I Never Thought I'd Need One

But since I have to keep the fan in my office on full power in order to not dissolve into a puddle, I could really use a paperweight. This adds to having had to buy a keychain - which I only resorted to doing after I lost the key to my office (which was actually attached to the lanyard that also holds my work ID) and decided that that key, the key to the lock I take to the gym and my house key might as well all be in the same place. So now I have a surprisingly heavy bottle opener thing with the Swiss flag on it - it was the cheapest one at the shop here - and fulfills my desire for multiple functions from a key ring - before this I had a little flashlight - suprisingly, I used it often.

Then there is the one adventure in necessity-buying that went seriously awry: I decided to buy a top sheet when I got here. I had one in London - for a single bed - and that didn't come easily because apparently the Brits don't share my investment in not sweating on duvets when not necessary - so I left it there. Then I decided to buy one for the double bed I have here (it's a mattress on the floor- not, as it turns out, as much of a step up from the dorm bed that I thought it would be) . So I went shopping. There was a sale, so the cheapest sheets were only 12CHF - too much, still, for a cheap sheet, but you take what you get, right? Then it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to identify an un-fitted sheet. Success. They're measured in centimeters, so I got the second-smallest size. And in a bright red that I find goes nicely with the orange drapes and my scattered dissertation reading. The only problem: not even close to the right size. Way, way too small. Plus, there's been a fair amount of inclement weather (last night I was completely sure that lightning was going to strike my building), so I've been sleeping pretty poorly, and thus tossing and turning - so every morning I wake up to a sheet that has also been tossed and turned into more or less a knot. But I'm only staying for something like 6 more weeks, so it doesn't seem worth throwing down for a new one. So yesterday I found myself thinking, in the same voice in my head that longs for a dishwasher or affordable fat free greek yogurt- a little wistful, a little frustrated, a little aware of the luxury encapsulated in its wishes: man, someday, I'll be able to REALLY make my bed.

Ruminating on the Price of Eggs

Eggs cost approximately 4 CHF a half dozen. (CHF = Swiss franc - pretty close to the dollar) And this isn't even the jumbos. This is medium sized eggs. Not even Jumbo. Sure, they're free range and organic ("bio" if you're in Europe) but there isn't another option. And this makes me think that chicken farmers must be doing pretty well, right? (Eggs also tend to come from Swiss farms - I know this because the origins of everything have to be labeled. . . and all of the labels also seem to be red and white, many with flags).

If my Swiss ancestors had foreseen this, maybe they would have stuck to the land that they found inadequate size-wise for cattle farming and, instead of emigrating to the Midwest where dairies were a dime a dozen (or so it would seem), would perhaps have chosen to change their livestock rather than their whole continent. . .

Hiding

The BBC says it isn't so hot today. I disagree. Despite having a fan on and the windows open and the shades closed, my office has been airless and boiling all morning. As a result, I've had to keep the door open in hopes of attracting some kind of cross-ventilation. I also had to go looking for information to add to the media calendar this morning, and to admit my general ineptitude via notifying the proper authorities about my lost key this morning.

This is all very dull and mundane and a big part of my job (well, the key part is a just part of being me - despite my efforts to not lose, break or spill things, it just doesn't quite work out that way - I also broke a hunk of plastic off of my computer yesterday when the vacuum power cord tripped the computer power cord and it went crashing to the floor on its side - inshallah the inside of the computer won't take it as an excuse to break . . . for the third time in 6 months despite my previously much more successful efforts not to knock it onto the floor). And it is part of why I wish I didn't work in communications. I'm tired. Really tired. I don't want to talk to anyone - let alone start conversations or admit to doing something foolish or ask anyone for anything. And this is a pretty light day on that front - my boss is out of town, so I have the office to myself, I don't have to make any phone calls to ask people if they've received my press release- I even opted out of lunch because I know I can't carry on a conversation. If it weren't for the heat, I could almost close the door, put my head down on my desk and snooze away the afternoon. But, alas, I shan't. So I'm back to the question I've asked myself at least once a day at every one of the 3 public affairs jobs I've had since I finished college: why am I doing this? Where is the job that would let me hide out more often?

Study Break

Envy me. Please. . .

Because this definitely set me back on the workfront. And it was worth it.

Also - I should point out that I may have been a bit hasty to sent my hiking boots back to Cleveland (which is not known for its mountain vistas) and will therefore have extra-sore soles for a couple of days. And it hailed on the way down. oh - and we had to wait for the cable car to start running (lightning went with the hail and it seems that being in a little metal box suspended in the air off the edge of a mountain maybe isn't so safe in such a situation) for maybe an hour - surrounded by British 13 year olds.

By we, I mean the group of strangers I went with on a trip organized through the local internet expat forum - who were loosely organized into an expedition. Most of the people were a bit older than me (I'm going to say average age was about 40, youngest other than me probably 30) - and that was fine. Intriguingly, the groups soon split and the youngest - and most American - contingent ended up leading by several minutes going up and about half an hour going down. The hike was only about 3 hours total for us - manifest destiny strikes again. And while the whole thing involved a fair amount of small talk - as daytrips with strangers so often do - the combination of trial - the hill seemed to go more or less straight uphill most of the time - but then again, growing up, I lived in "the heights" and even that only meant the top of a gentle slope, so I'm really no good at gradients -and then the aforementioned inclement weather (whcih was actully sort of gorgeous to watch brewing because it was at various sites along an alpine valley/mountain deal) were emboldening and conversation flowed quite fine most of the time.

I could have done without the schoolkids, however.

Then tonight I got to watch another storm come across the lake - from the relative safety of my creaky top-floor apartment. Mmmmm. Who could study in these conditions?

Festival Season

The dominant narrative on Geneva is this: it's boring in the winter. But there are music festivals in the summer so then it's a bit more exciting. And sitting by the lake is nice.

So now seems to be the heart of that part of the year, since there is a) a big festival in Nyon - 5 days long, which is in France but not very far away and the festival is hard to get tickets to so it's a big big deal. The buzz for me has come this way: a dinner party last week, overheard conversation amongst two English-speakers in my pilates class on Tuesday and a passing reference by a colleague to Manu Chao playing last night at midnight, and my flatmate telling me another -absent for the summer- flatmate may be coming back weekend to crash at our place at some point during the weekend - when - not exactly clear. It was not until this last conversation that I figured out that all of these conversations were about the same concert, or had any idea what the name was - it isn't advertised all that much. I learned, based on the website I found linked from the local expat message board (my last source of information) that tickets went on sale in approximately April.

Huh.

So anyway - I'm not going - it's too expensive even if you can get tickets. However, last weekend also began the pre-fete for, I guess, Swiss National Day - which is next week and would count as the real fete - and there are many more concerts in walking distance. Although the unimpressive mix of covers of 70s US pop and French songs that everyone else knew the words to that I heard last week didn't make me feel all that bad for feeling bound to my dissertation and teaching myself to make Spanish tortilla last Saturday night (I've been trying to learn this for many years - this was the first time i didn't end up with a weird scrambled egg/potato situation - although I did learn why it traditionally uses yellow onions - cooked purple ones, in egg: it looks like mold). Or the similarly exciting evenings of dissertation/laundry/cooking that I have planned for this weekend. Perhaps next week.

Office Culture

Everyone in my office seems to brush their teeth after lunch. This is new to me. I once had a coworker who did this, but it was only because she had so many cavities from the peanut M&M stock that kept us going two or three afternoons a week when things got really tough.

Has a dental hygiene craze hit the rest of the office world in my absence?

Dreams and Bumps in the Night

Normally, I wouldn't write about the former, because, really, dreams - eh? Sure, my friend Chris seems to have a special talent for dreaming in intriguing narratives that also character-driven and may predict the future, but I've never found mine particularly worth repeating (also because I kind of worry that if I tell the good ones then they'll never come true), but I feel that the vivid dream I had that involved going to Whole Foods is worth pointing out. And not just any Whole Foods - it was the one near the house where I grew up in The Cleve, and it was, as ever in real life, pleasantly lit, not too crowded (this makes me worry that it won't be around for long), and a source of deep moral confusion for going there instead of the Food Co-Op down the hill, where I learned the art of vegetarian shopping and the joy of having your peanut butter made right in front of you. The second dream, that I have had maybe 4 times in the last two weeks, is the one where you wake up because your alarm clock is going off and the clock says it's time to get up, but you're actually still asleep. This makes me suspect that these "dreams" were in fact the residue of Groundhog Day-esque do-overs that I must have messed up big time the first time around.

Then there's the part I would write about normally: It's been windy this week. It's also been a bit chilly - in the nice "ohh I'd love to be camping" way, not the brrrr I wish I had another blanket way. So doors have been flying open and slamming all over my apartment all week - we keep the windows and doors both open because otherwise it gets very stuffy very fast - I'm learning to adapt. However, last night, as I was going to bed, there was this scratchy noise out on my balcony - it sounded like maybe a bird or something, but it would come and go - apparently for no reason. So it freaked me out a bit. So I closed the blinds (which are like store-front anywhere in Europe or elsewhere that worries about having the windows broken in the night). The scratching persisted. AGAINST THE BLINDS. I'm not sure that there's a creepier noise to be found in the innocent world anywhere. Around the same time, there was this weird buzzing - kind of like a phone on vibrate - except not from either of my phones - and a bit louder besides - like it was right next to me- and no one else was home - or, for that matter, has a room close enough for a left-behind cell phone to make that kind of racket here. So I kind of freaked out, closed the glass door on my side of the blinds and decided that Hoover's men must have left some sort of bug here and the battery was on the way out. Or it was a doorbell or something somehow reverberating up through the pipes (top floor - noise, like heat, rises, right?). Now I'm starting to suspect that the scratching was actually the dried-out flowers I left on the balcony after plucking them from the - still alive! plants that I am supposed to water all summer. At least I hope that's what it was.

These are reasonable and likely explanations, right?

Another Day, Another Placeholder

I had a really good post here, but instead of publishing it, Blogger somehow deleted it. I am not pleased. I'm also tired and grumpy and if i try to rewrite it it won't be as funny. So instead, I pose the following question: if you were going to pick a cow from the cow parade to represent your personality, which would it be? And, furthermore, if you had to do this as part of a going-away card for a colleague you don't know all that well, what would you write?

This Is A Little Late

But, coming from a public relations office, just wow.

I went to a dinner party with last week - while everyone (including the two Italians) found this to be a self-parody, there was consensus that that was unintentional. I'm not entirely sure. If it was done on purpose: pure genius. (And he did win). Look out for the treadmills.

A Country For Old Men

Well, technically, it's a library reading room on international territory, inhabited by aged diplomats or staffers or something, but I've found the spot in the Palais where the elderly get their news. And I will be back tomorrow. See - it's a bit stuffy, sure, but otherwise, everything a periodical reading room should be (although I suppose periodical reading rooms that aren't stuffy are the actual outliers). Anyway - there are leather chairs and also a couple of carrels and a view of the mountains. Really, ideal for feeling like you're in the same building 40 years ago. Except maybe for the copiers. . . and me and my iPod. . . I'll be back to inobtrusively interrupt the experience tomorrow.

Someday My Toaster Oven Will Make Me Rich

I've long held the toaster oven in much higher regard than, say, the microwave. In fact, I may have jeopardized a job once over my attachment to the office toaster oven - then, as now, I enjoyed my sandwiches with melted cheese and toasty bread. This is impossible in a conventional toaster or a microwave. And really, there is no substitute. But I moved on, I ate fewer sandwiches, I even learned to cook grains. Then I moved to England and a kitchen with a dodgy oven, and learned some tricks - mostly, broiling. Now, I live in an apartment where the oven has no door. This makes me think that, if I were to cook bread, I might be able to make a giant loaf, put it on the counter, close the door to the kitchen and wait for things to heat up. But, I feel there are many things wrong with this scenerio. So I'm back to the toaster oven. Tonight I roasted potatoes in it. The only drawback is that I have to use tin foild as a pan because there are no properly-sized baking dishes - and this is risky with anything drippy.

However, I'm thinking - maybe it's time to write a toaster-oven-centric cookbook. It would have to be cheap - if you don't have a full oven, you probably don't have a lot of disposable income either - but I could definitely compile some recipes. Sure, many of them would be variations on the grilled peanut butter sandwich (best on an english muffin, currently I prefer adding kiwi, but many other fruits will also work just fine - and add vitamins), and creative uses of pitas, but they'd be cheaper and more from-scratch than the grocery store premade pizzas that so unsatisfyingly seem to dominate my current oven's dance card.

Goodbyes are Never Easy

Particularly at work, where they tend to be just plain awkward. The small talk, the awkward lurching for snacks, the inevitable too many people/not enough chairs - or, in one office where I worked, plenty of chairs, an ordered way of distributing food (if it's cake, one person cuts, then passes a plate at a time around the oval-shaped conference table until everyone gets a piece) - and fewer ways to escape the inevitable Weight Watchers points discussion, since it leant itself to cross-table comparing).

I kind of want to claim that my current office should know better - and that this summer, where there seems to be an average of a leaving party a week should lead to a fine honing of the going away afternoon, but I know it won't. I also know that it will at least be average - there's nothing heinous about eating brownies and talking to the people you already know/making chitchat with the people you don't/trying not to stand out as above-average uncomfortable to your superiors instead of working on a Monday afternoon. And this is why it will never change - you get the feeling that it could be better, that people could be more relaxed, but even if there is wine for sale in the cafeteria, that seems a little out of line for Mondays. So everyone sips tea and tries not to eat the right amount and be the right amount of generous and helpful (some, but not TOO much of both) and then dawdles when it comes time to go back to work - and the simulacrum of a relaxed, friendly farewell goes on as scheduled. The only things that tend to break this are the speeches - which have so far been quite lovely and heartfelt and have referenced some actual peril and uncertainty and last week there were tears. And I guess that's what counts, right?

Sabbath -Violating Recycling

In Geneva, the Sabbath seems to remain intact - whether or not it has anything to do with Protestant asceticism or John Knox in a more general way, you can't buy, say, clothes, or appliances. Now, it isn't that I don't think that taking a day off for enforced leisure is a BAD thing, I just prefer the Spanish version (or maybe just the Salamanca version), at least, where there are later evening opening hours during the week (and a siesta mid-day), and everyone hits the town to walk around on Sunday evenings (when stores seem to re-open too). . . I also have a sense that this version has something to do with underlying structural assumptions about who does what work when during the week.

So anyway - you can buy some groceries - either of the plantains at the corner store or the double priced everything at the 24 hour grocery store at the train station variety. So that is to say - if you thought you were getting out of reproductive labor of the consuming kind by shopping on Sunday, good luck. You also, if you live in my building, have no access to the single working washer or the scary sauna closet thing that counts as a dryer. Now, since the last time I did laundry was, frankly, deeply frustrating, and I have since located two wash-your own laveries within a 10 minute walk - both of which are open on Sunday, this isn't necessarily prohibitive or discouraging in the way that, say, facing a heatwave with no clean tank tops and a city full of shuttered H&Ms is. However, doing laundry anywhere turns out to be much more of an adventure than I would like - today it cost me a great deal, took too long and involved a frenzied trip to the train station for enough cash to complete the errand. And narrow, narrow aisles within the laundromat just made everything deeply uncomfortable.

The best Sunday prohibition I have discovered so far is the signs on recycling bins - which are not conveniently located in the first place(and I blame this lack of convenience for the fact that my kitchen was full - FULL - of bags of untended recyclables when I moved in - and reached a point of just plain grossness since). Further, they are constructed in a way that, for GLASS, you have to put one item in at a time - inefficient and potentially dangerous, since old Heineken bottles have a tendency to break over the course of a 4 block walk, plastic is nowhere to be found (which probably means that it gets picked up somewhere, but the plastic collection in my kitchen also points to some extent of inconvenience), and paper is just elsewhere. So, like I was saying Sunday, as after 8 pm and before 8 am, you are told, by another "interdite" notice, that you shouldn't be throwing glass bottles one at a time into the crazy bins - where bottles audibly shatter as soon as they are deposited). So, having defied this rule while feeling a little self-righteous about the gender division of labor - clearly, a system that involves such trouble for waste disposal, shopping and clothes-washing on half of the days when people aren't working and most post-work hours assumes that someone is home to do all of these things during business hours. Sure, I also get the impulse to restrict people's noise-making. But really, if breaking glass bothers you on Sunday, doesn't it also bother you after work on Tuesday?

So I have to admit, I felt a little bit of rebellious glee with each shattering bottle

Singles!

I went to a gym class in French yesterday.

To begin with, I did everything wrong - I should have gotten there early so as to get a spot toward the back where I could see everything and not let on too much that I really had no idea what the teacher was saying. So obviously, I got there 5 minutes late when most of the space was full and wound up right in front of the fan (which was a selfishly good move), and everyone else's equipment (adjusting height steps and the weirdest barbells I've ever seen -instead of clips for keeping the weight discs - which were weighted with sand - on, there were these weird clampy things where you turn what looks like a bent nail until it sticks to the weight bar). The teacher said something to me directly - it was either about stretching first or just joining into squatfest 2008 - or maybe about grabbing extra weights or adjusting my bench higher or feeding her cat after class - there's really no telling. Naturally, I nodded, smiled and started doing what everyone else was doing - no need to interrupt class to ask for a translation.

The rest of the class went surprisingly smoothly - the music wasn't good, but it certainly wasn't the generic techno that made weight-related classes at my gym in London even duller. And there was a cover of "Time After Time" - a really bad cover, sure, but it IS one of my favorite songs, and it's hard to lose the hook. . . you say go slow. . . .it's in my head again just thinking about it.

So anyway - being enthusiastically encouraged/told to work harder in French was not nearly as confusing as it could have been. Partly, I think this is because all instructors say more or less the same thing - to varying degrees of shlockiness - when not giving easily demonstrable direcitons, they're pretty much just talking as a disctraction from the sheer bizarreness of doing tricep dips surrounded by sweaty strangers for an hour. And having that in a language you don't understand kind of adds to it - much better than the instructor I once understood perfectly as saying, over and over, "squeeze your buns so someone else will want to. . .huh!" (she really liked the "huh"s) - and also there's a bit of an air of mystery - trying to understand one word out of every 30 - let's just say I got "ce soir" down after the hour.

Also - this was the kind of good teacher who does all of the moves with the class, so you really can follow the visuals when the spoken instructions are too much - not a great way to follow weight changes, but really, I haven't lifted much in maybe 3 weeks, so relatively light is a challenge for any muscle group. She even gave her scolds on bad form by demonstrating - and smiling a lot - regardless of what she was saying, I found this way of communicating the message quite effective, and not, in fact, scoldy at all.

And, finally, I have to admit: she tossed in a lot of English vocabulary - perhaps, as with computers, it is the technical lingua franca of exercise. Imperialistic? Maybe a little, but hearing "singles!" as a direction to do faster chest presses - I would be lying if I said I didn't feel more comfortable.

So, I will probably be back - I like weight classes because I like someone else deciding if I should do lunges today or not (I usually opt for not, so on the days I do, I end up in quad-y misery every time I try to move a leg), so I am happy to have the possibility of another try. And maybe some new vocab. . .

Dullsville

I know this blog is moving toward it, if not happily building a nondescript beige house there, and I know it has been for a while.

The reason for this is that my life is busy, yet also, paradoxically, a bit boring. I have been storing up observations on communication strategies with my flatmates, the earphone things that I vainly hope will help me understand French presentations at the twice a week press briefings that I go to at work, and the fact that everyone has to bag their own groceries in Switzerland and as a result, every food shopping outing ends in a frantic scramble to pay and bag and get out of the way before the person behind you's food comes tumbling down. But I haven't gotten up the concentration to write them. So instead, I will allude to unwritten posts that may never come into being so you know I'm thinking about it. And about becoming a more practiced - if not actually better - writer - in the process.

In the meantime, my days are a hugely exciting pattern of fighting with my alarm - and the sun, which inevitably shines warmly and a bit mockingly through my yellow curtains in a way that says "Yes, I've been here for HOURS now. You have no excuse. It's 8. Get up" or at least, in my semi-conscious anthropomorphizing that's what it says), then I make mediocre coffee- I try to get in a full cup and have a refill in hand before walking to work - otherwise I inevitably have to buy 2 cups during the day and that's just not good for anyone. Then I walk to work - it takes about half an hour. I am usually 10 minutes late. I am not proud. I blame this on the sense of being almost there that comes with seeing the giant broken chair from a substantial distance, and also underestimating how long it takes to get from the gate to my office (usually about 5 minutes). Then work, usually interrupted by as many breaks as possible - particularly when it's hot - which, thankfully, it hasn't been this week. Then an hour for lunch at 12:05 with the rest of the research analysts and interns. Then more desk, less concentration, then home, change clothes, go to the gym - sometimes stopping for the above grocery adventure on the way - then dinner, try to work on the dissertation, mostly just do the same aimless internet surfing as at work - but with more music because I don't seem to have sound on the work computer.

There are some variations, even a little bit of socializing, and some healthy wealth transfers to the Swiss economy, but after 2 and a half weeks, this seems to be about the norm - so far it doesn't lend itself to being interesting. In a couple of weeks, maybe my inner monologue won't be so preoccupied with store opening hours or cajoling me for my lack of French and I can get something more interesting going -as it is - my thoughts are usually about watch-checking and trying to go blank enough to saw merci and au revoir at the right times, and working on a smile that says "I know I'm an idiot for not understanding, please don't think I'm so arrogant as to think English should get me everywhere."

Dropsy

Not the real kind, thankfully, but I have been even more clumsy than usual today - including several dropped coins in the 5 minute wait to buy coffee at work, and a door closed on one of my fingers.

I think that this has something to do with Sunday night insomnia - which I've had more or less every Sunday since I had to start getting up on Monday mornings - not having it was one of a few things that I really liked about the student schedule of the last several months. I really should have taken the opportunity of my boss being out of town (he won't be next week) to oversleep, but instead, I went in on time - not even the usual 10 minutes late - and was barely coherent until around 11, then just clumsy and a bit dim, frankly. And littering change everywhere I went.

Happy Monday.

A Chili Victory

Every store in Geneva is having a sale right now. This is good news, since everything seems to be much more expensive than I would like it to be and sliiightly more so than I am willing to spend without a solid 3 rounds of internal debate (do I NEED a pillow? There has to be one cheaper than $30. . . there are no pillows cheaper than $30 . . .I guess I'll buy a pillow. . . unless maybe I can get by with a balled-up comforter. No. That's ridiculous, buy the pillow. . . there must be a cheaper one. . . etc) - and since everything closes bloody early - 7 during the week, 6 on Saturday, completely shuttered on Sunday - this wastes valuable time. Things tend to be even worse with food, which is even more expensive - I went to 4 stores before I could find soy sauce for less than $6 - and really, the stuff I ended up buying ($3.50!) wasn't worth the effort - far saltier than the average Kikkoman's - which is basically sea water to begin with. And my local grocery store doesn't take Visa (a total shock - who takes AmEx and NOT Visa . .. IN EUROPE?) so, paying cash, I'm quite aware of how much money I spend on food, so condiments tend to fall by the wayside. . . Making things worse, food here tends to be quite bland - perhaps because everyone is skimping on the spices, perhaps because gruyere is garnish enough.

So yesterday, when I found a bottle of Sriracha half price (down from $5.80), I may have done a little dance in the middle of the food section of the swankiest department store in town (where I had really only gone for the free samples). Now I'm figuring out how to achieve proper chili-power without carrying it on my person at all times- I already usually have a coffee cup and a water bottle - anything more vessels would start to feel excessive.

Independance and Neutrality

As the last american has departed my office and the other ones I've met only in passing, my fourth of july was a bit muted. I went out - attempting, at least, to go salsa dancing with people from my office, but as has been the case in every office where I've worked, the much larger number of women than men was a bit striking. And it was the kind of party where we would have been better off if we had imported our own men, since all of the ones who were dancing had clearly been partnered ahead of time. It was also in a gazebo - a rather awkward space for the old stand around and look cool until someone asks you to dance routine. And while salsa dancing is, in many ways, quite American, without the right costuming, it doesn't involve any actual fireworks. And, as I learned after one dance ending in a stomach cramp, it isn't particularly good with beer. Alas.

The last time I was out of the country for the fourth, 3 years ago, I was visiting a friend in Belfast - we heated some store-bought apple pie and talked about the Troubles - and the fact that the Quakers (who she was working for and whose programming in Belfast is run out from a cottage on a hill above West Belfast) got to cross the Peace Line even when everyone else didn't (at least the Quakers driving the official day care/after school program van). That kind of neutrality strikes me now as quite different from the Swiss kind, and I'm not sure how either fits with being too far away to have a really meaningful barbecue, but it seems worth mentioning.

Yay

It was cold- like wearing long sleeves and possibly closing the window in the office cold - today. And it rained pretty much all day. My towels, which still needed an extra rinse or 7 to get rid of residual soap from Wednesday's laundry adventure, were pleased, I am quite sure. And then there was the scene above - pretty neat, no? Actually, it was even more exciting in person - a full arch of a rainbow and a little bit of a second one nearby.

I won't lie and say I want it to stay this way, but it was kind of a nice change of pace from the usual 85 degrees and sunny sunny sunny (it's not too late to book a ticket to visit me for Swiss National Day next month).

Vintage Architecture and Dry Heat

You know how in Chinatown, you can tell that, no matter how much the characters seem like they're trying to look put together, they're clearly kind of dying because LA in pre-stolen water days wasn't air conditioned? It might have something to do with handkerchiefs, but I'm not sure. . . Anyway - I thought about this more than once today - as I do most days - I think because, in addition to having vast swathes of un-air-conditioned space, the Palais is also legit art deco - and not much altered since it was built. Also, the office where I work is actually a bunch of offices on a sort of square of hallway - this, unfortunately, feels more like a high school from the 50s than a private eye's office, but still, it has a bit of an old-school feeling. And we don't even have to wear suits.