©2026 The Daleys
Heather and I spent several days over the last week at our old house, cleaning and fixing various things that our previous tenants broke.
It is pretty annoying to have people totally not care about your property, and live in pretty disgusting conditions, presumably to get back at me for asking them to leave. They hadn't cleaned in a month or two, and it is hard to believe that they were actually eating food off the counters and table, etc.
We've gotten two calls in the last couple days from people claiming that we called them, and quite irate about it. What they didn't realize is that you can't really trust the caller-id values displayed on your phone - they are trivially forgeable by anyone, and I think relatively hard to trace even for phone companies and police, etc.
It makes me think of Asher every time.
1/23 - Faith's matching lower tooth came in.
It looks like she's teething again, maybe some top teeth on their way. She, like Noah my other early teether, is interested in solid foods already. Jonathan bought her (with his own money) some little cereal pieces, the kind that dissolve quickly. We give them to her half a piece at a time and she likes to play around with them in her mouth. Tonight she actually fed herself two of the pieces, grabbing them in her left fist.
While looking at a dollar coin, Jonathan said, "I think it has a picture of Obama or something", (really, it's Andrew Jackson).
"Switzerland laughs and American laughs are the same; only the language is different. I made my silly face at people in Switzerland, and they laughed like a regular American."
Mydad had mentioned a news article story a month ago about some company charging a whole bunch of people $.01 each on their credit cards; presumably with the thought that no one would complain about a $.01 charge, and since they charged a million people or something, they made a bunch of money.
It seems to me that the credit card companies should simply remove those charges automatically, once the fraud is discovered, but Citibank Business (AKA worse service than Citibank Personal) didn't, and I had to call to get it removed.
Very early in the morning, we got up, had breakfast and said goodbye to Sarah (all the other Dutlers said goodbye the night before.) Janet and Stephan came to pick us up and we crammed all ourselves and stuff into the mini-minivan. They took us to the Basel airport where we spent quite some time trying to figure out our seating arrangements. The week before when Jon called, they said he'd better call within 24 hours of the flight. When he called then, they said he should have called earlier. Finally they worked out something but Jon would still have to talk to the boarding desk people in Frankfurt.
I thought I had written about this before, but I can't find it, so maybe we just talked about it over email.
We purchased health insurance through Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield when I first started working for myself. It was the same plan as we had when workingfor Dynavox, though since there wasn't a co-pay any more, it was actual cheaper for regular visits, because some things are covered at 100% and some at 90%, and the 10% is cheaper than the $20 co-pay, which I hadn't realized would happen.
We missed our intended tram for the morning, but the next one got us to church just barely in time. In fact, we met the Dutlers coming up the sidewalk. It was nice to visit Janet's church. This is, in fact, where she met Stephan. Jon told Jonathan he could go to Sunday School if he wanted to, and he did. This was his first time.
In the morning we once again took an early tram to the train station. This time we boarded the train by ourselves and rode to Bern. As soon as we got off, we were greeted by Reto, “You must be the Daleys!” Reto is a programmer that Jon met through the LifeType project. He lives in Bern and this is the first time we met him face to face.
I was in need of a break from sightseeing and catching trams and we were out of clean clothes. Jon started a wash as soon as we got up. I asked him about his eye and he said it felt fine. Praise God!
The morning got off to a slow start, but we did more packing and I believe Mom and Dad came to Richard's so we could all go together to the heart of Basel. We were originally going to see some sights and then meet Janet and Stephan for lunch, but we ended up just getting there in time for lunch. We ate at the Stöckli restaurant which is one of Janet's favorites. A bunch of us ordered these potato things, which will have to wait to be named until a commenter-in-the-know can clue me in. (Röschti) Stephan ordered raclette and let me have some, which I enjoyed much.
The Swiss prefer to drink their water with carbonation and it's hard to find bottled water without it. The tap water in most places (including the public outdoor fountains) is perfcetly drinkable but you have to ask for it. At the castle, they served us the "with gas" kind most of the time, though a few glasses managed to be "without." (This included one miracle glass for me. Jon asked the server for no gas, but did not manage to communicate that this request was for me as well, so the lady poured some into my glass and went to get a no gas bottle with which to fill Jon's. Then I took a sip and exclaimed that it was regular water. It had no hint of carbonation, which seemed to rule out the possibility that it was a leftover bit from a bottle that had been standing around for a while. So Jon rushed up to the lady with his glass to ask her to fill it with that bottle. However, his was perfectly fizzy. We have not found an explanation.)