last weekend, we revisited obersaxen for a waffle party. (sorry, no photos of the waffles, but they were really tasty!) again, the weather was great, even though it was sometimes pretty cloudy and sometimes even showers came down.

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:

it’s still less than a year since we first saw some little kitten, and some months less before they joined us at our place – one of them, miukumauku, at our home, and the other two at our neighbours’. last weekend, on the day we returned from tyrol, it was the not-anymore-kitten’s first birthday!

(it was not so simple to get all three of them into one picture and make them look at the camera. in fact, they never did that when i was ready to take a picture. so i ended up looking for shots where they were not half busy eating or presenting their butts, but somehow looking nice.)

we don’t think they actually noticed that this day was somewhat special for them, but then, who cares if there’s food and good weather:

so we watched them play for some time, trying to catch each other, crawling through the grass, looking for food, etc.

finally, here’s a nice portrait shot of miukumauku:

some weeks ago, we went to see ohne rolf in engelberg. unfortunately for us, the weather sucked during our short stay. that’s why there are essentially on photos excep this one taken outside the schaukäserei:

on our way back, we hopped on a boat in lucerne and crossed lake lucerne until we finally arrived in flüelen. from there, we returned home via train. here are some snapshots from the nice boat trip, which was mostly uneventful except the last hop, where a group of drunken turnverein members entered the boat…

(the city you can see is brunnen.)

i have to admit that i haven’t been really updating my blog for quite some time now, even though there was a lot i wanted to add. now that i finally have a bit of spare time, i want to add at least some of these things.

after being on muottas muragl, we continued to the other end of switzerland, namely to the small village of broc, where the chocolate producer cailler is located. there, we signed up for a course on making pralines.

we first drank a nice hot chocolate in the cafeteria:

after that, we explored the shop, before finally our course began. at the beginning of the course, we began to prepare the filling.

for that, we started heating chocolate (cailler cuisine of course ;-) ) with a bit of cream, and later added some butter. that was put into the fridge to cool down. while it cooled down, we took a look at the available garnishments:

(the alcohol should be added when melting the chocolate. we decided against it since you have to decide between all your pralines having alcohol or none.) after some time, we put the chocolate cream into an icing bag and created little heaps (i’m tempted to write turds – the similarity was quite obvious). these were cooled again, until we transformed them using our hands to balls. these were cooled down again, and we were provided with chocolate for the shell. (producing that one yourself is quite tedious work, since you have to invest quite some time to preserve the glossy look. i guess at cailler they have machines for that.) we then put garnishments into pots and started to produce pralines. here are some results:

the process of getting to this point was to take a ball of filling, put it into the shell chocolate bowl, turn it around there, extract it and bath it in the garnishment bowl:

afterwards, the pralines had to be cooled another time. we then were provided with packaging and decoration material:

afterwards, we went on a tour while our pralines were staying in the fridge. after the tour, you end up in a room where you can try all pralines produced by cailler, and you can eat as much was you want. finally, we picked up our pralines and began to return home. it was a great and tasty experience!

today, we were on muottas muragl. luckily, this morning, the weather was much better than predicted by the weather report yesterday: it was sunny! during the late morning, it once again became cloudy, but before, we had some really great views while strolling a bit on the philosopher’s trail:

while we now had snow for quite a while, most of the time it was either good weather, or we were home. so some days ago we were quite happy that four things coincided: the weather was great, we were home, the little cats were playing outside, and we noticed and joined them with my camera :) so here are some photos of miukumauku and her friends enjoying winter. and two photos of pantone.

a happy new year to everyone!

we spend the last couple of days of the last year in braunwald, glarus, for a short skiing vacation. the weather was great, much better than announced. it was sunny most of the time:

(sorry for the photo quality. i only took my tiny compact camera with me…)

it was also the first time i ever stood on skis. after a couple of skiing lessons, i even managed to get down the little hill (school to braunwald) and – with a lot of help – the bigger hill (grotzenbüel to school). it was great, even though i was pretty dead afterwards. skiing is quite exhausting, especially with regard to some muscles which i don’t really need for my daily life :)

just for fun, i turned one of the snow fall shot series from this morning into a little video. sorry for the perspective change at the end, this was not intended. i aligned the shots with hugin, scaled them down with imagemagick and converted them to a mp4 video and an ogg video using avconv. (if you’re interested in the commands i used, mention that in the comments, i’ll then post them.)

despite the not so great weather forecast, the sun came out this morning and bathed my surroundings in beautiful sunlight. i grabbed my camera, put on my winter gear, and went on a nice long walk. i essentially walked around the area from the first half of our easter walk, with the difference that this time, everything was covered in snow.

something very beautiful with snow is the effect when snow randomly falls off from trees. the effect is best with sunlight:

some more impressions:

anyway, shortly after arriving back home, the sun was again covered by clouds and the landscape bathed in grey. by now, it’s snowing again.