She’s No Girly-Girl

Changes

With careful and near-constant observation we were able to watch one of our caterpillars pupating today.  This morning we noticed he’d attached himself to the lid of the jar in a "J" shape.  Thanks to this website, I was able to watch for signs of the change, i.e. limp antennae and a straightened body.  James shouted for the kids to come inside (their cousins are visiting), and we all gathered around as he carefully held the lid above the jar for easier viewing.  I didn’t realize that caterpillars are so active in shedding their skin and changing over to pupae!  I’d imagined it more as a passive process, but this little guy was wiggling like a Houdini in chains.  I wasn’t thinking quickly enough, so I didn’t get video until the transformation was almost complete, but this will give you some idea what we observed:

Video Hosting – Upload Video – Video SharingMore pictures of the process are available here.

If You Look Up Ironic in the Dictionary . . .

Victoria’s Secret is concerned that their customers might be offended by exposed breasts.  But it’s not at all what you’re thinking.  Read on.

There are parts of our culture that make me physically ill.

HT: Stephanie

Speaking of Nature . . .

Here’s a picture that was taken in our nextdoor neighbor’s yard about 15 minutes ago.  Can you tell what that is?  My hands are shaking so hard I can hardly type, because that’s a cranky Mama Bear with three cubs who charged at me while I was taking pictures of her.  The kids are safely inside the house, and I’m going to do some research so I can educate Baba about what to do if he should come in contact with a bear while they’re playing outside.  The possibility seems fairly likely.

UPDATE: Mama Bear and her three Baby Bears stuck around the neighborhood most of the morning.  I sat in our driveway snapping pictures of her as she demolished the neighbor’s birdfeeders.  We found the tree where she’d hidden her cubs and got a picture of one of them–the other two were up higher in the tree and hiding behind some branches.  View the pictures here.  And here’s the video (notice Junior in the background saying, "Bar! Bar! Bar!):

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Caterpillars

To the left you see what’s causing a big stir at Cartoon Living today.  Stay tuned for further developments.

As I was getting ready to post this, two fawns crossed the river, visible from our kitchen door.  Nature sure is hopping this afternoon!

Kayaks!

Now what kind of man uses his motorcycle money to buy kayaks for his family?  Apparently, the kind of man I married!  James took us out for a mystery drive on Friday night, and we ended up at a local outdoor sports store.  He ended up buying two slightly-used kayaks and he’s thinking of going back for a third so that the whole family can be on the river at the same time–Margie in my kayak, Junior in Daddy’s, Baba by himself.  Baba’s surprised us with his ability to handle a boat, even in the moderately swift current and going upstream.  I guess he’s inherited some of Uncle John K.’s genes!

Ever since we moved near the water it’s been my dream to own a kayak and be able to scoot up and down the river at my pleasure.  I’ve been having so much fun with it, even though I haven’t been able to go out of earshot because James is on-call all weekend.  Tomorrow will be a different story altogether!

I’m testing out a new feature of Picasa–Web Albums–so check out the rest of today’s pictures here and let me know what you think.

At the Zoo

Back to our regularly scheduled programming . . .

"Mom, you know what we’re playing?  Margie’s the zookeeper and Bird’s the little girl who likes monkeys . . . and I’m a Siberian Monkey!"

Truer words were never spoken.  And if you look closely, you’ll see the zookeeper is doing a pretty good job of imitating the monkeys.

Something tells me it’s all happening at the zoo . . .

Jungfrau and Journey’s End

It’s about time I get around to blogging our final day in Switzerland, don’t you think?  To the left is a picture of us on top of Jungfrau, almost 12,000 feet above sea level.  In the background you see the large glacier which houses the Ice Palace, a network of tunnels and ice sculptures inside the glacier (more on that later).

To reach the top of Jungfrau from Interlaken is a two-hour train ride, 10 miles of which is via a tunnel carved through the mountain itself.  There’s a good map here to show you the route we took up the mountain, beginning at the bottom-center of the map in Interlaken Ost and following the red line through Winderswil, Lauterbrunnen, Wengenwald, Wengenalp, Kleine Scheidegg, and finally into the mountain at Eigergletscher (the red-dashed line denotes the portion of the railway inside the mountain). 

At the top of the mountain we found a tiny village of restaurants, gift shops and tourist attractions perched on and carved into the mountain, connected by tunnels through solid granite.  We had our choice of sledding, dog-sled rides, zip lines, museums, scenic terraces, and the aforementioned Ice Palace.

The Ice Palace was our favorite part of Jungfraujoch, so I’ll spend a bit more time there.  As we entered the Ice Palace, James and I stopped to take pictures where the rock ended and the ice began.  It took us awhile to get used to walking on the floors of smooth ice, but before long we were enjoying ourselves by skating up and down the tunnels, touching the impossibly smooth ice and viewing the ice sculptures.  What’s amazing to me is that the Ice Palace is carved out of a piece of solid, moving ice.

After eating lunch at a restaurant overlooking the glacier, we headed back to the train station, but we had different plans for the trip back down the mountain.  At Kleine Scheidegg, we disembarked from the train and, on advice from the lady at the front desk of our hotel, made use of the extraordinary hiking trails to travel to Brandegg, where we caught a train back to Interlaken (consult the map again for an idea of the terrain through which we hiked).  This hike was another highlight of the trip for me–being out in awesome nature, seeing parts of the country that aren’t accessible from the beaten path, getting caught in a thunderstorm that rolled down the mountain, finding shelter from the rain on the porch of a tiny shack with half a dozen German-speakers, meeting two teenagers from Chicago who were hiking up the mountain with their bikes looking for bike-friendly trails.  We hiked for three hours and several miles, and, although our leg muscles are still paying the price, we would have walked longer had we not needed to be back in Interlaken to do some last-minute shopping before the stores closed for the evening.

Saturday morning we woke at 5:30 to meet our taxi for the train station at 6:30.  A three-hour train ride found us in Geneva with plenty of time to catch our 12:15 PM flight to Amsterdam and from there to Detroit and then back to Minneapolis.  We walked into our house at 12:30 AM (7:30 AM in Switzerland), which made our journey an even 25 hours.  I slept for about three of those hours, so you can imagine my body is still a little confused.

The kids were excited to see us in the morning, and we stopped over at my grandparents’ house on Sunday afternoon so we could show them and my aunt and uncle the pictures.  It was a pleasure to hear Grandpa reminisce about the old farmhouse and to see how many of his memories matched up with the places we saw.  I’d love to make another trip back to Switzerland someday, but first I’m going to learn either French or German!

More pictures from our trip to Jungfrau and the rest of our vacation may be viewed here.

Home Again

It’s good to be home.  We spent just over 24 hours traveling yesterday (by taxi, train, airplane, bus, and van), and home has never looked so good.  I’d wondered how the place would look to us after all the breathtaking scenery in Switzerland, but it is beautiful here too . . . just a quieter, more gentle kind of beautiful.

We came home to the real world–two kids with the croup and one with a stomachache and a fever.  They seemed sufficiently glad to see us (or at least the candy we brought).  Papa and Mimi and Auntie and Bubba took good care of them while we were gone.

I’ll have pictures from Jungfrau to share later on, but tonight . . . well, I’m just plain tired.

Oberdiessbach and Bleiken

We’ve just returned from a wonderful afternoon with my grandpa’s cousin, Lotti, and her husband, Hans.  When I said they were gracious to drive us around Oberdiessbach and Bleiken (the villages of my family history) I was unknowingly making a gross understatement.  They not only took us to the villages but also made stops for refreshment along the way, refusing to allow us to pay for anything.  Lotti ducked into a small candy shop while the rest of us were viewing the church in Oberdiessbach and bought us a special chocolate that is made only in Oberdiessbach; it is called "Diessbacherli".  We’ve sampled a little (YUM) but we’re saving the rest to bring back to the family in Wisconsin.  When we entered Bleiken, the village where my grandmother lived, we stopped for a drink at a little cafe next to the school.  The view from the patio was outstanding–I never realized that Jungfrau is visible from the villages of my family history!  After our refreshment, we were back in the car for the climb up the mountainside to the old Bahler farm, where my great-grandmother lived as a girl.  It is the highest farm on the hill, and I couldn’t help but think of the book Heidi as we were driving out of the village and past all the other farms to the very top.

I’m having trouble uploading pictures to my shutterfly account, so I’ll have to save that for later.  Tomorrow we scale Jungfrau, and then Saturday back home!  We’ve had a memorable visit, but we’re both anxious to see our kids again.