Week of 4 July 2010:

We love the Swiss flowers

















Tender mercies are wee miracles that didn’t have to happen. The first four days of the week were fine, but not particularly noteworthy. Thursday, however, seemed to be a day full of tender mercies, starting very early. Somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, Dede couldn’t sleep. She had the impression she ought to change the menu for the family home evening dinner this night. Instead of the crêpes with Swedish Lingonberry sauce, she decided that since it was so hot out, she ought to make Sister Doyle’s chicken salad croissants and serve them along with watermelon. Dessert then would be a Texas brownie sheet-cake to celebrate Jenny’s Dallas home. The next tender mercy was that although I’d started to copy photos into a Word document, putting labels with people’s names in the places they ought to go was a real chore. I thought that perhaps it would be possible to start a PowerPoint document and then be able to position the text boxes and the pictures where they’d best fit. That would be fine, but the slides in PowerPoint are horizontal. Then I found a way to change the slide orientation to portrait (vertical). Things worked great, and I was able to get the nearly 40 pictures into 11 pages, with labels and names of each of the Yverdon YSA that were in each pix. A miracle occurred on the way to Yverdon: cars in front of us suddenly stopped; I had to brake severely and go from 110 km/hr to 0 in a very short space. The Texas sheet cake on the back seat slid forward, but instead of rotating on the edge of the seat and turning over onto the floor, it slid right out into the air and landed RIGHT SIDE UP on the floor! Nothing was damaged. The next tender mercy was the arrival of Eric, Sabrina, and Joël to bid farewell to Jenny. Their enthusiasm made the evening terrific.

Jenny Pike's final family home evening in Yverdon
The croissants stuffed with chicken salad were a BIG hit; and the chilled watermelon disappeared almost as soon as it got to the table. (Joël told us grandfather used to say there were two benefits to eating a slice of watermelon: you could enjoy the taste of something juicy and cool, AND, you got your face washed at the same time). And everyone loved the Texas sheet cake. Jenny had volunteered to teach the lesson, which she took from April’s conference talk by Sister Julie Beck (General RS President), regarding personal revelation. Jenny asked each of us to share instances where we’d received personal revelation that either helped or comforted us – and everyone present had one or two stories – it was a spiritual feast after our food feast.

A family with four generations in the church in Switzerland: Saturday, we made it to the baptisms of Alizée Bentele (age 12) by her GREAT-grandfather, brother AEDO, and that of Samuel Tschumi, by his dad (Christian’s father is married to a cousin in the Aedo clan). The chapel was nearly filled; many were descendents of Br Aedo.





Four generations in the Aedo family celebrate Alizée's baptism






The week was topped off by a trip to the mountains :) That afternoon, we went with the Doyles toward Gruyères and Mount Moléson. We hiked up to a little restaurant where after Dede had a slice of apricot tarte, we watched a film about making cheese by hand in the Swiss mountains.

With the racket these bells made,
no Swiss cow ever got lost for very long




Just in case you ever wondered how Swiss cheese used to be made by hand (click on the picture to enlarge it)













The best part of the trip was our taking a ride on the little “luge” sleds. It cost 5.5 francs each, but it was fun to ride the “Alpine slides” (like the ones at Mt Hood in Oregon and at Park City in Utah). After another good dinner at the Moléson restaurant (ham and Gruyères cheese sandwich and a salad for 9.80 francs) we started home, just as the thunderstorms hit (actually, they’d hit while we were eating).

Is this a midget plane, or maybe just a fancy motorcycle on the streets of Geneva?