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Archive for the ‘Home’ Category

We’ve been working at home for over 2 years now, in a little out-building that acts as both an office and a guest room.  We painted the walls soon after moving in, but it’s still not been the nicest space, either in terms of work environment or for guests.  The floor was fairly ugly old linoleum, and the room contained a big bunk bed with a double bed below and single bed above.  The top of the bunk blocked a lot of light from one window, and the double bed reduced the usable floor space in office mode.

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!

We woke up on Saturday morning to about 5cm of snow on the ground, and some more drifting down.  Sadly this lot was all gone by Sunday afternoon, but on Tuesday morning we had a fresh batch and it hasn’t stopped snowing since then!  The view is much the same though.

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

I have been rather hopeless at posting on the blog lately.  Since our darling daughter started at daycare, she has become very good at bringing home strange and unusual bugs that our poor immune systems are not used to, and so there has been a string of colds going through the house.  My most recent one turned into a sinus infection that actually had me shedding tears in misery.

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!

The snow has compacted and hardened up, so it’s a lot easier for the deer to get around the neighbourhood, and we’ve seen our locals in the garden a couple of times.  We used to have a usual gang of three, but now they’re four!

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.

Just when we thought it couldn’t snow any more … we get another 25cm overnight.

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.

We’re very excited here after the news that the Cottage in Clarkville has a new resident! And it’s not a lamb, or a chicken!

So very big congratulations to the cottage dwellers and a big “Well done!” to Mrs Clarkville, for doing one of the hardest days work you can do.

Readers who know the Clarkevillians can head over to their blog for news and photos, and leave a comment if you want to congratulate them yourselves.

We were lucky enough to spend a whole week at the cottage in Clarkville while in NZ. Mrs Clarkville was newly freed from work at the start of her maternity leave, so although we were working while there, we also got to do a few excursions, like a jaunt up and over the Port Hills.

Anneli enjoyed making friends with Toby:

We were there for the amazing honey harvest:

And we were privileged to sleep beneath the beautiful “wedding tablecloth quilt”, which I love:

Thank you Clarkevillians!

The night we got home to Sweden it was a brisk -16°C outside. Our luggage didn’t manage to catch up with us until the following day, and it contained all of our winter clothing, so we had to make a chilly dash from airport to car and then from car to house.

And it was snowy. Oh boy, it was snowy. It was a proper winter wonderland. But the best part is, it has kept snowing since then!

Here’s a bit of our front garden. In some spots, the snow comes up to my knees.

We had one day recently when the temperature soared to a tropical +2°C. Things started to melt, and the snow on the roof over our deck started to slide down over the roof edge. Then it got cold again, so it froze in place, and now we have this awning of ice hanging down:

Linus has had his work cut out for him, shovelling the path so we can get down to the carport.

The fjord has totally frozen over. We have seen plenty of people out skating, and walking their dogs on the ice.

We don’t have any skates, otherwise we’d get out there and have a go too – it’s a pretty rare occurence in this part of the country to have such solid ice on the sea. It might be another 10 or 20 years before have the chance to skate to an island!