Full Football Friday

I was out of bed and on the computer at 6:30 a.m. with a ton of work that I needed to finish in preparation for Sunday's season opener against the Basel Meanmachine at home. After finally finishing up at about 2:30, it was time to head into Thun for some shopping.

The Coop Supermarket

My guess is that they attached the much newer Coop to part of the old city wall, preservation at its finest.

One of the things that I really like about life in EuroBall is this daily trip into town to buy supplies. This ritual is due to a couple of factors.

First, since I do not have a car, I only buy the items that I can hand carry to the bus stop and back to Helvetica. A second factor is that refrigerators (frigerators in Camarillo-speak) in Europe are rather small by U.S. standards so you can not store a ton of food. I find shopping for these reasons to be invigorating as it forces me out of the house daily.

Vereha Dorder and Deborah Steiner

These ladies work at the Stadtbibliothek Thun, the town's library. They have extensive English language book and DVD sections that have provided me with lots of hours of free home entertainment since I am an official Stadtbibliothek Thun library card holder.

Today when I tried to check out two Sherlock Holmes DVDs, one with Basil Rathbone and the other with Robert Downey, Jr., with Vereha, she asked me a question in German which I did not understand at all. It turns out that she wanted to simply know if the DVDs were for return or check out.

When I meekly explained yet again my Swiss-German language deficiency, Vereha looked up at me and strongly declared, "IT'S YOU!" She then went on to explain how she follows the blog and likes many of the pictures that I post. After thanking her for her very generous blog comments, I asked how she found out about the blog in the first place.

It turns out that my Advance Public Relations Scout, Annemarie Sutter had told Vereha all about the blog. Annemarie is Tiger Defencsive Coordinator Ueli Sutter's lovely sister.

That young lady deserves a pay raise, I'll talk it over with the blog's Board of Directors..

Shouldn't I be getting tired of this view by now?

Today's shopping was approximately 95% planned and 5% impulse. The 95% was of the usual food and drink variety.

As for the other 5% today, let me just say that while some people collect bad habits, I collect . . .

Fussball Cards

I collected baseball, basketball and football cards as a youth and, no, my mother did not throw them away.

I know that it is a bit unusual for a man of my age to be doing this but I still like to occasionally purchase a pack or two of cards.

In this picture you can see the four sets that I'm working on at this moment. At the top left are UEFA Champions League cards. In the middle are a set that came free in an edition of Bravo Sport magazine. To the right are my Swiss Football League Top 200 cards.

Finally, the stamp book below holds my UEFA Euro2012 stamps.

If anybody in the greater Thun megalopolis wants to do a little card/stamp trading, let me know.

Friday Night Warm-Ups

It was our last practice before the game on Sunday and was both well attended and full of positive energy.

After the two hour practice, we adjourned to the Morris Restaurant for a little post-practice team bonding.

Good times indeed!

Car Roof Fussball Pitch?

I saw this car in the Morris' parking lot. It is live grass actually growing on this car's roof. The car had a lot of writing on it and it turns out that the car's owner also runs a garden shop.

If he can get grass to grow on a car roof, imagine what he could do for your back yard?

The Basel at Thun sports weekend starts tomorrow with the Swiss Fussball League's top team, FC Basel visiting Arena Thun for a game against FC Thun at 5:45 p.m. and I've got a ticket!

FC Basel is, as I said, in first place with a record of 15 wins-7 ties-2 losses, good for 52 team points. FC Thun is currently in fourth place with a record of 9-7-9 which equals 34 team points.

GAME ON!!!