Two years old!

 Happy Birthday, L! xoxoxoxo

Yesterday was L's second birthday! Plans were scaled back a little, due to pneumonia, but L didn't seem to notice.  Since we have found the cakes here a little disappointing, we tried something new. E went to Globus (which never disappoints) and bought an assortment of cupcakes and mini-cakes. Doesn't L look  pleased with them? She chose the fruit topped cheesecake with pistachios. It had berries inside, too.

After cake, T could hardly wait to give L her presents, which he and S had wrapped together. He gave her a candy bar that was specifically from him. She also got: a puzzle, a potty, and a dolly to keep Baby company which she has named Butterball.

Winter walking

Our friends, S, and I going back up the hill.

It's R! Yesterday (Saturday) S, Daddy, T, and I went with Daddy's boss and his family and Daddy's former boss to the Panoramarundweg Rosenboden winter walk at Toggenburg. The view was beautiful with snowy mountains all around and a lake at the bottom. The sky was a beautiful deep dark blue. It almost looked like the sky in the upper atmosphere before space begins. 

So much for cough syrup

I didn't want to post it after making such a big deal about the cough syrup, but it stopped working for me. Since Sunday my cough seems to have gotten worse. I have a sore throat from so much coughing, and am dehydrated because of the sore throat.

So today I went to the Doctor. As far as I can tell, my doctor is the only one in his office, but he still had a blood lab, EKG machine, and x-ray machine there. I learned all of that first hand. Doesn't that seem like it would be incredibly cost prohibitive? How can anyone ever start a practice? True, he's not a specialist reading the x-ray, but that was off-set by not having to traipse all over a hospital, like I would in the US, with different forms and waiting rooms for each test.

My results seem to have been fairly straightforward anyway. I have pneumonia. Now I have a prescription and should be feeling a bit better by Sunday. I have a follow-up on Tuesday. The good news is I have been feeling like a loser because I haven't forced myself to go out and do things with the littles - and now it turns out I'm not a lazybones who can't power through an annoying cold. I really am as sick as I feel and staying home (which means not pushing the heavy stroller up hills) is reasonable. The bad news is I have pneumonia, and have had a sneak peak into what it feels like to be old. I guess I am old if I couldn't fight it off.

E just got home with some groceries. I can hear T yelling, "How many stuff did you get, Daddy?"

Two funny things:
1. At the doctor's office I had to strip for the EKG and x-ray. There was no gown or paper or anything for modesty, though I tore the place apart looking for one. I had to use my shirt.
2. E gave a talk at a conference in Fribourg today and the participants were each given a gift. That happens sometimes. It's usually a bag or umbrella or something local. E got a wall clock. I guess that's local. The funny part to me was that everyone was also handed a loose battery for it.

Ski trip with friends. 100th post! By S

(Sorry you'll have to wait for the pictures. Daddy hasn't downloaded them yet. EDIT: Yes he has. This is E, and I'll caption the photos!)

Lake Luzern is under those clouds.

On Saturday we had to wake up early so we could catch a train to Zurich so we could catch a train at Zurich. We went to Luzern. From there we took a bus to a bus stop near a gondola lift to Klewenalp. Daddy's co-worker (H) and his family invited us to a nice ski trip at a great place. When we went above the clouds the sky was clear even though below the clouds it looked like everything was gray and dark. The clouds from above looked like a big sheet of lumpy snow that you could just jump on and make snow angels in.

When we got there we went on some of the slower slopes that were more our speed. My favorite slope was slightly curvy and you could go fast, so it was fun. Daddy thought it was scary, though. After we went down that slope once or twice with H's son and daughter (who are both amazing skiers even though they are younger than us) we took a chairlift to a very long slope that was very hard and terrifying. There were very straight steep strips where we had to either turn a lot or go down on the sides of our skis. After that slope, with H's help we were all a lot better at skiing. R and Daddy each fell a few times. I didn't fall because H was holding onto me. Even when he did let go of me I didn't fall at all because I had gotten better.

This looked steep to us, but we were told it's practically flat!

When we got to the bottom of the hill we had to take another chairlift up to the top of the hill that lead back to our original ski path. We took the path down so we could go to a restaurant and have lunch. Lunch was french fries and a lemon and some parsley for me. We also had hot chocolate to drink.

When we'd all had a nice break and gotten over the hard ski path we noticed one of R's ski poles was missing. We couldn't find it at all. Eventually we got back to skiing, but we all still felt bad for her about the pole. We went back to the curvy path and went down several times. I was still really impressed with H's kids' ski skills.

When the ski slopes were about to close we all went back to the gondola to go home. This time we took a boat, but Daddy got confused on his phone so we were on the wrong boat and we had to take it to somewhere else. Eventually it all worked out. Except the train station we were going to catch out train at was really crowded and had a huge band with skeleton face paint. We ignored it and went to our train track. On the way home we all rested and when we got home we were all very tired and went to bed.

When I saw the helicopter I started looking frantically for the girls. 

Once again, we were lucky and it wasn't there for us! (Though there may have been some close calls.)

Good stuff

Apologies in advance to R and S's friends who might be hoping for a long overdue fun post.  I am hoping to have S dictate a post tomorrow about her Saturday ski trip with R and E. They went somewhere new and I don't want to spoil things too much, but I'm told I would have been terrified :)

Half way

I've been at home sick with a low fever and rattling cough all week, hoping to be better by the weekend, so we haven't gone anywhere or done anything to post about. Even R didn't go on her ski trip. It was postponed due to weather (or avalanche forecast, we're not sure.) So here is a little filler post so my mom doesn't worry about us :)

We are just over half way through our time here (we bought our tickets home the other day*), so it seems like a good time to take stock of what we have done and remind ourselves of the things that we absolutely want to make sure we do before we leave.

Another school trip

Well, it's late Sunday night, so R figured it was a good time to spring another school trip on us. Actually, E knew, but he is just as confused as I am by the information sheet that came home. It is a completely incomprehensible jumble of instructions, printed front and back in font so small I need a magnifying glass. There are groups to assemble, and 6 a.m. meeting times in Zurich, and train car assignments. What happens when they get to the resort is a complete and utter mystery. It sounds like they will break into groups of three and go anywhere until it's time to leave. R is very worried about how she is going to collect a group of non-skiers. She figures her German as a second language classmates are her best bet, but they are all juniors and seniors, so they will be in different train compartments.

R is going to fish for some useful information tomorrow, but her friends are tired of translating much. They think she ought to be fluent by now. R did translate a lot of it for us, but this is a case where we want to be sure of everything, and so weird translation things like "stern meeting head" aren't going to cut it. So E is going to bring it to work and harass his colleagues.

I hope we will get it all sorted out. I also hope that they will downgrade the avalanche risk in Klosters from level 3 considerable! R hopes it's not as frightening as Arbeitswoche was! No dangling off the mountain, please, or grotesque facial injuries!

P.S. from R: It's pretty late so I was just headed off to go to bed but L ran up to me screaming something and dragged me into the bathroom. She ran up to the tub, pointed in it fiercely, and screamed, "bath" while furiously tearing at her diaper trying to get it off. Then she went from pointing to jumping, then grabbed onto the side of the tub and tried to pull herself in. She looked so sad when I said, "No, it's too late" and grabbed some bath toys to try to convince me. Eventually I got Daddy to watch her so I can go off to bed. But I have been watching the last few minutes because she is so cute.

Freaky clown doll

This morning S and I went to the Oerlikon market. Everyone was buying greens, radiccio, and cabbages. The cabbages are all so pretty. I'm going to look up some recipes this week because next time I won't be able to resist one.  Interestingly, we saw some really big vegetables including a sugarloaf cabbage and an escarole which each took up its whole crate.

After that we went to Brockihaus, the used stuff store where we did some of our Christmas shopping. This time around we found something for L's birthday. Then we had to decide whether to bring home some Thai takeout from the shop near the station (Chiang Mai!) or try to find the big brocki - Brockiland. We went to Brockiland, which is in an old underground parking garage on the other side of town.

Heading into Brockiland

What am I doing here?

A suggested that no one knows why I'm actually here, so I (E) thought I'd take a minute to tell you what I'm up to. I'm working at EMPA, which according to their website is "an interdisciplinary research and services institution for material sciences and technology development." There is a broad range of materials research going on here, not only across the institute but even in my lab. Some people are working on developing new materials for medical devices (hips, knees, etc., trying to make them have a life time of 100 years so that you get the surgery once and never have to think about it again). Others are working on devices to take the waste heat out of car tailpipes and convert it into electrical energy that could, for example, recharge the battery.

I'm working much more on the basic science end of things. In a nutshell, I'm trying to develop a way of measuring fluctuations at the atomic scale by looking at dissipation. The translation of that sentence is a little longer.  First, fluctuations:  any system when it is near a transition will have fluctuations. Think about water freezing.  You might think it just freezes, but those atoms that are on the edge of freezing go through a process of thinking "well, should we turn into ice?  I'm not sure, it is pretty nice being able to flow all over the place rather than being locked into that big ice cube.  But we are pretty tired (it's getting cold outside) so maybe we should..."  They dither a while -- this is (in an obviously cartoony fashion) what a fluctuation is.  Why do we care? Because the nature of the fluctuations -- how fast they are, over what range of parameters they exist, and so forth -- depends on what is causing the transition. So for systems where we don't understand WHY a system is changing from one thing to another (for example, why high temperature superconductors suddenly let current flow through them without any resistance), looking at those fluctuations can help us understand.

The frustrating (and exciting) thing about this is that currently we don't have a good way of measuring these fluctuations. They tend to be very fast and can be spatially dependent, so you have to look closely and quickly to see what is going on. Fortunately, the technique I use, atomic force microscopy, lets us do just that. In AFM we take a very sharp tip and put it on the end of a small cantilever. It looks a lot like an old fashioned record player arm and needle, except shunk down to smaller than a human hair. Because it is so small it vibrates very quickly (up and down a million times a second). We can actually watch how it vibrates (how fast and how much) by watching the wiggles of a laser beam that we bounce off of it.  Anyway, here is the neat thing: if we bring this oscillating cantilever close to some material it slows down -- it both oscillates more slowly and not as much. You can imagine this happening by holding your arm out straight and shaking it up and down, then letting it come into contact with a surface -- it is going to slow down. Try bringing your hand up against a table, for example, or against a sofa. It behaves differently. If there are fluctuations in the material it turns out that they will slow it down more. Those water molecules on the edge of freezing say "Hey! Here is our opportunity to stay warm a little longer if we take the energy from this big tip shaking above us and not freeze" while the ones that are already frozen or far from it don't care so much so don't steal as much energy from the cantilever. So we have a way of measuring the fluctuations.

Well, I was optimistic when I started writing this, but I'm not sure my cartoon is enough to make any of this make any sense. Suffice to say we have a brand new way of measuring something that no one has been able to measure before and lots of people have wanted to and it should allow us to better understand all sorts of new material properties that are right now completely mysterious to us.  If I could just make it work...

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Disaster averted

Well, disaster is a bit much. Inconvenience, expense, and disappointment, or any combination of those three was averted.

It was an absolutely beautiful day today - sunny, warm, no wind. The lake was flat as glass. The perfect day for my planned hike on Uetliberg with the littles. But I couldn't leave as early as I would have liked (I would want to do the hike before Uetliberg gets shady in the afternoon) because I had to pick up vacuum bags for the housekeeper.

It is an unusual store. You go in and have to wait until they wait on you, like it is Oleson's Mercantile. Then they disappear into the back to find whatever you want. I made the mistake of browsing once, not realising I was in their storeroom. They seem to have a few buildings in which they keep stock. I think I have mentioned before the corner store that has never been open. Now I know it is part of this compound. If you wanted the suitcase in the window at the corner store, you would have to go down the street past a couple of other shops that don't open to the one that does. I suppose then they would go out through the back, run up the street for the suitcase, and come back. I think that is what they had to do for my vacuum bags. Meanwhile, I waited in an empty shop while other people came in and, knowing the drill, just stood silently still waiting for their turn. They had the bags in stock, which was lucky, but walking home I was sick.

Old New Year cake

This is a picture of the New Year's cake that we picked up in Herisau. I thought it would be more of a rolled bouche de noel sort of cake, but it had bananas inside. L was so happy! The main points of the cake, though, are the good luck symbols on it and the number 14. I don't think the 14 was there because it is 2014 for three reasons:

1. It looks like a calendar page

2. There were other cakes with 1s, obviously meant to be January 1st.

3. Herisau celebrates new New Year (January 1st) and old New Year (January 14th)

I love coming across things like that! The canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden is very traditional. They rejected the Gregorian calendar in 1582 because it was introduced by a pope and didn't accept it until 1798. So my cake seems to be a holdover from that. In fact, there is a town that still celebrates Silvester on the 13th, so I could see the silvesterchlausen again if I wanted to. 

Another example of the canton's old-fashionedness - women didn't get the right to vote until 1989! To be fair - I just looked this up to confirm and even the canton of Zurich didn't give women the vote until 1970, so Appenzell wasn't so far behind. 

Happy New Year!

Last night E brought R and S into Zurich to see the New Year's Eve fireworks. I stayed home with the littles. L fell asleep early, but T had trouble settling down. He and I rang in the new year doing one of his favorite night time activities: reading Nancy Drew with superheroes replacing Nancy, Bess, and George. Usually T doesn't notice that Batman is acting and speaking like a 1930's teenaged girl. However, sometimes something catches his attention that he knows just is not right. That is how, "No! Batman NOT have a charming new hat!" became a catchphrase around here.