K's Café: The 30 Second Blog

Print labels without using troublesome software on your computer

I was having trouble with MS Word, trying to print return address labels with graphics - skip it! Just go straight to http://enu.print.avery.com/SelectSku - they even give you holiday graphics for your labels, and you can just print a pdf right from there, online. No need to use buggy, irritating, crashing, freezing, unsatisfactory, not-quite-what-you-need software on your computer. Why'd it take me so long to find this help? I didn't ask Google soon enough.

Delirious? in Concert in Wettingen, northwest of Zürich

Just got back from the British Delirious? Christian rock band concert in Wettingen, northwest of Zürich. We were standing on the wooden parquet floor, crushed in by hot bodies, about 12 feet (4 metres) from Martin Smith, the lead singer/guitarist, and even closer to Stuart Garrard, the 2nd guitarist/back-up singer. Stuart started out in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and jeans, came out later in a kilt (as you see below), then switched back to jeans... The concert location gave out free ear plugs to counteract the 100 decibel limit of the the sound...and we all used them thankfully!

The Schilthorn

Taking two more cable cars up from Mürren, we had to feel really good about three different kinds of special Swiss cards we had in our possession:

1. The "Half Tax" card for David and me (most public transport in Switzerland at half price, including trains, buses, boats, trams, and some cable cars; for an annual fee that is totally worth it)
2. The "Junior" card for Jason and Emily (they travel free in the company of a parent)
3. Our Migros grocery store loyalty "Cumulus" card (they were offering a special deal for the 2nd adult travelling free!)
With this combination of cards, we ended up paying one sixth of the price we would have without them.

We were rewarded all the more for our travels with views from the top of the Schilthorn, in Kanton Bern, Switzerland:

From left to right, the famous peaks of the Eiger, the Mönch, and the Jungfrau. Some say that "Eiger" means Ogre, and the "Mönch" (monk) in the middle is separating the ogre from the "Jungfrau" (young lady). :-)
At the Schilthorn summit, there is a rotating restaurant called Piz Gloria, which featured prominently in the 1969 George Lazenby/Diana Rigg James Bond movie, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." We ate lunch there, and the restaurant abruptly stopped rotating while we were finishing our main course. The lights went out. The cable car stopped running (our route down through the snow). It turned out that the power for the whole valley had gone out, and stayed out for an hour or so, while they extricated a poor soul's paraglider from the power lines...we had seen one taking off just as we were coming up in the cable car. This guy was only 21 years old. You never know when your last day will be. Especially if you jump off mountains near power lines. But then it's probably worse getting in your car, right? While we were up on top of the mountain, we didn't realize how serious the incident was, and we were just enjoying the most amazing place to be stuck.

Even if it was a rather vertiginous drop in certain areas...I held for dear life onto the cable provided, as we walked along this dropoff into the snow, ice, and fog.

Mürren - Take Two

We visited Mürren on our reconnoitering trip to the German-speaking part of Switzerland, a year before we moved here. Then we went back last month for a weekend. Stunning as ever.

We stayed in a little hotel on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a deep, deep valley with a river way down in the bottom, whose rushing waters lifted their rustling noises all the way up to our balcony, echoing off the mountainsides. Lauterbrunnen is at the bottom of the valley, and we took a cable car and train to get up to Mürren, a car-free village with real, white-bearded mountain men in the cafés... The mountains kept drifting in and out of the opaque fog, revealing different views varying from just grayness to these crisp, snowy peaks. Next post: one more cable car from Mürren up to the Schilthorn, location of the very old James Bond movie, "In Her Majesty's Secret Service."

Seasons of a Blog

It must be winter for my blog. It's been hibernating. In the meantime:

David, Emily and I learned how to make mosaics in metal cases on our dining room table (David's intriguing idea).

Jason made a tall domino tower.

Emily built a large model of the steep, hillside town of medieval Cortona, Italy, with her classmates, based on a field trip they enjoyed together.

We've enjoyed a couple of roaring fires.

And a friend of a friend treated us to a complimentary family photo shoot outside.

We also visited Mürren for the 2nd time, but those are photos for another post...