Sunday Morning Thoughts – September 8, 2024

What is pumpkin spice?

Seriously? I have no idea. I looked it up and there’s no actual pumpkin on the list of ingredients. So, maybe I do like it. There’s cinnamon and ginger, that’s a good start. I’m totally trying it. Then again, do I really need something new to get hooked on? Oh … apparently, it’s a spice mix used in pumpkin pie.

In my defense pumpkin pie is not really a thing here and the last time I had some was Thanksgiving 2001 – and that was pre-Pumpking Spice Lattes.

Crazy week this week. Difficult decisions made – resumes will be sent out. Friendships deepened. Gave in to an impulse to go to Italy. You can read about it here.

I can highly recommend taking a city tour with the “Stadtflüsterer” in Zurich. We had the best time! Since there ended up being only three of us and we were all really interested to learn more, we got to see some extra stuff. So much fun. I didn’t really take that many pictures because I was trying to take in all the information Jürg gave us. Yes, the other two on the tour might disagree, but it was only 44 pictures in 2h 15 minutes. That’s nothing.

I don’t think you can take a city tour of Zurich and not mention the churches or the church clock face in Europe. If you thought it was Big Ben, this is your fact check 😉. Here’s a picture I took of it.

St. Peter, Zurich

I shouldn’t recommend a film that I haven’t watched myself, but it was recommended to me and I found it on Netflix. Some of you might find it interesting. It’s called “The Reformer: Zwingli. A Life’s Portrait”. Short version: Germany had Luther; Zurich had Zwingli.

I’ll do more of a recap of that city tour some other time. Too many facts. I’m gonna need to revisit some places and digest everything I heard.

Friday morning I went to Como; in the evening I joined a friend on a little outing. We drove to Buchberg where the church was illuminated (not a regular occurrence). I’ve shared pictures of that church before as it was on one of my hiking routes. It’s a beautiful church. It burned down 50 years ago, and my friend actually witnessed the fire as they lived right next door at the time.

I loved the different colored lights they used and I’m sharing a picture of the color I liked best. Things got a bit dicey as a road ranger tried to attack my friend. Luckily some locals intervened. The guy was apparently a known troublemaker. Talk about wrong place, wrong time. Bit shaken but otherwise okay.

Church in Buchberg - September 6, 2024

Looks like yesterday was the last summer day. Temperatures are dropping considerably next week, and I even heard snow mentioned. Fall – I love it. Bit annoyed that I didn’t get more hiking in. But the weather was horrible. So much rain. Then it got too hot and now there’s snow again.

Looking at my walls with all my paintings and the book I published, I think I achieved plenty. It’s just the hiking I’m disappointed I didn’t manage to do as well. Seriously, the focus our brain has on things we didn’t do is amazing. And I’ve been working on this. I’m conscious it’s happening, but that doesn’t mean I can stop it. Retraining my brain will take some more time. New pathways need to be formed.

A work in progress.

I’m actually laughing about the state of my apartment. Okay, I’ve been on vacation, wrote a book, painted a lot, went away for another weekend, worked an extra day last week, had to go to Italy and went to art class yesterday. I’m surprised I managed to get anything done around the house to be honest. And there seems to be some food in the fridge/freezer. At least I won’t starve. I'm totally making a curry for lunch or dinner. There will be cauliflower, chickpeas, red beans, garlic, onion and carrots in it. Oh, and regular peas if I have some. I’m out of potatoes so I’ll eat it over rice. Yummy!

I have a story that I need to quickly share with you. On Tuesday I had to go to a photoshoot. They want everybody’s picture up on their website. You know that I don’t own ANY makeup whatsoever, right? So, when she put powder on my face, I had no way of getting it off. Just plain soap and water didn’t do the trick. It felt like it was everywhere, in all my pores etc. I felt really uncomfortable. My brain went “who do I know that’s an expert on makeup?”. I sent a quick message to Arizona and was told to try olive oil. It worked! I was so relieved and also glad I asked for help. Thanks again!

We can’t not talk about the weather. So, what’s the scariest weather event you ever experienced?

I think mine might have been when we were driving on I-10 somewhere in Louisiana or Texas and suddenly there were tornado warnings in the area. Or what we thought was the area. Our paper map did not list the names of the counties yet the radio station only mentioned counties. Now some are easy to find because their names correspond to the biggest town – others not so much. We ended up stopping at a rest area and I went up to some of the truckers to ask if they had more information. They told me that the storm had past and the weather up ahead was okay to drive in. We later saw trucks that had been overturned on the other side of the freeway and the motel we had stayed at the night before was on the news because cars parked in their parking lot were found up in trees.

No idea how we managed to drive through tornado warning weather and not get hurt. Driving was bad yes, but we followed at truck at not very high speed, hoped for the best and stopped as soon as we could. This was all pre-cell phone, or we might have had our very first cell phones but you could only call and text with those.

Last Sunday I got several severe weather warnings. It said something like “severe stationary thunderstorm with a lot of lightning expected”. And boy were they right. That thing didn’t move at all for over an hour. And I could feel how charged the atmosphere was in my entire body. It was so intense and also scary. Nothing I could do about how my body was reacting. I didn’t feel unsafe in my location during the storm, but just going out onto the balcony (it’s about 3 meters deep) to move my furniture all the way to the back wall, was a challenge. I got drenched. I can usually sit out there and watch thunderstorms or stand out there quite comfortably. Not this time.

As a result my nervous system was put back on high alert and my survival mode kicked in. And I felt dizzy for most of Monday and Tuesday. All better now, but that was intense.

Tomorrow in Knabenschiessen in Zurich, so I’m working a half day. You can look that up. Don’t want to trigger anybody by mentioning guns. All safe around here of course.

During the city tour we passed so many shops where you can buy Swiss Army Knives and I was reminded of American tourists taking to social media and posting their outrage that you can buy such dangerous weapons just anywhere. How do you respond to that?

Quickly interrupted my writing to take an important phone call from a friend.

Back to say that I hope you’re having a lovely Sunday. Be gentle with yourselves and do something that makes you laugh out loud. Yes, sending around silly memes totally counts.