September is here. But even more importantly, fall is here. And last year, something happened to me that transformed me into a fall-loving person when my favorite season has always been spring before. So I’ve been longing for fall for weeks already; I’ve been craving lit candles and full red wines and hearty stews and warming soups and evenings spent reading in front of a sparkling fire. And now that time is finally here. Yay.
But before this blog goes into full-blown autumn-mode, let’s take a look at 10 pictures from August, shall we?
In case you’ve forgotten, when we said goodbye to July, I was in the middle of a vacation from work, something that continued for two weeks into August. Vacation was great; it started out with a visit from my grandbaby, daughter, and son-in-law, and continued with evenings like these; hubby and I on the porch, listening to a great playlist, having a glass of bubbly or three.
I also repotted some of my indoor plants: these are coleus that I grew from seed that needed to be put into individual pots. I also gave the Chinese Money Plant (to the right) a bigger pot. I’ve never had a green thumb before, but apparently I do now. 😁
Our friends told us about a ramen restaurant that opened in Malmö (where we used to live before we moved to the house in the country), and if you’ve followed my blog since I lived in Malaysia you probably know that ramen is my favorite food in the whole wide world. So the hubby and I jumped into the car and drove to the restaurant to try it out. It looked good, but sadly we were disappointed. They made the ramen with chicken broth instead of that deep flavorful pork broth that has simmered for hours and hours, and that gives the dish its complexity. This was a nice enough noodle soup, but it wasn’t a real ramen.
I had such high hopes. Do I have to return to Kuala Lumpur for a decent bowl of ramen?
The last week of our vacation, we jumped into the car and drove toward our old hometown: it was time to visit our families for the first time in over a year. On the way there, we stopped by Cliff Burton’s (Metallica’s bass player) memorial stone, that sits where he tragically died in a bus crash in 1986.
On our way to visit a friend, we stopped at Granbergsdals Hytta. It’s a smelting furnace built in 1642 even if it didn’t look like this back then. Hubby and I have a soft spot for this place; back in our youth (we’re talking early nineties) we were members of an amateur theatre company, and we acted in a couple plays here in this old, lovely building. Back in 1994, I played one of the gods in The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht. Wanna see a pic? The young girl in the middle of this picture is Nell as a 22-year-old aspiring actor. 😂
(Wanna see another pic? Again, the young girl in the middle is me, but here I’m playing a tree. A rowanberry tree to be exact, in a Swedish play called The Story of a Tree.)
Let me tell you: spending an entire summer in that old building with likeminded people was awesome.
This picture is filed under Things I Never Thought I’d See. After visiting a dear friend in his new house, he said Make sure you don’t miss the camels on your way back. Hubby and I said Huh? Camels? but kept our eyes open. And sure enough, there they were. Grazing peacefully in the Swedish countryside. Let’s just say that camels are not native to Sweden, so I really hadn’t expected that.
But all things must come to an end, and that goes for vacations and summers, too. So on August 16 I had to jump on the train and go back to work. It was a drab, rainy day, as though the weather commiserated with me.
One day, we woke up to new neighbors; a herd of cows in the field next to our house. The field has been mostly empty all summer, with the exception of a girl and her horse a few times, but I’m happy about the new neighbors. They’re very curious about us and stare at us when we take out the trash, or when we…
…decide to jump into the pool one particularly sunny weekend, because who knows if this might be the last chance? Our pool isn’t heated (that’s a project for next year) and the water temperature was 19C (that’s 66F for you heathens who refuse to use the superior Celsius scale 😆). I sat by the side of the pool for the longest time, fiddling with my phone, splashing my feet in the water while considering whether I should jump in or not.
After a while, I decided that yes, I was gonna do it, so I changed into my bathing suit and literally jumped into the pool. I was gonna use the ladder, but hubby shook his head and said I’d never go through with it if I did, so I handed him my glasses and jumped. And surfaced shrieking, because holy crap that was cold. My shrieks drew the cows’ attention; they came wandering to the part of the fence where they could see my pool shenanigans, and they stood there staring at me, as though they were thinking What’s that crazy human doing? When I rushed inside to put on something warm, hubby checked on the cows only to find that they’d wandered along. The shrieking seems to be over, let’s go eat some grass instead.
Just because my vacation was over, didn’t mean everyone’s was, so one weekend we got visitors. My brother and sister-in-law came to stay for a few days and it was lovely. While they were here, we engaged in a Great Swedish Tradition: the crayfish party. My SIL brought crayfish and shrimp, and we ate it with bread and a pecorino-basil pie, drank snaps and sang silly drinking songs as tradition demands. It was lovely.
(If you’re paying attention, you’ll know that this is actually the eleventh picture, but it’s my blog and I break the rules if I want to 😁)
And on one gray, rainy day at the end of August (the 27th to be precise), we had a huge pile of firewood delivered and I declared fall season officially opened. Bring on all the autumnal things!
How was your August? Tell me something that you did in the comments!
Nell Iris 