A lovely day in Freckly Land

Well, my friend is gone. I dropped him off at the Greyhound station an hour ago, and I must admit to feeling slightly relieved. No, it was not his presence at all. I quite enjoyed the conversations, and I believe he had a really good time with us. I feel relief for being able to speak English again. Not that German itself is a tough language for me to speak, although I do frequently use English sentence structures, which makes my German family laugh at me, but Swiss German, which (in my humble opinion) sounds like farmer's German, is a dialect, that I speak and understand, BUT after years of not hearing it or speaking it, it was hard to adjust.
I frequently switched back and forth between high German and Swiss German, and he always adjusted and switched back and forth with me. But it made conversations a piece of work for me. :)

Did he bring chocolate? Oh my word, you do not want to know. I have chocolate coming out my ears. Portion control is the word of the day, and I'm wondering how to manage staying away from the heavenly stuff. This was entirely unexpected, and I will now even be able to share with my friends, rather than having to hide it and eat tiny pieces at a time.

Today we battled the public school kids at OMSI for a couple of hours and then decided it was entirely too much trouble. We had lunch at the Ramshead McMenamins, during which we toko this lovely picture of the Lovely Freckles and Toothless Fairy.



Then on we went to the beautiful Pittock Mansion...



and we saw this...



We saw signs of spring all over the city, and it had us happy and relieved, that we are in fact, finally seeing early signs of sunnier days and warmer weather.