on friday evening, we had a really amazing sky over hinwil:

one and a half weeks ago, we visited the naturzentrum thurauen near flaach. the weather was wonderful, and after exploring the nature trail, enjoying all the frogs there and finally having a picnic, we continued to the rhine and continued via boat to eglisau.

yesterday, i was in our garden, doing a bit of work. namely, planting some lavender. two of the plants you can see here:

i haven’t planted anything (nor did any serious garden work, in fact) for quite some years now, but it was fun. (and i wasn’t forced to do it, either.)

the main purpose of the lavender is although not to just be a nice view – that’s only the secondary motive – but to make people realize that they shouldn’t walk through our garden and treat it as a kind of short-cut to get onto the hill. i hope this helps, and that not at some point some idiot just stamps my lavender to death.

(well, currently it also looks a bit broken; that was thanks to the heavy rain this night. i hope it will recover from it and hopefully start growing soon.)

yesterday, we were in winterthur, watching cyclope, a wonderful show combining tinguely-like apparatuses with acrobatics and music. it was really amazing! the show, inspired by jean tinguely’s le cyclop, is performed in an old industrial hall, which creates a wonderful atmosphere. the stage, which begins directly in front of the persons sitting in the first row, is a broken up amusement park, which seems to be only inhabited by a (involuntary?) clown. when he’s eventually fed up by his surroundings and wants to leave, suddenly hell breaks loose. it was just amazing! a wide range of acrobatics, acting and music blending perfectly in the huge metal colossus, which turns more and more into a face with, well, only one eye. a pretty heavy piece of metal, so to say.

we were lucky, and our friends, who arrived very early, were offered an upgrade to sit more in the front, and so we ended up in row 9 (instead of something much higher). it looks like it wasn’t exactly sold out, and they tried to at least fill the first rows so that it doesn’t look too sad. which is really, really shameful, since such a great show deserves a much larger audience! so in case you’re somewhat close to winterthur, be sure to watch cyclope while it is still shown! (until end of may, apparently.) after that, it apparently will be shown in july in basel as well (though outdoors there). it is really something which should be seen live, and not on video or tv or anything similar.

today was my first day of my new job as a software engineer at dybuster, a small zürich based software company producing learning software treating dyslexia and dyscalculia.

quite a different job than before, but still a very nice and friendly environment, and a very noble objective in my opinion :-)

more than one year ago, miukumauku, my cat, moved in with us. so when i was sitting outside and saw her playing in the sun, i had to take some pictures. she grew quite a bit, and stopped playing with most of her toys, in favour of having a real-life outside, playing with anything that moves and is not too big. and she’s still extremely cute.

here are some pics from today:

the interplay of sunlight and clouds sometimes results in interesting shots… some days ago, parts of the sky was cut in two pieces:

sometimes, we can observe quite dramatic sky panoramas:

this weekend, the apv zo visited the wildpark bruderhaus in winterthur. the weather was great, and except for the lynxes, we saw all animals we planned to see: sika deer and fallow deer, european bisons, wild boars, red deer, przewalski’s horses and gray wolves.