Apologies for the lack of activity

It looks like I am starting out my next blogging decade at a snail's pace! I have been distracted by lots of happenings back in my "real life". My time available for Swedish stuga blogging is less than I'd like right now. Full service should return in a month or two.

Ten Years of Blogging

Believe it or not, today marks the ten year anniversary of my first blog post. Over the past decade:

- I've made 1400 posts. The most viewed post was, inexplicably, about November's weather. The most searched topic is, of course, Cinderella!

- Over 355,000 different people have viewed the blog. The lovely people at Cabin Porn were my top referral site. Strangely enough, France is the home of my most avid readers.

- I've also posted nearly 2100 photos so far. A few of them are pretty good.

It's been fun to skim back through the years and see how the whole project has moved from designing, to building, and now onto living in our little house. We have made many great friends over the years, and it's no exaggeration to say that Sooz and I feel as home there as anywhere we've ever been.

So what does the next decade hold? That's a good question. Our plan is to spend our summers on Aspö when we retire. What with the grocery deliveries from Mat Hem, the pending installation of fibre broadband, the new luftpump, and our own little boat giving us freedom, such a prospect is very easy to imagine.

Retirement is not that far away, either. I'm pretty sure it will be within five years, perhaps even a bit sooner. We've thought about how long-term living at the house would be different from the way we've been using it so far. Sooz is really looking forward to our growing our own vegetables; I'll be making a few planters over the coming summers. I'm also planning a new closet as we will need more clothes available. It's easy to wear the same shirt a few days in a row when all I do is putter about the house by myself. We will have to think differently about water usage, too. Being there every day will strain our well quite a bit more than 6 weeks' worth of visits.

We always use our house in "vacation mode," too. We're always anxious to get to Aspö quickly and not leave when we are there, to maximise our time at our house. Time won't be in short supply when we move from vacation mode to retirement, so we will have to re-adjust our thinking. We'll have to think of our house more as a base from which to do things, as opposed to a destination in itself. We will also have to change our eating (and drinking) habits from vacation mode to daily living!

All of that is a bit in the future though, although it is lovely to think about spending long, lazy days watching the seasons progress through our beautiful little island.

Here's to another decade as wonderful as the first!

July's weather

It was a pretty dry month. We could definitely see the impact on the island. For example, the blueberry crop is a lot smaller than usual, and a number of the traditionally wetter parts of the island were bone dry.

There was a huge rainfall this past Friday, over an inch fell that afternoon. We could use quite a bit more, to be honest. But selfishly, we liked having a nice dry time on our holiday.

I also left in the sound meter readings from the month. It's quite obvious when we're in the house!