Hey,
It has been a quiet week here in Sweden. The weather this week was influenced by Hurricane Katia. On Monday and Tuesday we had horrible winds and the whole week it has been raining off and on. So far today the sky is clear and the sun is shining brightly! I guess I never thought that living in Sweden our weather would be influenced by hurricanes. I thought I had left that when I moved away from Houston. Not to worry, no one here gets uptight about the weather, it is just weather and life goes on. Yes, it is hard for me, I still am not used to not doing things because of the weather, I prefer to hunker down.
One of the nice things to watch here in Sweden are the families riding their bikes to work and school. Our house is right next to a bike path and in the mornings while we are eating breakfast, we see parents and children riding their bikes off to school and work. You see young babies on the back of their parent's bike, while the 3 or 4 year olds and up are riding their own bikes. In the afternoon, you see them all going home. I did not realize what a interesting parade we would see every day! Our kitchen table looks right out onto the street, so you cannot help but watch everyone come by. Sometimes after lunch, I see teachers and their students riding back from an outing. Yesterday I think I saw a whole school walk by. I do not think they have school buses around here to take the kids to field trips and such, they just walk or ride their bikes. Perahps if they are going farther, they take the train, I do not know.
I think in one of my earlier blogs, I talked about that we really do not have brooms and we vacuum the whole house. Well, I wanted to tell you about how I do laundry here. Yes, I have a washing machine in the house, but I do not have a dryer. I have an extractor. What is an extractor you ask? Well, it looks like a dryer, but it extracts the moisture from the clothing, towels, sheets, etc., but it does not exactly dry the clothes. On nice days, you can wash your clothes and hang them outside on the clothesline to dry, which is very nice and I think about my Grandmother and Mom doing that when I was a kid. Yes, I am old enough to remember when we did not have a clothes dryer at our house. Otherwise, you can use the extractor and then hang the clothes to finish drying in the laundry room. I admit, I have only hung clothes out twice. I am always afraid that it is going to rain and get the clothes all wet again. The other reason that I have only hung clothes out twice is because the landlord has the clothesline right next to the woods and I get eaten by the mosquitoes! David is going to move it for me this weekend, so I will not have to fight off the mosquitoes!
Another item that I have found interesting is that there is not a proliferation of canned goods at the store. Yes, you can buy canned items, but they do not come in "cans". Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of beer cans! Things like tomatoes paste comes in a bottles or the tomato sauce comes in packaging like the juice boxes come in. Sweden is very conscientous when it comes to recycling and we have recycling centers all over Almhult. Most neighborhoods have their own recycling stations. Our trash only gets picked up every two weeks and we have very small cans. They are perhaps 1/3 the size of the trash cans in the city of Houston. We are able to recycle much of our trash and what cannot be recycled is put into the trash. I do not have a garbage disposal, so any type of organic waste can be put into my composter, which is located near the shed. I think it is pretty cool to see how much can be recycled and how much the community, retailers, and corporations encourage it. I feel that I fit in because I have been recycling for at least 20 years now.
I think that is about it for now, I hope that you all have a very nice weekend. I will try to come up with some more interesting material for next week. Happy Weekend!
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