It’s been a busy, yet strangely relaxing weekend, and one that has gone by far too fast. Anders arrived home just in time for dinner on Friday evening, and after he had been thoroughly greeted and handed out presents and started unpacking he came into the kitchen where I was finishing up dinner preparations, took a look at the meal in progress and said, “I’ve been in China for 3 weeks and you’re making rice??”
HAHAHAA!! Oops! Karin had come home with a tale of woe about her day being ruined because they had had korv stroganoff for lunch at school and she had looked forward to it ALL WEEK as it’s one of her favorites, and JUST as it was her turn to take her food they RAN OUT OF RICE and she had to have it with MACARONI instead and WOE! WOE! So I had calmed her down with a promise to make it for dinner, never thinking about the rice thing. Hee!
Yesterday, we mostly did laundry during the day. Karin had a soccer match in the morning and then we went to a crayfish party at a friend’s new house for the evening with a huge crowd of other friends and people. We were in a tent out on the back deck and it was COLD. Much seafood was consumed and many snaps songs were sung and did I mention how cold it was? Autumn is definitely here. But as long as autumn keeps gifting us with days like this, I don’t mind at all…I just have to start dressing for it.
Today was another gorgeous gorgeous day and after I had slept in, and gotten up leisurely and fixed my breakfast, Anders said it seemed a shame to waste the day inside and couldn’t we go somewhere instead? And I agreed, and we drove to the coast and visited Ales Stenar which sits high up on a blustery cliffside overlooking the Baltic Sea and it was a perfectly perfectly beautiful day. The pictures don’t show how many people were actually wandering around up there, in and out of the stones, speaking Italian and German and Swedish. The pictures don’t show the ladybugs that were on several of the rocks. They don’t show the white butterflies that were swooping around on the cliff side or how steep the cliffs were.
Anders and the kids climbed down the cliff to the rocky beach below, where people have spelled out messages and their names with the round, water-tumbled rocks and sat on the WWII bunker in the sunshine for a bit before climbing back up. They wrote their initials in stone on the top of the bunker: a K in a circle of rocks, a big M E. I sat in the sunshine at the top, on the grassy rolling edge and looked out over the ocean. All I could see was blue. Blue sky, blue water. A seagull from above. More butterflies.
We had seafood for lunch at the fish smokery and bought some smoked salmon and mackerel to take home with us and then we drove up the coast and found a lovely fika place to sit and have delicious pastries (rhubarb pie with a huge dollop of homemade whipped cream! frosted cinnamon buns! Apple cake with vanilla sauce!) in a rose-edged garden in the sunshine.
And then we drove home through the sparkling sunshine-filled afternoon and I had a 2-hour nap. Aaaah!
(He was covered in mosquito bites from the evening before. There were millions of them and he’s a mosquito magnet.)
MMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmm pie!! The biggest piece of delicious rhubarb pie buried in heavy cream and dusted with powdered sugar.
(All photos copyright Anders Ek except the PIE X-)