The disconcerted return

I forgot I even had a blog for a while during the past few weeks. It was a nice mental break from trying to seem interesting. Also, I stopped having those "this would be a perfect blog post" moments. So I almost feel like a regular schmuck now. 

Today I have not even thought of a topic for this post. You see, I am still rusty. But by tomorrow I will be photographing my refrigerator or making you watch a slide show of my journey up a foggy mountain or reading to you from a dictionary. And the world will have righted itself. 

At the moment, I have the odd, disorienting sensation of being in a time vacuum. Somehow this last string of trips and visitors has really deep spaced my sense of reality and the passage of time. Even for someone in retiree status, it is bad. I do not think I could not come up with today's date in less than four guesses. I try to have conversations about Gallileo climbing the leaning tower. I worry about how prehistoric people learned to write. I can't figure out if fall has come to Lugano. And I am relishing my current events ignorance way too much for an American at election time. 

You know you live in a small town when...

you tell the cab drive your street and he guesses the building number.

Somehow during the visit of our friends S&P this week, we found ourselves in a strange, strange land. 

(photo: S&P)

The natives were not friendly and wore a lot of jewelry. 

damned dirty ape couldn't even afford a track suit (photo: S&P)

And there were gorillas out there in the mist with the cows.

(photo: S&P)

Thankfully, we were eventually able to escape from this planet of apes and return safely to Lugano. Who knew our Swiss German phrase ("Meine Name ist Taylor") would be so useful!

Bacche di ginepro

In the spice section the other day, I impulsively picked up a bottle of dried berries, which, my dictionary later informed me, were juniper berries.

They pretty much taste like vodka minus the vodka. They are assertive, but reticently so, like they are not used to being alone on the palate and would anyway prefer to stay tucked away in the woods by themselves with the deer. They are definitely closer to fruity twigs than blueberries: not really something that you put on your cereal.

What in the world shall I do with these berries? I hope someone will help me.

For me, this brings to mind tipsy second graders or construction workers being dainty. Not sure for whom it's intended.