The first fire for the season.
Autumn is definitely here now, the trees are changing colors and some trees have already lost almost all leaves, the days are a bit chilly and I started a fire in the stove for the first time this season. We have a rather persistent wind outside so I thought I might as well try to start a fire with the help of it. Normally I get a back draft the first time after summer so the entire cottage get filled with smoke and the fire alarm starts beeping loudly 🙂 Not today though and I kept the fire alive for two hours and now the cottage is hot as h… 🙂
I baked a couple of scones while I could, it would take too long to bake a bread and the heat would probably driven us out of the cottage for hours 🙂 I could of course have opened the windows and doors but it was nice to push out the last of the dampness and not letting it in again by doing so. Naturally I also put te kettle on so I could make myself a nice pot of coffee 🙂
I’ve started to move in some of my potted plants now, the week when we get our´first night with frost is almost here (next week) and I’ve placed the more hardy ones on my patio, the frost rarely reach in there beneath the roof. I’ve checked the weather forecasts but none of them show any temperatures even close to frost but they tend to miss this little village at the outskirts of the world. But then again, this year has been odd weather-wise, we had very warm summer temperatures in April and May, cold in June, really hot in July and rather cold now in August. It makes me wonder what winter will be like 🙂
This is how a photo looks when You’re trying to concentrate in a bit too dark place and Orvar walks straight in to an electric fence. The poor dog shouted like crazy and even scared a marten. It was too quick for me to get a photo of though.
It’s time to start making dinner for next week at work, I think I’ll do something easy like tomatosauce with lots of minced meat and spices in it. Too bad the fire in the stove has died out, now I must use the electric stove instead 🙂
We have lots of Field mushrooms in this area.
Have a great day!
Their season is short but they are truly nasty.
Our weather didn’t get much better than this today.
So far the day has been rather nice even though it isn’t especially warm, the sun doesn’t shine through the clouds and we’ve had a few drops of rain. It would even be too much to cal it a drizzle. I haven’t done much to be honest, walked with my dogs and napped for quite some time. It’s a quiet day, I can’t even hear any twittering from the small birds living around my cottage.
The Moose fly, or Deer fly, season has started and it seems I always bring one home with me. I truly hate them and they are truly nasty. On moose and deers they live like ticks, dropping their wings as soon as they’ve bitten their way in to their skin and it happens they bite humans too. It hurts like hell to be honest and they think they might spread the same diseases as ticks does but they’re not sure about that yet. Luckily for me they usually reject me as a food source but I had a neighbor that constantly got bitten. A deer or moose that gets bitten a lot usually start loosing a lot of fur and that can’t be a good thing.
But even if they don’t bite me they are creepy! Their legs work look hooks so they are hard to sweep away and even if You hit them hard they just laugh out loud not bothered at all. Sometimes they lose their wings too while we try to get rid of them but that doesn’t bother them since it’s natural for them to lose them when they live like tics. They usually hide in the hair and even if one showers and wash the hair they survive and I don’t know how many times I’ve woken up in the middle of the night feeling how one or two crawls around in my hair!! They haven’t existed that long in this country and they are working their way north in a pretty fast speed.
Finally they open up! I didn’t think I would get a chance to see them flower before the frost came. Too bad we have no butterflies around because I’ve heard they love these flowers.
But their season is usually short compared to other flies ( a few nights with frost and they are gone and frost comes early to this area 🙂 ) and they only fly around in the forest so the fields are moose fly free. Too bad I love walking in the forest 🙂 There are lots of mushrooms in the forest too so I think I’ll bring a basket with me tomorrow. Lots of mushroom poisoning at the moment too, no one has died so far but it’s bound to happen, it always does. The thing with mushroom poisoning, at least here in Scandinavia, is that one won’t die directly. It actually takes around ten days before one does but it always starts with food poisoning symptoms, really bad stomach and most likely stomach pain too (but to be honest, there are loads of different symptoms depending on what kind of mushroom one has been eating). After that people usually feels better but not good and after around ten days the injuries can be so bad that one won’t survive. Some mushrooms, like the white Toad stool gives no symptoms until the injuries in the body are so bad that You won’t survive. So it’s always best to be sure of what You’re picking.
Jerusalem artichoke, a perennial sunflower and a rather beautiful weed. It’s so high that I must look up to the flowers now.
This is hard to see what it is but it is a cherry tree, Prunus pumila. It doesn’t grow high but wide instead.
As You know I don’t pay extra to get more tv channels since I feel they mostly just show garbage anyway but right now I do have an extra channel that they send to everyone for free but I don’t know for how long. Yesterday they showed one of my absolute favorite tv series ever, The Vicar of Dibley. It’s a British sitcom about a female priest in the fictional town Dibley somewhere in the Oxford area I think. If You like British humor this is a must, if You don’t I feel sorry for You 🙂 🙂 🙂 Yesterdays program was the Christmas special for 2006 (unfortunately they don’t show it any longer) and I think I laughed the entire hour the program lasted 🙂 I hope I have this channel next Friday too because they’ll show the New Years episode then and it’s a following to what happened in this program. It was so fun to see this show again that I’ve decided to buy the entire series. If you ever see that they’ll send this on a channel You have and You do like British humor do watch it 🙂
This and next photo shows two Nanking cherries, Prunus tomentosa. They are very hardy (unless they are grafted) and very draught tolerant (unless they are grafted).
Balkan Mallow.
Corydalis cheilanthifolia.
It’s time for a pot of tea and something to eat I think. I might make a pie today, the weather sort of invites to it 🙂
This Maple tree always start changing colors on the same branches every year.
Have a great day!
They’ve been there since 2003 :-)
We’re having a rather perfect weather today, even though the sun mostly is behind clouds right now it has been shining a lot during the day. I think it has been around 20C (68F) and there’s a weak breeze that tried to dry up bot the ground and grass but with no bigger success. I know because I’ve just mowed the lawn and the grass was dripping wet and it clogged the lawn mower the entire time. It took twice the time to mow my lawn than it usually does but since the weather was so nice and the flies just a bit annoying I actually enjoyed doing it.
I was looking for some fish in the freezer the other day when Orvar was a bit wobbly in his stomach when I suddenly found a ziplock bag with the numbers 03-03 written on them. I had no memory of it at all so I opened it up and to my big surprise I found lots of seeds in it 🙂 I have no idea what so ever to what kind of seeds they are 🙂 I had placed them on a wet paper towel and placed them in the freezer and I’m pretty sure my intention was to pick them out after a short while. I have no idea if they still will germinate but I’ve placed them warm and light so now I only can hope for the best so that at least one seed will germinate and that I at least will know what they are 🙂
I’ll do very little for the rest of the day, that cold I have is still hanging around, not really breaking out but not really leaving me either. So I’m tired and just want to go to bed to be honest but I’ll fight it and stay up for at least a few more hours 🙂 I’m boiling rice for Orvar and it seems to take forever for it to start boiling today, the problem is that when it starts it never seems to want to stop doing it 🙂 I normally make the water start boiling, then I turn of the stove and place some thick handkerchiefs on it. The rice is ready at the same time as it should have if I’ve kept it on the stove but there’s no risk of burning it.
Just as I wrote that last word my fire alarm started to beeping loudly 🙂 🙂 🙂 It’s time to buy a new battery 🙂
Have a great day!
They always manage to trick us.
Do You remember when I got that laptop for free and they upgraded my internet connection on my mobile phone and it all would be slightly cheaper? and we all wondered how they had tricked me because they always do? Well I finally found out how 🙂 I’m not sure they themselves fully understood how smart they actually were 🙂 Yes the laptop was for free and they did upgrade my mobile phone connection but they connected my laptop internet to the connection I have in my phone making it a bit tricky to understand how much data I actually was using (since we pay for how much data we are allowed to use for a month for a certain price).
But they did also give me a new phone number which I really didn’t understand that I was supposed to get, they talk fast and one always believe one gets it all which is plain stupid since we all know we don’t 🙂 So what was that new number for, You might wonder and so did I until I paid the bill. It turns out that they most likely thought I had two mobile phones and therefore connected my laptop to my mobile phone but! they also gave me a new almost identical connection to the new laptop! This I never understood when they were talking to me on the phone. I have most likely said yes when they recorded the deal so I won’t even try to complain because it is impossible to win against these big companies.
So instead of getting a cheaper bill I’ll get a more expensive 🙂 The good thing however is that if I use too much data in my laptop I just switch the simcard to the old one I had before and take some from the mobile phone because I don’t surf the net that much with the phone 🙂 I do however on the laptop since I often post photos in my NG album and that usually takes a lot of data. We all knew they would trick me and how right we were 🙂 🙂 🙂
One can barely see the cattle in the fog.
We’re having sunny and reasonable warm days here now but foggy and oh so cold nights. It falls down to 3C (37F) at night and I think it might be even colder on the other side of my cottage because almost all tomatoes starts to become brown now. I think I’ll get a few cherry tomatoes but it looks like all big ones are destroyed now. Still, the first frost night hasn’t shown up yet but I feel it’s close now.
and suddenly the fog just rolled away even if there was no wind.
It’s time for a pot of tea and something to eat, I have only had one apple since 1 pm today and now it’s almost 7:45 pm.
Have a great day!
Soo many of them.
I love my dogs but sometimes I do wonder 🙂 They can be so smart sometimes figuring out how to open up doors and how to rob the food sack without me knowing it or to steal my socks and hide them so I can’t find them. But only one gets the poochie bells that I got from Joyce and she never needs to go outside at night 🙂 🙂 🙂 When Sune needs to go outside he runs around like crazy making quiet little sounds but in good time. Hector goes to my bed and sort of say humpf rather quietly and it is pure luck that I actually understand what’s going on when it happens during night.
Orvar, the big kind bear sits close to the kitchen door and hopes for the best 🙂 🙂 🙂 If the best doesn’t happen he looks for a place where he knows I’ll notice what he has done and goes to sleep after doing his business. Well it is easy to find no matter where he has been because of the incredible nasty smell 🙂 But suddenly I’ve noticed something, Nova comes to my bed and wakes me up, I go down to the kitchen door and let all dogs out but Nova doesn’t go outside, she goes back to bed. It turns out that when Orvar really needs to go outside but never seems to know what to do than to sit by the door, Nova wakes me up instead 🙂 She has saved me twice this week because Orvar has been a “bit” wobbly in his stomach.
And how many spiders live here?
I wonder how this started? When did she realise that it was a good idea to wake me up even if it doesn’t concern her at all? and why doesn’t she use the poochie bells? The only time those are used is when we are on our way out and Nova jumps up and hit them 🙂 Perhaps I too one day will have a dog that actually understand the greatness of those bells 🙂 🙂 🙂
Under construction.
I woke up to a world covered in thick fog but at the time we went out for a morning walk and it was light enough to get any photos it had become much less thick. At the moment we came home again it thickened again 🙂 It didn’t feel that cold to be honest because there was no wind what so ever but it was actually only 3,9C (39F). I guess it was the fog that saved us from a first frost night. It’s just around the corner to be honest, we usually get it around 6th-7th of September. Days will now turn towards warmer again though and we’ll actually see the sun again 🙂
I wonder how this web works. Is it luring any insect down the “tube” towards a sticky “carpet” web at the bottom?
It’s time for a pot of tea and something to eat before I go to bed. I hope we’ll get a foggy morning again tomorrow.
Have a great day!
And suddenly everything went black.
I was so tired when I went up this morning, it felt like I hadn’t slept at all. My nose is a bit stuffed and my throat feels a bit sour so I guess a cold is slowly taking control of my body. It didn’t help that it was pitch black outside because of heavy clouds and rainfall. I think I saw some fog too but didn’t care to be honest, all I wanted was to go back to sleep 🙂
But off to work I went and everything was working as normal and I was just waiting for material to arrive to the paintbox when the power died. It only lasted for a minute or so but I had to restart everything again. But the paintbox brain had decided to change painting program so the paint guns collided withe the material 🙂 luckily enough nothing broke, a paint gun costs around 33000 Swedish kronor, that would be around 5077 Us dollars 🙂 We started working again when we had a tiny power break again and naturally I had to restart everything again.
We did look outside and the weather was reasonable fine and no thunder what we could see or hear of. So everything went on as it should and suddenly everything went black. It turns out there was a thunderstorm rather far away from the factory after all and the lightning had hit a common wooden power pole that burned up and almost the entire county lost their power 🙂 It took them almost 40 minutes to get the power back again.
It’s amazing how one power pole can take away the power from an entire county 🙂 The lightning also hit the telephone masts that controls the mobile internet so many didn’t have any connection to the internet for a very long time 🙂 It also hit our computer system at work and they were still working on that when I went home from work this evening. The thunder never even came close to home though, I live very close to the county where my job is, just 200 meters (much the same in yards) but get my power from another place 🙂
This is never a good thing to see in the forest. It usually ,means deforestation machines will arrive later on.
It’s time for a pot of tea and something to eat and then I think I’ll have an early night.
Have a great day!
They are changing colors now.
The trees are turning yellow.
I would say that no matter what the meteorological explanation on when autumn starts says it has started here, the leafs are starting to change colors. I saw this morning how many of them are turning yellow. A bit early to be honest but I’m not sure if trees cares about that 🙂 I guess it can be because of the stress from the long draught and then this rather cold and rainy weather after that, it sure feels like autumn anyway.
So I’ve started to prepare just in case that first frost will be early too by placing lots of plants beneath a roof on my patio. The first frost usually never reach in far there the first visits. The Brazilian nicotiana with no name flowers now but they usually only smell warm evenings and since we’ve had around 10C (50F) already around 6pm here I haven’t had any chance to smell it 🙂 It will get a bit warmer and sunnier later next week they say so perhaps I’ll get a chance then.
They show a new channel for free on tv for a while now and it is the channel that show how Cesar Millan helps people with their dogs when things don’t work as they should. To be honest, some of those dog owners are pure idiots! Yesterday for instance they showed a couple that at first had one dog, for a reason I didn’t hear they got another one and that’s when the problems started. The first dog got aggressive and protective. So what does this couple do? Do they solve the problem? No they get yet another dog to even things out as they said?! 🙂 How on earth did they think that would solve anything? Thankfully this was tiny dogs, slightly bigger than Chihuahuas but still they were afraid of this aggressive one.
Lots of rose-hips this year.
The Brazilian nicotiana.
I’ve heard that Cesar Millan can be a bit too tough on dogs but from the little I’ve seen he hasn’t. On the contrary, he has been determined and consistent and always very calm. Mostly he seems to work with light touches and sounds, when it comes to dogs. He’s a bit different with the humans and is more a therapist to them than anything else. This morning they showed a dog that was afraid of the beach and ocean and how four people tried to force it to stay by pushing and carrying the poor dog, how on earth did they think that would help 🙂 🙂 🙂 If You were afraid of dark rooms and somebody forced You in to one, would You be less afraid of it after that? 🙂 🙂 🙂 It took him a day to make the dog feel safe on the beach close to the ocean.
Much nicer weather on our second walk. Lots of Rowan berries this year, at least on this tree.
Unfortunately they send these program when I’m at work during weekdays so I’m hoping they send this channel for free for at least a few weeks so I can watch it during the weekends early in the mornings. I do like to watch how he solves the problems the owners create or worsen when they get their dog/ dogs because to be honest most of those problems are created by humans that simply put their own fears in to the dogs heads.
It’s raining again after a few hours with sunshine, I’ve done the laundry and I have only the dinner making left to do today. This week it will be reindeer shaving stew, lots of mushrooms in it and some onions but no other vegetables because I forgot to buy any 🙂 I can always add them after work tomorrow. But for now I’ll be happy for a cup of tea.
Have a great day!
Some kind of Toadstool.
There are several different kinds of yellow Finger mushrooms and it’s hard to tell them apart.
False chanterelle, no danger of eating it though but it taste very little.
It feels like summer again, when the sun shines.
Foggy up on the mountain, rainy down in the valley.
It has been a rainy, damp, cloudy and chilly day until the sun suddenly shone through the clouds, then suddenly it became way to warm to wear that sweater I had when we were out walking 🙂 It feels like I can turn off the radiators tonight, it was way to early anyway to be honest but I do hate to freeze when I get up early in the morning. This nice weather won’t last for long though, we shouldn’t have it now either according to all predictions I’ve seen 🙂 More rain is on the way but it looks like we’ll get sun and slightly warmer weather from Wednesday and onwards.
The air was suddenly filled with butterflies and dragonflies when the sun showed itself and the few other flies that still are around stopped their insane interest in us as well but they have started that again and I could hear thunder from a far distance right now and the clouds are big, dark and threatening above the mountain. They don’t seem to go this way though and it’s always nice to see the lightning hit the mountain, I got a perfect view from my kitchen 🙂
They grow barley in a field close to the creek, the farmers get paid to do so because this is what the cranes will get to eat next spring.
I should have brought a basket with me when we were out walking this afternoon, mushrooms are popping up everywhere now, we barely had any last summer and autumn and now when the rain came they were so ready to grow up. Do You know that mushrooms aren’t plants nor animals? Fascinating isn’t it?! and did You know that trees grow much better when interacting with funguses? In fact some can’t even live at all without the help og funguses. The trees even allows the funguses to get inside their cells without starting to fight them off. By allowing that they both gain on it, the funguses give the trees minerals and nutrients that live so deep in the ground that the trees can’t reach them and the funguses get other things in return, I think it was different carbohydrates that the funguses can’t produce themselves.
But funguses are also the ones that finally ends the tree’s life, as soon as it gets very old and doesn’t have enough strength to fight other kinds of funguses attack and slowly break down the trees. By doing so they create homes for other animals and the nutrients that were locked in the tree returns to nature again. It’s all a circle but we humans tend to break that circle by consuming everything but give very little back to nature. Anyway, I picked almost 2 kg (around 4 pounds) of mushrooms and I’ve just fried them all. They do contain a lot of water sop I might have around half a kilo left (around a pound) but that’s not bad. I’ll freeze almost all of it so I can use it during late autumn and winter 🙂
It’s time to make a pot of coffee, I’ve already had two pot of tea and need a change 🙂 I think I’ll make myself some warm sandwiches later tonight but for now it’ll do with some vanilla quark.
Have a great day!
This is my favorite Dahlia, I love those colors. But the top one isn’t bad either but it is very big and get really heavy when filled with rain.
I just cut myself a little.
Finally Friday and I’m at home yawning in front of the computer. I’m still tired after the thunder night and our weather really doesn’t help. After a few seconds with some sunshine it turned back to grey and rainy, mostly drizzle but still it doesn’t make one especially peppy does it 🙂
My car has driven me slightly insane warning me about lightbulbs being broken here and there in my car. I don’t have any manned petrol station on my way home so I have to drive long detours to get to any place that sells car lightbulbs. I don’t like long detours so I have been putting it off for quite some time but now mornings get darker and darker so I better change before it is too late. I remember the olden cars, lots of space in the engine room and it felt sometimes as if one could crawl in to it and still have place for a sofa and a small tv 🙂 Today there’s no space at all. Some cars are so bad that they have to go to a garage to get the lightbulb changed!!
We went down to the creek for the first time this summer since I knew the water had calmed down and that it would be possible to walk there today.
I would lie if I said I had plenty of space to change the lightbulbs in my SAAB but I did manage to get my hands down and remove the bulb without injuring myself too much and to my very big surprise it was even easier to put it all back again and it worked too 🙂 I always drive to the same petrol station when I need new lightbulbs to my car, it’s almost only women working there and I can be just as stupid when it comes to cars as I actually am 🙂 There are a zillion different bulbs to choose between and some are better than others and some are better than all the others but not for the price they have. So I just walked up to the same lady I always walk up to and said Help and help I got and she didn’t make me feel as if I was the most stupid man on earth 🙂
We call this mushroom for grape finger mushroom. The yellow one is just one or perhaps two fingers but this one is full of them, like grapes if You understand how I mean. They usually get pinkish tips later on.
They have sort of repaired the old rotten bridge 🙂 It could take my weight anyway.
I still have two tiny lightbulbs to change though, I didn’t manage to pull of the plug to the parking light, I’m missing something with that plug, perhaps I should press and pull? who knows 🙂 I also need to change one bulb above the license plate on the boot cover but for that I need a screw driver so I’ll change that one this weekend. The parkinglight plug however is a mystery that most likely can be solved by a work friend 🙂 There should be some kind of standard on those things so they all looked the same in each and every car 🙂
Yes Bertil followed us and he complained all the time. Even I could feel the smell of the wild hogs.
It’s time to make a pot of tea and after that I think I’ll have a short nap, better take it on the sofa because even if I do fall asleep easy in it it still is a bit uncomfortable so I won’t sleep for too long 🙂
Have a great day!
Well, that was a surprise.
We had one of the worst thunderstorms that I can remember the night towards yesterday. It wasn’t the lightning that was worst, even though we had plenty of that too, it was the rain. But it was the rumble that woke us all up in the middle of the night and most of us couldn’t fall asleep again so we were all a bit tired at work yesterday and today too to be honest. I had two rather big trembling dogs that tried to hide behind me and two smaller that got a bit jealous when the big ones were allowed in the sofa (no dogs in my sofa normally) so they too wanted to stay there.
The sun started to shine for a short while after I had come home after work yesterday.
I can understand how Noa felt when the big flood started because it was something like that here too 🙂 I’m surprised the little road outside my home still is there and in such good condition because it wasn’t a little road that night, it was a river 🙂 I had big lakes in my garden and that’s unusual since there’s only sand beneath the grass. I went down twice in my cellar because I was sure the water would go down there but luckily it didn’t. I texted to work that I most likely would be late because there was no chance to get Orvar and Hector to the dog yard as long as the thunder continued and I wouldn’t even have tried since I know how afraid they are.
This is not a puddle, the water flows from one side of the road to the ditch on the other side 🙂
He never misses a chance to take a bath. This is not a lake, it’s the bog.
The rain was still pouring down when I drove away to work and the wiper blades on my car worked on highest speed. I passed the river Lidan and it was no longer a calm sort of sleeping river, now it roared and for once it actually looked alive 🙂 But that was nothing really. Before I enter the village where I work I must drive over a tiny creek, much the same size as the one I usually show photos of here. It had almost reached the bridge I drove on and that is around two meter (much the same in yards) higher than normal. This village is on a big area called the Vastgota plains and it is absolutely flat for miles and miles in all direction so if this little creek wood go any higher the entire village would be in trouble. It did get higher.
This is a glimpse of how it must have looked some centuries ago when this was a shallow lake.
Almost the entire village was covered in up to half a meter (the same in yards) of water just after I had reached my work place. My work place however is slightly higher than that but even there water poured in since the drains outside started to spraying up water instead of swallowing it. A rather new hotel and restaurant with a bowling alley in the basement got flooded and they think it will take at least fout´r months until the bowling ally can open again. I have no idea how the grocery store managed through this but I guess they too got flooded.
The entire neighbor factory where I paint some times was covered in 30cm (12 inches of water and they had to send home most of their employees and they were closed today so they could clean up. Almost the only place that didn’t get flooded in that factory is my paintbox 🙂 A few more drops and that too had been drowned 🙂 So what happened here in the village at the outskirts of the world? Not much thankfully but the bog now looks a bit like the lake it once was and every single little ditch now are more filled than they ever have been before 🙂 It rained quite a lot today as well but most of it fell over the bog and not here, lots in the village where I live though. Today they have even bigger problems further north, a semi big dam broke and the water filled a city close to it.
It’s time for a pot of tea and something to eat. Tomorrow’s Friday and a short working day, couldn’t be much better 🙂
Yesterday.
Today after more rain.
Have a great day!
Charlotte.
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