Apologies for the blog silence – my mind has been a little occupied the last few weeks.  As of today we are the very proud owners of this beautiful house.  The next few weeks will be a flurry of painting, floor sanding, and moving.  Hopefully I’ll have time to write some updates now & then.

First, you need a lumberjack.

Lumberjack lurks beneath the cherry tree

Then it’s just a matter of …

Down ...

... she ...

... goes!

Then you send in the pickers.

Lumberjack of all trades

Little picker

It’s a bit of a shame to lose the largest of our cherry trees. But the lowest branches were so high, it was impossible to get any fruit from it, so only the birds were getting any benefit.

To answer Kathleen’s comment:

“and then did you pit them all?!”

we pitted a lot of them, by a variety of methods.  Some were cooked and then mushed through a grid (for jam), some were cooked for wine making, some were pitted by hand and made into pies.   We have thirtysomething jars of jam downstairs, some dried cherries going into our muesli, some fruit leather, some cordial, and some cherry wine that is getting very promising.

This year we decided it was worth investing a little bit of time and money to make this a nicer space both for ourselves and our guests.  The new daybed can be used as a single or a double bed, and has big drawers for storing bedding.  We also bought some secondhand good quality desk chairs – previously we were working on old kitchen chairs!

I really should have taken some “before” photos, but to be honest I was a little embarassed about just how unpretty it was!  So here are just the “after” photos, and anyone who has stayed with us will be able to really appreciate the transformation.

We’ve had such lovely spring weather lately, I’ve been thinking that summer was just around the corner… And now look what we’ve got! More freaking snow!

Looks beautiful, but it makes it hard to convince Anneli that we should get in the car and go grocery shopping …

Happily, we are all healthy again now.  I thought I would post some photos from last month that haven’t previously had their public debut.

Back in the spring, everything started to green up and then the ground burst out into a sea of these little white flowers – vitsippor in Swedish.  This bit of forest is on our daily “commute” to daycare.  In the winter it was impassable, but in the spring it became the highlight of the day.

A local forest patch

Anneli enjoys the forest view on her way home

We had our own cherry blossom festival here:

And then we had a storm, after which they looked like this:

We had some stunning weather in May.  After a brief heat wave:

Richard arrived for a visit, and it turned back to average springtime.  But it was still nice enough for a picnic down on the beach.

And we took our guest to Universeum in Gothenburg, where we saw pointy pink birds and fluffy black monkeys.

I had one lonely tulip blooming in the tulip patch:

Most of its friends were nibbled to death by the deer:

Lonely tulip did eventually get some friends who also bloomed, but it was far from being the tulip patch of my dreams.

That pretty much sums it up for May 2010.  We did a lot of digging in the garden, but I don’t have particularly interesting photos to show for it.  Stay tuned though because the vegetable patch is starting to produce the goods!

Our local gang of hooligans

The weather has  been warmer, with positive temperatures quite a few days in the last week.  On Saturday it was really warm in the sunshine, so we sat outside for our morning tea.  Anneli had one of her favourites, cottage cheese with orange chunks.

Anneli enjoys her morning tea

I’m still working on getting the new blog up to date, in particular getting my photo gallery in place and getting the photographs back into my older blog posts, which is a bit of a tedious job.  It’s all coming along though, thank you for your patience!

One evening last week, we could see an owl in the trees behind the house. It was pretty dark though, and it was on the wrong side of the trees, so there was no photo opportunity. I was still quite excited since I’d never seen an owl in the wild before.

Imagine my delight when I took some dishes into the kitchen this afternoon and saw not one but TWO owls having a nap right outside our kitchen window.

Of course I ran for the camera. I had to open the door to get any decent photos, which woke the little fellas up. They looked at me with big round eyes for a bit, and then one of them flew away. The other one is still snoozing in the tree.

Click here to see a few more photos.

I was getting worried about the roof above the deck, which had a very thick layer and was starting to look decidedly curved. So Linus got up on a ladder and knocked off a lot of snow.

We’ve also been growing some impressive icicles. This is our prize winner, which is currently just over 140cm long. There is an ice staligtite growing upwards towards it from the deck, so we’re hoping they will meet in the middle.