitty number 2" (although he could also be pretending to be a monkey here)

Isn't he versatile?

Shopping Frenzy

We may not be moving in for another 3 weeks, but that doesn't mean we can't have a shopping frenzy. Yesterday we bought this

rather excellent sofa (sadly not in that wacky shade of yellow, which is great but probably a bit too high-maintenance), and a bunch of useful but less exciting other things (like saucepans and doona covers and spatulas).

Then last night I had a dream that we had moved into our new flat, and the view from the bedroom window was of the beach. It was lovely. It was quite sad to wake up and realise just how wrong I was. Stoopid landlocked nations.

Blergh

It's a month since Reto and I got married. Much as I don't approve of people noticing such things (and believe me, normally I am the sort of person who doesn't), I can't help but feel vaguely nauseatingly happy.

In other news, in the book I am reading at the moment (the title/author of which is too atrociously embarrassing to mention) the main character's husband dies on the 16th of Feb. Which is our anniversary. So that's nice.

Just Say No To Cleanliness

Guess what I did earlier today? I steam-cleaned all the tiled floor in the house. Although it wasn't really so arduous (no more so than vacuuming) and it really does seem to have the power to make things quite clean, I hope I never ever do it ever again in my whole life. Why? Because I disapprove of that level of cleanliness. I don't care if I live in a bit of filth, and indeed I would even go so far as to say I prefer it. I don't like the constant pressure that having everything spotlessly clean creates to keep everything spotlessly clean. I may not have the busiest life ever, but I would much rather spend my spare time doing whatever it is I enjoy doing than spend it steam cleaning things I stand on and breathing in the offensive fumes of genocide-strength antibacterial surface spray.

Not Homeless!

Hurray! All my incessant complaining for the last few days has come to a cheerful end! We're not flat-hunters any more! Although things were looking quite positive, and then sort of positive, and then a bit negative, and then ridiculously negative (although that could have just been my half-empty tinted glasses that I was apparently wearing this morning), we have just heard that we are the proud new renters of Flat Number Two! Hurrah!

In less good news, we can't move in for another 3 weeks (boo!) but then again, that would be the first weekend when it would be handy for us to move in anyway (what with our hectic social schedule over easter, and then other people's hectic social schedules over the weekend after easter, which would prevent us from having the hands and the wheels that will be so helpful in getting us moved out and in) (yay!). Which means that Reto has to commute all the way from here to there (a few tedious hours in the train) for the first few days of his job (boo!) but this is made easier by the fact that by then we will finally have our super-duper-go-anywhere train tickets (yay!), which incidentally are going to be tons cheaper than we thought they might be since his comes at student rates and mine is the discounted "second person in the house/family" ticket (yay!). It seems to me that the "yay!"s are way out in front. Yay!

Now all we have to do is buy a couch and a table and a toaster (and spend all the rest of our wedding present money (yay!)) and we will practically be living like grown ups!

Why I Kinda Miss Aarau

We went to Aarau yesterday, and in addition to finally seeing a movie I have been wanting to see for ages (Into The Wild), eating some rather excellent tapas and seeing a good friend, we also scored all these books ...... for a mere 20 francs! Well, okay a few of them are library books, but we bought 14 of them at the second hand bookshop. Lugging them all the way home again was annoying, but definitely worth it!

Now if you don't hear from me for a while you won't know if it's because I have been poisoned or because I am hiding under the covers with a book.

Mysterious Occurrences At The HOT

Something strange is afoot. The other day while having a shower I noticed that ... I was not alone. In what I imagine is a display of total unSwitziness (for I have never seen an unauthorised creature in anyone's home here. Which seems remarkable given this nation's abhorrence of fly screens), there seems to be a spider living in the shower here at the HOT. Although not such a fan of spiders myself, this one looks mostly harmless and so I have decided not to tell anyone in case they decide to kill it.

Strange thing number two happened a few days ago. A big box of Lindt balls turned up on the doorstep. No one knows who put it there or why, but it was in pristine condition (ie. unopened and apparently untampered with) and so after a few days of hemming and hawing we decided to throw caution/paranoia to the wind and scoff the lot. No adverse reactions so far, but if I mysteriously don't write anything here in the next week or so, you'll know I've most likely been poisoned.

Please note that the photo above is not an accurate portrayal of reality. The real packet of chocolates was bigger, redder, less empty (indeed unopened), and the daffodils at the back weren't in bloom. I like daffodils.

Boring? Not My Problem!

Last year I was acquainted with the idea of commitment. If I started reading a book, I kept going right through until the end, even if it was unbearable tosh. This year, not so much. It's really very liberating, but I do wonder if I am missing out on some great stuff.

Flat Update

We are in the throes of searching for a new flat, and happily we now have a short list. Our options are:

1. Possibly over-priced but charming. On the 4th floor (I think) with rickety stairs and no lift (a nightmare for moving our furniture in). Tiny bedroom but excellent living room and, fairly revolutionarily, it comes with a washing machine! No communal laundry nightmares! No allocated half day a week and cranky neighbours! No storage space (like a basement or a cave or whatever). Mostly super location. No balcony, but an excellent bath (those are the two things I really want in a flat, a balcony and a bath). We could move in instantly, which would be great.

2. Heaps cheaper and deceptively large. Another tiny bedroom, and another excellent living room, and also a spare room. Crappy old-fangled kitchen and bathroom (with bath!), but cosy and adorable. On the 3rd floor (I think) with not-so-rickety stairs and no lift (a nightmare for moving our furniture in). A shared washing machine but one shared by only 5 or so flats, with space for hanging laundry out (I hate driers) and no timetable (a good thing). Super location. An attic basement. Oh, and there is no way to buzz people in through the front door! You have to actually go downstairs and open it! No balcony.

3. I don't know, actually. Reto saw this one on his own this evening and said it was super, but I really don't know. Apparently it also has its own washing machine. I believe it has a balcony, but a tiny tiny crappy one, and no bath.
UPDATE: Apparently this flat has semi-tiny rooms (although not as tiny as the rooms in the other places), a spare room, a newfangled-ish kitchen (which is also where the washing machine is, whic I think is weird and Reto doesn't), a lift (it's only on the 1st floor so you don't really need one. Oh, and apparently the lift actually opens into the apartment! Weird! Mock swanky!) and a super location. As well as no bath. The fact that I haven't seen it makes me not care so much for it, though, and Reto says he puts it at the bottom of his list too.

So there are the options. We're applying for them all and seeing what happens. I'm secretly going for Number 2.

All Of Us

I used to find it really annoying when people got my name wrong. They would mispronounce Robyn (sometimes), they would spell it incorrectly (allll the time), they would assume I was a man (really fairly entertaining until the squillionth time it happened. Actually, the last straw was when it happened when we were dealing with the Swiss consulate in Australia. I know they're still Swiss, but they're in Australia! Robyn is a girl's name there! Aagh!).

Anyway, fast forward to now and my shiny new surname, and I love the fact that it has lots of variations. I am fairly fond of the official english version, actually (because that is what I have been calling myself for the last few months), but I also enjoy the german version, and I am also looking forward to the french-speaking option, whatever that might be. It's like suddenly I could be anyone! Or all sorts of different people! Wacky!

Not Asleep

Well, here I am at 6.30am on a Saturday morning, all bright-eyed and awake. As I also was an hour and a half ago. Which is far better than yesterday, when I woke up at 3am and couldn't get back to sleep, but it's still not really ideal.

In addition to my lack of sleep, I am also having a quality of sleep issue. For a start, the bed we have here is tiny and Reto is pathetic at not hogging all the space, and secondly, I had a nightmare last night! Happily I don't really remember it, apart from some vague idea of lots of death and blood, but I do recall that I woke up traumatised. I blame it on the fact that yesterday we went to my favourite library in this neck-o-the-woods, the Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, and, true to form, there were lots of new and/or currently popular books around in english (because apparently no one but me ever borrows anything in english from there). And so last night I started reading "No Country For Old Men" (having failed to see the movie yet) and it was all death and blood and sociopathic violence with the threat of lots more to come. So it's no great leap of personal insight to see where the dream might have come from.

Coming Up This Week

The other thing that happened was that I read my horoscope in Who (magazine) and apparently this week I am going to give birth to a baby*. Or maybe it's this month. I don't know how often Who comes out.



* Actually, what they said was that I am reaching the end of a period of gestation, and that that might mean that I am going to have a baby (right now), or it might mean that I am about to start a new business or that a new romance I am having is about to flourish. Hmm. And by the way, I think that my relationship with Reto is a bit old to be called a "new romance".

Switzerland Versus Australia

Our first flight to get back to The Land Of Calc was with Qantas, which you will all no doubt recognise as an Australian airline, and the second was with Swiss. And so, to sum up finally whose country is better than whose ...

On our Qantas flight we had a spare seat between the two of us. You might uncharitably suggest that this is because no one is foolish enough to fly Qantas, hence the empty seats, or you might just recognise that gift horses' mouths are not made to be looked in.

On our Swiss flight, not only did we have far less leg room and noticeably narrower seats, but we somehow managed to be wedged into the middle two seats of a row of four, which is obviously the worst possible seating luck.

WINNER: Australia.

On our Qantas flight we didn't have individual screens! I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't have even thought such a lack of technology was still possible these days had my sister not recently told me that the same thing happened to her on a United flight to America a few months ago. Happily one of the movies they showed on this flight was Michael Clayton (which I had been meaning to see and really enjoyed watching), but the other one which I embarrassingly endured most of was some tosh with Nicole Kidman and space aliens. Happily for Our Nicole, she had to spend much of the movie pretending to be a soulless, emotionless zombie type, which suits her acting style down to the ground. I have never seen her so convincing.

On the Swiss flight we had sensible individual screens and shows on demand, as it should be. Funnily enough, I watched another Nicole Kidman flick, this time Margot At The Wedding, which was far better than the Qantas one, but still kind of awful. I also watched a fairly excellent and peculiar Canadian movie without Nicole Kidman in it, called Lars and The Real Girl, which was bizarro and comes highly recommended (by me).

WINNER: Switzerland

The Qantas blankets were all soft and fluffy, and the cushions had surprisingly endearing little ruffle things around the edge.

The Swiss blankets seemed as though they had previously been used on horses and made me itchy. The pillows were fine but had no endearing qualities.

WINNER: Australia

The food on the Qantas flight was okay. I scoffed every skerrick of my first meal (and some of Reto's. This possibly says more about my hunger than the fact that the food was great, but it was certainly edible. It was an asian-themed pork thing). The second meal was worse (pasta with an extremely mushy cheesy sauce, allegedly gruyere but I would be very surprised) but still not bad. In between meals they gave you fruit, semi-upmarket 2-minute noodles (of the Suimin variety, if that means anything to you), hot chocolate and peppermint or jasmine tea. Oh, and one of the cold drinks you could get was Ribena!

On Swiss, the first meal was okay but not super (Some sort of unidentifiable chicken and rice number. Possibly I ruined it for myself by having a fantastic bowl of ramen at the airport in Hong Kong), and the second meal was atrocious. Reto disagrees with me vehemently on this point - it was breakfast, a bread roll, a croissant, strawberry jam, butter and strawberry yoghurt. Oh, and a banana, orange juice and a piece of gruyere. In my opinion, this isn't a meal so much as a bunch of assorted undesirable food items placed in close proximity to each other. The cheese was nice, and the banana would have been had it not been pre-frozen, but that's about all I can say for it. Reto, on the other hand, thinks this is his ideal breakfast (or something like it) and always goes on about how he likes the breakfasts on Swiss.

All the wine I drank on both the flights was Australian, so we're all even there, but on the Swiss flight no one offered me anything at all to drink for a stretch of about 6 hours. Possibly this is because I was asleep a lot of the time (and I suppose it's polite not to force beverages on people who are in no fit state of consciousness to drink them. Or even hold them), but there was also a lot of time there that I was awake and so dehydrated that my mouth felt like it had been chewing on the horse-blanket for the last few hours.

WINNER: Australia. Although Reto would disagree.

The Qantas flight had a landing gear (or whatever it is that makes the wheels go up and down) that sounded so scarily loud and crunchy that I was sure we were all going to die. Coupled with the alleged flickering of the cabin lights just after take-off (coinciding with the up-crunching of the wheels), the fact that the down-crunching seemed to need 3 goes to work properly, and the fact that it was a mere 12 hours or so since we had seen footage of that flight that failed to land in Hamburg, I was convinced we were going to die. Then again, I usually am.

On the Swiss flight - no crunching, no more than the usual mild-to-moderate anticipation of death during take-off and landing.

WINNER: Switzerland



Actually, in general both the flights were okay, but it would have been better if they were the other way around. On the first flight, which was shorter (9 hours vs 12 or so) we were not tired (we left at 3pm) but we had plenty of space for comfy sleeping and no real chance to watch movies (which is my favourite thing about flying). On the longer flight we were trapped in tiny claustrophobia-inducing seats with entertainment galore and hardly even the ability to stay awake for dinner, let alone a movie. It sort of goes with my theory about life here being all backwards and topsy turvy. Sigh.

Not At Work

All yesterday morning while I was gadding about town [having the world's most delicious breakfast at a cafe near my place that I am very sad to say I only discovered yesterday] I was hoping that some random stranger would comment on the fact that it was a Wednesday and I wasn't at work, ask me if I was having the day off and thus allow me to say "no, I'm actually emigrating today". But no one did.

Happily my sister managed to work it into the conversation, though. She was in a meeting and she had to leave a little bit early. Everyone apparently glared at her and she said "sorry, but my sister's emigrating today and I have to drive her and her Swiss husband to the airport", and then apparently everyone looked all astonished and talked about that instead of whatever the meeting was about. So that was good.

Things I Am Fed Up With

1. Packing. It's boring, and having to constantly panic about the weight limit is incredibly annoying.

2. Wondering on which side of the world my life is. I suppose it would be foolish to think at the moment that it is this side of the world, since I am leaving tomorrow and not coming back in the foreseeable future (how depressing), but do I really need to try to wedge all my pretty dresses/skirts/tops/jewellery that is still over here into the suitcase? Will I ever wear any of it? But then again, what's the point in leaving it all behind (apart from the fact that they won't really fit into my allocated 20kg), thus ensuring that it will all remain unworn?

3. The attitude of assorted foreign (Swiss) people towards Australian food. No, it's not the same, and yes, some things are nicer in your country, but please appreciate the fact that I don't agree with you about almost everything that you have to say, and I could do without hearing you denigrate everything constantly. Perhaps it says more about your fussiness than it does about the inedibility of everything that this entire continent has to offer.

4. No, that's about it for the moment. Now I'm off to the pub for some trivia and a beer.

Chatting

This morning I had an unreasonably long conversation with a loopy dude in the bank.

I went in and took a number and since there was no more seat space I stood up. Some old chap moved along the seat and said "here, you can sit down, there's plenty of room" and, not wanting to hustle the oldies along, I said "oh no, no, it's not necessary.." etc and he insisted and I demurred and eventually he barked at me "oh, just sit down!". Urmmm ... okay, so I sat down, and he proceeded to engage me in conversation. We talked about the exact opening hours of all the local banks (and compared them favourably to the opening hours of other banks, which apparently close at 2pm which is completely insane and quite possibly untrue. I haven't actually been in a bank branch for years, so I couldn't really comment), we chatted about what "NSW" stands for, we talked about the recent refusal by the PM to accept a pay raise and it was all went on and on and on. Happily he eventually left, and when he did every other person in the room smiled at me in a kindly way as if to say "thanks for being the one who saved me from that".

It was the happiest anyone is ever likely to be in a bank.

Yay For The Weather!

Well, depending on whose opinion you listen to, it's either not summer any more (yay! That's my opinion), or it's still winter (also yay! That's Reto). And then on Thursday, when we're back in Switzy, it will still be winter/not summer! Yay!