Here is another panorama. I photographed it on Thursday.



For anyone that is interested, the 180° panoramas I take are made up of between twelve and fourteen shots, which I photograph freehand using a Sony DCS F828 digital camera. I mount the shots in Adobe Photoshop®.
360° panoramas like this one at Fradley canal junction are more difficult and need to be shot with the aid of a tripod.

Exactly six years ago yesterday, I moved from Germany to Appenzell, Switzerland.

My first morning here, I woke to the sound of cow bells.
I looked at the clock, it was 05:30.
I looked at the snow on the trees outside and decided:
I had been dreaming - no cow bells.

But yes - there they were again!
And they were coming closer!

After a short while the cow bells were directly under my window, accompanied by yodelling.
I opened the window to find eight fir trees, covered in cow bells and yodelling.
They were still there when I went downstairs and opened the front door - it was not a dream.
When they had finished their Zeierli (a natural form of yodelling), they came and wished me a Happy New Year.
I gave them some money and went back to bed. After ten minutes they were back.
I thought perhaps I'd given them too much money. But no, it was another group.
By 07:00 I was broke!

The Silvester Chläus walk from farmhouse to farmhouse every new years eve or on the Saturday that precedes, if new years eve is a Sunday. They chase away any evil spirits and any troubles the farmer cares to tell them.
They'll also take any money that is given to them and/or drink any alcohol offered to them.
For one reason or another I missed them the last two years, but this morning I was up at five with Glühwein (mulled wine) on the stove and ready for their visit.
They didn't come!

Oh, I heard their bells and I heard them yodelling. They visited the neighbours on the next slope but never managed to climb the slope to our place. They must have found our doors locked the last two years and decided not to bother again.

What does one do with a bucket of mulled wine?

What do Heathrow and Appenzell have in common?

Remember that picture recently - the goldfish bowl full of milk?
Well the past few days have been just the same.

Yesterday I ventured out to find out if the fog was just local; it would seem that we have a halo around our house.
Up on the next hill the view is entirely different!



I think I might move until the fog has gone.

Bah! Humbug! Father Christmas doesn't exist - or does he?

When i was a child, we used to hang a pillow case at the foot of the bed for Father Christmas to fill in the night from 24th to the 25th of December.
Santa would fill it with all sorts of goodies and I was invariably awake at around five'o'clock, wanting to show my parents the goodies. And I can ensure you, that the mandarins and chocolates weren't half as interesting as that train set, that I had set up in my bedroom by five thirty!
Two things altered my perception of Santa. Firstly: he supposedly visited all good children during that night - the whole world over.
At some point, I worked out, that he would have his work cut out, just sliding down all the chimneys in Birmingham, let alone the whole world.
Secondly: I swear I saw my Dad putting the goodies into the pillow case one night!

Over the years I have always wondered and now my perspective has altered.
It first started, when I moved to Germany.
That was when I discovered that Santa visits the German-speaking-nations on the sixth of December. (Saint Nicholas died on this date - I know, because I remember reading it on his grave in Myra, Turkey!)
At first I thought this was because the Germans are impatient and unable to wait for the 25th. Yesterday, however, Santa was sighted in Toronto, where his sleigh broke down this year.
Perhaps I should reconsider. Perhaps he spreads his workload over the whole of December and does, somehow, manage to visit all of those children after all!
What a nice thought.

Looking out of the window today, I get the distinct impression of living in a goldfish bowl full of milk. This is the view from my dining room window:



It is difficult to discern whether the view is that of low clouds, or of fog that has risen from the valley. I would have to drive down to find out.

Fog in the valley often looks like this:



The picture was taken early one morning just as the sun was coming up over the hills.
Down there in the fog, somewhere, is St.Gallen and behind it is Zürich.

The views from up here can be quite spectacular. I was lucky to catch the scene below - it lasted all of 25 seconds - I just happened to have a camera lying at hand.



In fact I have been lucky a couple of times and have been able to capture a few scenes, that only lasted seconds:



These last three images were all taken from my dining room window,
during evening meals.



The pros and contras of living in the foothills of the Swiss Alps!

If you looked at the photographs in my previous post, you might have noticed, that the roads have posts running down the side of them ...

The posts are put in some time in October and enable us to find the roads, even when they have been obliterated by snow drifts.
Because ours is a private road, we are obliged to put up our own posts.
During the first couple of years that I lived here, my landlord put the posts in.
The last two years he didn't. Well, he's over 80 so perhaps he wasn't well enough, or he just forgot.

The year before last, when I realised that the post weren't going to appear, I put up some plastic bean canes I purchased at the local nursery. They were green and not very easy to see in semi darkness.

Last year I phoned the 'Bauamt' - the people that maintain our roads and public buildings - and asked if it were possible to purchase some of their red, wooden posts.

The guy from the Bauamt told me I could have some of his older posts, some that had been knocked down by cars and consequently shortened. They would be a lot cheaper than new ones. He even came along and put them in for me.
I paid CHF 50,- for them.

In May I took them out, cleaned them and stored them in the barn.
In October my landlord remembered, that he had to put in the posts.
The bottom half of the road (the steepest part) he marked with my bean canes.
The stretch between my house and his house was marked with some old fence posts.
His driveway was marked with my shiny red posts!

I couldn't be bothered to go and inform him, what I thought about him, but I did remove two of my red posts and put them in the most important positions on the steep part of the road!

I hope he misses the edge of his drive now and lands in the meadow!

There are some expats who chose to live in, or near, Zürich.
They are now complaining about the weather.

I chose to live elsewhere, at just under 1000 meters above sea level. I did so in the knowledge that in this area, we can have snow from October to April. That is seven months a year and I love it!
It was a lot warmer this year, than in previous years. We had an unusually long and hot summer and a wonderful autumn. Now, at last, winter has us in its grips and the weather prophets have promised us a meter of snow for Christmas!
I am thrilled!

For those of you who either chose the wrong part of Switzerland to live in, or chose to live somewhere entirely different - here are some photographs I took this morning.

A taste of things to come.

Der Föhn isch zämmegheit.

The foehn collapsed yesterday.
Last week was warm and, if you ignored the golden trees, you could have mistaken it for spring.
Yesterday I had a splitting headache and wasn't surprised, when the wispy clouds over the mountain tops, were blown away.
A strong wind came up and when I went outside the wind had turned cold and was lashing streaks of rain around.

This morning we awoke to 25 cm of snow.
It hasn't stopped snowing all day long.
For the first time in ages, I had to dig the car out again.
I wish there were some sort of spray to make snow disappear from cars.

I'll have to turn the central heating on now!

On my way home this afternoon, I found my path blocked by sheep.

It is not unusual to see sheep here, but we are not in Wales or Scotland - it is unusual to have them on the roads!
I carefully nudged my car through them and when I got home I phoned the farmer that owns the sheep and asked if it was o.k. for them to 'out on their own'?
"Oh yes," he said "that's fine."

Well, o.k. they are his sheep, not mine - he knows best.

The phone just rang.
Did I, by any chance, observe the direction the sheep took off in?

The Boss recently introduced me to one of our sales people as
"...and this is our computer expert."
My job title is actually something entirely different, as some of you might actually have read elsewhere.
I am not a computer expert - far from it. A computer is the tool I use to accomplish the work I do, the way a carpenter most likely uses a saw every day.

The sales person stood and watched me working in Photoshop for a few minutes and then commented
"Wow, I wish I could use a computer like that! How long have you been working with computers?"

This made me stop and think ...

I acquired my first computer in 1980. It was from Texas Instruments and used Basic.
I fiddled around with it for a few weeks without being able to reconcile myself to the fact that, not only did you have to tell it what to do, you also had to explain how to do it. It couldn't do anything I couldn't imagine for myself.
This is not what they had told me, that computers would be able to do.
I gave it away to someone that - hopefully - could put it to more use than I could.

It must have been around 1983, that I first bought a computer that ran DOS. Green text on a black screen - yuck!
It could do things without me needing to explain what I wanted it to do, but I had to write out commands to get it to do so. The commands got more and more intricate, the more complicated the things you wanted it to do.
But, at least it could do things that I couldn't imagine and I could write letters on it. There was also a software loaded, called MS MultiPlan that allowed me to create rudimentary spreadsheets. A slide-rule is faster.

My boss at work bought a Mac in 1985 and I envied him for its GUI (Grafical User Interface).
It was also in 1985, that A guy at the Motorpresse in Stuttgart greeted me excitedly, waving a piece of paper. The paper had some text printed on it in Black and white. It had been produced with PageMaker on a Mac.
"This is the future of the reproduction industry" he informed me.
Although I didn't believe him for another two years, he was right!
(A few years later I was lucky enough to help produce the first digitally published magazine in Germany.)

I couldn't afford a Mac of my own so I was rather pleased, when Microsoft copied the GUI and introduced Windows in 1986. It wasn't quite the same as using a Mac, but it was similar. The thing I hated was how often it crashed!
Windows was always just that little more complicated than a Mac. It has always been a lot less productive.
I spend the first ten minutes, after booting my Windows laptop clicking away at irritating messages - most of them warning me about something to do with the internet and viruses.

I always preferred to work with a Mac and I have been teaching people how to use them since 1987.
My first very own Mac was purchased in 1991.
There are still six of my old Macs on various shelves in my office and I have three in everyday operation.
Computers have always interested me as a means to accomplish things in the publishing industry. In the meantime, they interest me from a general media point of view. I only ever dug down as far down into their workings as I have needed.

My knowledge of publishing and design applications has been accumulated over a period of 20 years. Some of it has been hard work - most especially, understanding the theory behind the practice.

I'm not sure the sales person was really that interested in my computer past, so I just said
"Since about 1987"
"Well, in that case, it's no wonder!" he said.

I suppose, that if I were unable to use the tools of my trade after 20 years, I should, or hopefully would, have chosen some other trade.