The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
Ben wanted to go on the bumber cars. Note, bumber cars, not dodgems. Switzerland is not ruled by a bunch of elf’n’safety pansies. At first, he was all “nooooooooooooooooooooooooo”. After a couple of minutes, he turned into a blood-thirsty maniac who was yelling “HIT HIIIIM! HE LIKES IT!!”
When you’re stressed, just look at Pavel eating his paw and everything will be better.
Katy, Bean and I went to Geneva to see the latest incarnation of Kodo’s One Earth tour: evolution.
I was, in a word, disappointed. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there were still moments of brilliance, but the show didn’t live up to the larger-than-life dragons who suddenly slither on to the stage or the shaggy-haired, old-style forest ‘demons’ from the One Earth: Mystery 2016 tour. This show seemed almost too technical, too slow, at times. I didn’t feel the mad, raw energy from the previous show. The group of special-need kids behind us that didn’t stop talking the whole show probably didn’t help either.
My 3 favourite muppets in the same sketch :)
For Halloween, we all watched the Thriller video. While parts of it haven’t aged well at all, it’s still a classic. Bean wasn’t impressed…
but it looks really, really fun!
This is where the tulip festival is. It’s also 5 minutes from our house.
Katy loves the Swiss scouts. She keeps saying “my brownies were never this fun. All we ever did was play rounders”. It should be noted that, besides his last-minute injury, Bean enjoyed his camping trip and it was the first time in a looong time that the St-George camping weekend didn’t get rained on :)
2016 sucked. There’s no two ways about it. There was Ebola and Zika, bombs in Belgium and Lahore, Syrian refugees drowning all over the place, kids living alone in slums in Calais, 14 (!) school shootings in the US, Brexit, Nigel, Boris, Theresa, Pulse shootings, Kim Davis, Trump… the list unfortunately goes on.
For the idiots we kept, we lost David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Terry Wogan, Harper Lee, Paul Daniels, Ronnie Corbett, Prince, Morley Safer, Muhammad Ali, Gordie Howe, Anton Yelchin, Jerry Doyle, Kenny Baker, Toots Thielemans, Gene Wilder, Neville Marriner, Leonard Cohen, and many more.
On a personal note, while there were some good moments, Katy and I found 2016 hard as a couple. Until I changed groups, work was toxic.
So, with firm conviction, I say fuck you 2016, and we can only hope 2017 will be better.