Grunt

You already know that I don't do New Year's resolutions. No, not me, I couldn't possibly do anything like anyone else.

So this year, I took some resolutions in May.  Because I can. Seriously. Are you going to stop me? There, I didn't think so.

So anyway, first up on my May resolutions list, lose weight.  This involves some huffing, puffing, and sweating, the details of which I have generously decided to leave out of this post. But it also involves Weight Watchers in all its point-counting, meeting-attending, public-weighing glory.

It has probably not escaped your attention that I live in Switzerland.  Not only that, but I live in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.  So named because no one actually speaks German there.  Nay, instead they speak Schweizerdeutsch, which in German would be pronounced Shwizer-Doitch, but which in S-D is pronounced Shweetser-Dootch.  And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Needless to say, I understand next to nothing of this beautiful, phlegm-producing language. I know it has a lot of eeee, ooooo, and leeeee sounds, and that anything purporting to be a 'g' or a 'k' is delivered with a vicious scraping of the respiratory tract, but that's about as far as it goes.

Which means that every week I have the privilege of being weighed in public, handed a list of Swiss-sounding foods I'm unable to identify but now know the point-value of, and listening to strangers cough up a lung for thirty minutes.

An original, and hopefully effective diet technique. It certainly is making food sound pretty scary.

The lucky cow

There are some stories from childhood that stay with you forever.  You don't know why these particular stories stuck and not the countless others your obliging parents read to you, but they did.  For me, there's the one about the robin and Jesus (Selma Lagerloff) and there's the one about the cow and her glasses.

Dear lucky readers, you are in for a treat.

Once upon a time, there was a cow.  The cow was wonderful in many ways but let's face it, she was an astonishingly picky eater.  And stubborn.  And this otherwise lovable cow decided she could only eat four-leaf clovers.

Trouble was, there weren't a lot of four-leaf clovers in the field where she lived, and so she slowly began to starve.  (Gosh, this was a children's story?!)  Her friends the duck, the goat and the rabbit (OK, I don't really remember what species her friends were, but just go with it) tried to convince her that she needed to eat the regular old grass and stop being such a drama queen but she stuck to her guns and just kept on looking for those four-leaf clovers.

So one day, her friends come up with an ingenious plan.  They convince our heroine, the cow, that there are actually lots of four-leaf clovers in her field but that she actually hasn't been able to see them because she forgot to get a check-up at the optician.  Fortunately, they've already picked out some glasses for her which should do the trick.  And lo and behold, the glasses are perfect!  There are four-leaf clovers everywhere!  The cow can't believe she has been so blind this whole time!

Little does she know, of course, that the four-leaf clovers she now sees have in fact been painted on her glasses by her friends.

The end.

This is a story about perspective.  And friendship.  And the importance of regular medical examination and fashionable corrective eyewear.

And it's a story about Miss Res.  And Switzerland.  And just diving in and having a grand old time because, well, this is my field for now and I don't want to go hungry.