If you were a sailboat, I would sail you to the shore

Howdy friends. For those of you who don't know, I'm back in Switzerland and have been for two weeks nearly. I have a temporary job working in a department store distribution warehouse. I unpack, sort, and hang up clothes for the stores. Pretty exciting, I know. I've been there a week thus far, and although it's not the most compelling work I've ever done, it's good to have a job and the days go surprisingly quickly. Besides that, I work with a group of lovely girls and it's been a pleasure getting to know them a bit this week. I work across the table from a Swiss girl named Ilenka, who just finished highschool and is excited to be going to California and South America soon. There's a French girl who is studying to be a nurse and who speaks about as much German as I do, seems a bit shy, but makes funny faces if things go wrong. I think she'd be fun to know if we could talk a bit more. There's another Swiss girl named Lila who is getting ready to move to Holland to study illustration, and she's nervous about moving to a foreign country where she doesn't understand the language. We talk about what she should take, what she should buy there, and the fact that she'll make friends in short order and will be fine. Yesterday we discovered Raphael is a mutual friend; she went to school with him when they were 14. Oh, and Ilenka and I know some of the same people too. I think meeting new people in a foreign country and discovering you have mutual friends is a whole new level of home, and I like it. On Monday when Raphael thanked God for our food and my job, he prayed I'd make some new friends at work. Nice that God gives friends on top of work and food.

Know this song? I read that the girl who sings it thinks "that a lot of love songs tend to deal with the fluffy nice side of love, but this one deals with how you get very selfish when you fall in love with someone, and you don't want to share them with the world, you just want them all about yourself. What's genius about Mike's lyrics is that instead of saying that directly he uses these crazy strange metaphors, "if you were a piece of wood I'd nail you to the floor" and quite bizarre stuff and I like that. Musically it sounds like a really nice smooth love song, but the message is pretty intense and quite dark." I disagree about the dark part, and I might tell you why later, but I'm STARVING at the moment...so, I must be going. :)

Vacation, continued.

Running short on ideas for great summertime activities? I can recommend installing a transmission as quality family fun for a weekday morning.



Plus, when you go shopping in the afternoon and you still have a bit of grease on your arms, you won't look so prissy buying that cute new purse and shoes.

:)

Oregon tours, home improvement, and big plans to import cars

Well! As usual, the lack of bloggage indicates a rather busy schedule. This time you can thank Lukas for prodding me to post something. I've had a busy couple weeks at home catching up with family and friends, attending my cousin JoAnna's wedding, and convincing mom to undertake a variety of home and yard improvement projects (most of which she was already considering in some form anyway. I just affirm where affirmation is due: "YES! New flowers and a new patio would look GREAT there! Let's go buy stuff right now"). Today, for example, we agreed on a location for a firepit ring (which I fully intend to make, because good grief! those things are overpriced!), and we did some scouting for free brick on Craigslist for the new patio areas we are now planning to build. Furthermore, we've assessed a variety of options for keeping bugs off one porch and making it a more user-friendly "outdoor living space" for the future. We'll be paying Ikea a visit next week to investigate their curtain options.

In the midst of all that planning, we're also working to make our bathroom more fabulous and coordinated than it already is. We're painting an old brown spice rack white to serve as shelf for small things, and since foreign European words make everything seem more sophisticated, we want to put some word on the face of the shelf. Unfortunately, the most obvious option, "BATH," translates to "BAD" in German and "BAIN" in French, neither of which sound one bit sophisticated. The German is out for obvious reasons, and I for one couldn't look at "BAIN" without thinking "BANE of my existence."

As fun as all that has been, certainly the highlight of my time home so far has been showing off Oregon and toodling all over this Northwest corner with Raphael, who was here for a week and a half. You're just going to have to wait for more pictures, cuz I only have a few to show you at the moment. We camped a few days at Trillium Lake near Mount Hood, caught trout from the canoe and fried them up for dinner, went to a rodeo, climbed Multnomah Falls and drove up the Columbia River Gorge, visited Cannon Beach, and ate a humongous, hot, gooey, glazed cinnammon roll at Camp 18. I love American food. We also went to the Auto races, drove some fancy pants cars (I didn't; he did)...hmm. This would all be much easier to talk about and more interesting with pictures. So I'll tell ya more about my Oregon tourism later.

Raph's first catch of the evening. He got another one too.


On the way to Cannon Beach.


Driving nice cars. Woohoo. :)

Finally, about importing cars: Raph and Brian and I have been discussing the possibility of importing old, hard-to-get American cars to Switzerland. Will keep you posted.

That's it for now I suppose. Laters!