i don’t really mind rain very much. it’s actually quite nice walking in the rain i think. especially now, when bob is so much in love with the neighbour’s little dachshund that he doesn’t mind getting wet, as long as he can be outdoors and hope getting to see her :) what i don’t like about rain is all the mud it creates. our road is a gravel road, which is very nice and i love it very very much, but when it has rained every day for a few weeks it gets more like a mud road than a gravel road, and you get mud up to your ankles when you try to walk on it and your feet get sucked down and you really really don’t want to fall cause you never know if you’ll get up again or if you’ll get sucked down into an unknown world. and your white dog with long white hair on his tail becomes dark grey. and your home becomes covered with dark wet mud, until it dries up and turns into pale grey sand. which is almost impossible to get rid of, cause for some reason neither the vacuum cleaner nor the mop really works on it. so, considering both the pros and cons, i think i prefer the rain to stop now.  ¶ 7:40 PM

  today i really missed having my friends here! bob and i were going on a walk in the woods, and as the sun was making one of its rare visits to nyland and it had recently been raining there was a thick, heavy smell of whatever it is that smells in warm wet forests, and suddenly i thought i could smell coffee… so i came to think how nice it would be to bring a thermos with coffee and some cinnamon buns and sit down on a dry stone on top of one of the hills and look out at the lake and the mountains and the fields. this place would be perfect for the söndagsfika (sunday coffee) me and some friends used to have! if they didn’t live 200 km away… anyway, if you feel like coming to visit, you know that you can expect wonderful coffee breaks :)   ¶ 7:38 PM

  swing

yesterday we were bored, and went on an excursion to helgum. at first it didn’t seem like a very nice excursion: the wind was stronger and colder than in nyland (not cosy at all), and even though the helgum lake was big and nice with a beautiful view, it seemed colder and angrier than our own little lake (i guess that can count as a good thing in a way, actually… before the trip to helgum i thought our lake was rather angry and dark, but compared to the helgum lake ours is quite cute).

after a while we found the school yard, with an extraordinary swing. if you ever pass helgum you really should stop there! i’ve never seen anything like it, but it was really really great. big (=enormous!), and with sort of a ”net” at the bottom, so that you could lie in it really comfortably. and it was very good at swinging too, it never stopped, so you could just lie there and look at the sky and be cosy.

unfortunately i got sea sick pretty quick… i don’t know why that is, i get sea sick really easily nowadays… both from swings and roundabouts… it’s as if the inner parts of my body are slower than the outer parts, so that my guts don’t really follow the movements of the swing or whatever i’m riding on. do guts get heavier when you get older? or maybe they get less attached to the body?
  ¶ 6:30 PM

  i like the people around here. they are really friendly (even though most of them don’t reach the kindness level of the party :) i guess that alcohol has a positive influence on these people’s friendliness). it’s nice to be ”neighbour” to people who live several kilometres away. and i like it when they hoot when they drive by, so that you look up and can see that they wave. and that they stop to talk for a while, even though you don’t even know who they are. i guess in some ways it’s easier to get to ”know” people in a small place like this… but you don’t really become part of the community very easily. i’ve talked to people who have lived here for 12 years or more, and still introduce themselves as ”newcomers”. in that way it’s probably easier in a city, i imagine, where people come and go all the time. lots of people here are like the fifth generation living in the same house, or relatives to the first people who came here, or at least they were born on the other side of the lake, or they’ve lived in stockholm for 30 years and then decided to come back. i think that all the people who say they are newcomers are people who have no “real” relation to this place… even if you come from a village only 30 km away you don’t count as a “real” nylander, it seems. i wonder if there are any exceptions… i’ll have to figure that out :)  ¶ 6:28 PM

  i'm back!

our modem hasn't been working for about a week, so i've had to be unconnected for quite some time... but now i'm back :)

nyland is in the middle of a storm right now, and has been for several days. i actually like it... it's impressive with the dark grey sky, the black angry lake, the wind that makes big treas fall to the ground and the noice it makes in the house. most birds seem to have found a place to hide, only the seagulls are brave enough to stay out in the wind.

have to go! see you :)  ¶ 12:55 PM

  spring signs the last few days:
* of course: there’s no ice left
* lots of ants
* lots of bumblebees
* we saw the first mosquito of the year at the walpurgis party
* on a walk in the woods the other day i passed through two spots of summer smell
  ¶ 12:57 PM

  this has been a very special weekend, for two reasons:
* the ice left and
* we had a walpurgis party with our village community.

the ice first:
i’ve already told you a lot about the ice, and i guess some of you might be a bit bored of it. but i promise you, thursday last week was really amazing! there was quite a big piece of ice left on the middle of the lake, maybe 800 * 600 m (or more… i’m not good at judging distances, as some of you might now…). it had started melting little by little from both sides, but more on the outlet side than on the inlet side. it all went very peacefully, with the edges just “disappearing”, no ice floes breaking lose, and even though i thought it was exciting seeing the lake grow more and more lake like every day i was a bit disappointed that there was so little “action” going on. i had expected to see the ice cracking open and making noise and move about…

but last thursday the action suddenly started! at first i saw an opening growing in the ice. i went to look several times, because i saw that the crack was growing very quickly and i wanted to go down to the bridges when the piece had detached, to see it go by and throw some stones at it. suddenly it was gone, so i took bob with me and ran down to the bridges even though i understood it couldn’t have travelled all that way in such short time. when we got back home again i saw another big crack, so i sat down to read in the window in order not to miss what happened. as soon as the ice floe had been separated from the rest of the ice it just sank. and during the day and evening pretty much all of the ice had sunk, except for some small pieces attached to land. during friday you could still see some ice floes right under the surface of the lake, but now it all seems to have melted. so now we have a real lake here in nyland!

and now the walpurgis party:
our village has a “village community” together with two other villages, and they arranges parties and pub nights now and then. we had been looking forward to walpurgis for a while, because we thought it would be fun to meet more people, and hopefully “get to know” them a bit (we have talked to people who have lived here 12 years and who apparently still are considered to be newcomers, so i guess it can be a bit difficult to be totally “accepted” by the community…) anyway, the walpurgis evening started about 17.30 in the village café (which is not a cafe, but the meeting place for the village community), with an accordion band, coffee and biscuits and people selling lottery tickets. tommy and i bought a ticket each, had a cup of coffee, said hello to some people, and went home to bob at about 19.30, to go for a walk and have something to eat. at 20.30 they started the bonfire, so we went back again to look at the fire and listen to the choir and the speech and watch the children run around with their crackers for a while. then one of our neighbours invited us home for some wine, before the pub night started.

after a nice talk and some wine we went back to the café, where the “accordionists” were still playing. we didn’t get home until about 2 (the accordions stopped playing at 24). during the evening we got to talk to lots of people, and they all seemed very nice and friendly. to show you how extremely friendly out neighbours are here in nyland i’ll make a list of a few of the things i was promised during the night (i’ve left out quite a few things, so this is just a glimps:):
* i’ve been invited to join a hunter this fall, to see what i think about it
* i’ve been offered a rooster
* we’ve been promised that we’ll get broadband to the village by may 7
* i’ve been invited to watch a turkey get killed, and maybe learn how to kill a hen if i want to
* i’ve been promised to get the tank on the car fixed in exchange for a hair cut
and we’ve been invited for several litres of coffee :)

i enjoyed myself a lot, and it was really nice to get to talk to so many neighbours. they seem nice all of them (i guess the unnice ones didn’t go to the party).
  ¶ 12:56 PM