Happy Holidays!

Dearie me - I can't believe it's been nearly a month since my last blog update! The following has happened in these past few weeks:

- I signed a new contract to stay in Zurich for an indefinite period of time. Or at least until I've managed to eat every single piece of Swiss chocolate that I can lay my hands on.

- I went to Paris during Christmastime, and had the most wonderful time with someone wonderful. There was an attack of the snow, but it made everything that much more beautiful:



- Because of the holidays, there are chocolates everywhere, especially at work. As a result, I have now turned into a zombie who just trolls all the floors in the office building, looking for my next chocolate fix. I walk up to random people's desks, take any chocolate that I see lying around, and then walk away. I hear there's talk of staging an intervention to help me make it out of this. I hope they have chocolate at the rumored intervention.

- A direct side-effect of the above situation has been an exponential expansion of my ass. It is as wide as Pluto the planet now and shows no signs of shrinking anytime soon.

- I hosted my first cheese fondue dinner, and it was heavenly! I would like to show you pictures of said event, but I was too busy eating all the food to remember to take pictures.

- I have been eating so much fondue that I'm basically starting to look like one.

- I upheld my annual December tradition, and lost one glove last week. I now have five left hand gloves, because I keep losing the right one on a different mode of public transport. Every year. For five years in a row. Just one of the many reasons why I need therapy.

- Managed to take some pictures of the Christmas tree at Paradeplatz:



- And took some pictures of Zurich in winter:



I'm now off to London for Christmas and to Birmingham for New Year's Eve. So in case I don't get around to updating this blog anytime soon, here's wishing everyone Happy Holidays and hope you have a wonderful New Year!

Plans for the weekend...

include doing this:



and some more of this:



Somehow, somewhere, something went wrong in my move to Zurich - I have officially become a soccer, oops, a football addict. I can't go to bed until I know who's playing the next day, what are their chances, and until I have read all possible analysis on all the games that took place on that day. I have practically moved in at Razzia, a former movie theater that has been converted into a bar for all the games.

This week though, has been brutal. I have been at an off-site pretty much all week, so had no access to TV, and had to resort to receiving the score updates via texts. Anything to get my fix. I had sufficiently threatened enough people with dire consequences if they didn't respond to me and ended up having 3-4 people texting me the score at the same time. I even kept informing one of the Directors at the offsite of the Italy-Slovakia score, not realizing that he was Italian and thus ready to murder me with his eyes for continually bringing him bad news. Football - causing career suicides since 1872.

I'm really not sure how I'm going to recover from this addiction when the World Cup ends. This will be like trying to get over "LOST" all over again!

Third "First Day"

Just in case you were thinking that this whole STIDT is a one-off thing, I'm here to prove you wrong. But before I go about doing just that, here's a little glimpse at my third-first day in the office:

The Gods of Wellness finally paid heed to my plight, so their blessings, coupled with a 1.5x dose of MediNait, knocked me out for most of last night. I definitely feel eighty percent more human today. I now sound like a sixty year old grandmother, which is a marked improvement. So today was the first time I spent the entire day, and then some, at work. Based on my first impressions, I can tell you that everyone is SUPER NICE. I cannot emphasize that enough. One of my coworkers spent the better part of his day just going over the project with me, taking pains to print out documents, and ignoring the hacking and hawing. I honestly was just expecting him to hand me a bunch of documents and asking me to review them, but he really took the time to make sure I had a good overview of what I was getting into. Next up, lunch…

Everyone here is aware of my love affair with food, and the I know many of you are surprised about the lack of food mentions here. But there's a good reason - I've just been having soup and salad since I arrived here. I can't taste anything, so there's no point in wasting good food on my tasteless taste buds for now. Anyway, here's the thing about living in a German speaking region - everything, including the cafeteria menu, is in German! The cafeteria is HUGE, with many, many options for lunch, none of which I understood. Luckily, yesterday I went for lunch with a German speaker, who was instrumental in ensuring that I knew what I was consuming. Today, I decided to be Dora The Explorer and went for lunch all by myself. By the time I got to the cafeteria, Dora had fled and the 60yr old grandmother had returned. As the time grew closer and closer for me to make a selection, I abandoned all pride, turned around, and asked the guy behind me in my raspy, grandmotherly voice, "Excuse me, do you speak German?". "Yes, I do", he replied. After mentally falling at his feet in gratitude, I asked if he could kindly translate the menu for me in English. Thankfully, he did, and I was able to have rice and a dosa type thingy with curry for lunch. I crashed someone else's lunch party and butted in their private conversations, but they were kind enough to let me join them and even waited for me to finish my lunch and left with me. See what I mean by SUPER NICE now? I also had a drinks thing with everyone on the floor, but more on that tomorrow.

Anyway, back to STIDIT. I'm not going to post one everyday, but every now and then, when they become too much even for me, I need to share. Lucky for you, today is the day. So, as I mentioned earlier, one of my coworkers spent a lot of time with me today. What I neglected to mention is that he asked me, "So do you have a folder (on the network)?" and I , due to my mental problems, heard, "So, do you have a home?" Now, I know home and folder don't rhyme. Intellectually, spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally, I know this. But somehow, there was a disconnect, as there often is, between my brain and my mouth. So I went off on a five minute monologue about my new apartment, where it was, how much I liked it, etc. As I paused to take a deep breath, he replied, "Uh..I was asking if you have a folder on the network so I can copy these files over there for you." Even though I am not White, my face turn almost red at my gaffe. But he was kind and talked to me about the apartment for a bit.

Then, then this happened: He was showing me something on the monitor, and he got the message "Your computer is shutting down…" He was baffled at the cause and did NOT understand what was happening. I had a sick feeling that I had something to do with this. He started looking for his CPU, and sure enough, the CPU was on the floor, right next to my…foot. I had accidentally kicked the Off button and initiated the shut down! I don't think he realized that it was me and blamed the computer, as we often do, for being stupid. I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically agreed with him on the computer's lack of intelligence. But deep down, I knew it was me. And that knowledge fills me with shame. But I can't help it, my stupidity is genetic and hereditary. Being ashamed of it would be like being ashamed of being born with something - it's out of your control. You can only accept it and move on, which is exactly what I ended up doing. Oh well, sooner or later, even the people here will have to know that I do stupid things on a daily basis. The sooner they find out about it, the better I think!