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

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.)

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:

a couple of weeks ago, the meadow behind our house was freshly mowed, and our cats were playing. it was beautiful weather, and i grabbed my camera to watch them playing a bit:

also on last weekend, we did an excursion around the zürcher oberland. we started by taking the historic steam locomotive train (the same as last time) from hinwil up to neuthal, were we continued to a lake to barbecue. later, we continued by the same train to bäretswil and walked down the kemptner tobel to kempten, ate some ice cream there and finally continued home. the weather was fantastic (even though the forecast warned that there might be rain), it was sunny and warm the whole time.

here are some impressions:

today, after the rain stopped and the weather eventually turned out to be beautiful, we decided spontaneously to take the dvzo steam locomotive ride from hinwil via bäretswil to bauma. due to some technical problems the train ride took somewhat longer than planned, but since the weather was nice, we didn’t mind that at all. here are some impressions from the trip: