And so it begins

Construction on the annual Julbock, the world's largest straw goat, has begun in the small city of Gävle (about 100km north of Uppsala). According to the newspaper, they Goat committee this year has opted to forego the highly successful flame-proofing used in the past two years. They say it's because the chemical caused the straw to absorb water and turn a dull brown instead of the goat's natural proud yellow coloring. I suspect it's because they secretly want the goat to burn every other year or so.

Either way, the webcam is up, as is the goat's blog (only in Swedish this year, by the look of it). You can keep an eye on the goat's progress off to the right.

I can't resist posting this charmingly unintelligible machine translation of the goat's first blog entry:

So it was finally time for a world celebrity to wake up from its summer slumber. On Friday the whole I should be place on the Palace Square in winter white Calcutta1. Follow the building via web cameras! New raiment has bock Committee cost of an old man too. Ah, the smell luscious malt indeed - straw will apparently from whiskey production in Mackmyra. And some, it is nice to regain its former glory. Unfortunately, the flame retardant (used in recent years) that I lost stinget total. Nobody likes of course, a dirt brown CHRISTMAS GOAT, which most resembles a roller cured terrier. But this year I am irresistible again with the New barley straw! Although I am not as eldsäker night, but I hope you will help me to look out for FIREBUG industries. Now is the ZOMBIES!

1 For some reason, online translators generally mistake the Swedish town of Gävle for the Indian city of Calcutta. Go figure.

Låt det snöa, låt det snöa, låt det snöa

Turns out that the snow we got on Saturday was just the start. Sunday evening saw some more, but then things really took off on Monday, and now we've got about 30 cm of the stuff. The picture above was taken Tuesday morning—I guess some people don't have their snow tires on yet. Biking to school Monday morning was dicey in parts (and I did watch a couple of people wipe out), but fortunately the majority of my route goes through the woods, so I didn't have to contend with traffic outside of a couple of blocks at each end.

Now that the snow has stopped falling for a couple of days, the maintenance crews have had a chance to catch up. Interestingly, they don't actually plow all of the snow; they pack a bunch of it down into a nice hard base that covers the sidewalks and the streets, and then they spread gravel over that. It doesn't make for a great walking surface right after they do it, but once it gets roughed up a bit it seems to be fine. There must be a tiny version of the big snow clearing equipment I've seen around town, too, because someone has gone through the forest trails and made a 45 cm wide path of packed snow down the center of each.

The forest, incidentally, is gorgeous in the snow, so much in fact that after getting home earlier than expected Tuesday I felt the need to go and walk around in the woods for a while. I didn't have too long, though: I got home at 1:45, and the sun sets now at 3.

That's all for now. Thursday we're expecting highs around 5°C, so I suppose we'll be trading in all our high albedo cover for a new round of mud; meanwhile, I intend to keep enjoying the white stuff.

Snow Day, Sort Of

We woke up this morning to our first real snowfall of the year—not a blizzard, by any means, but a decent 5 cm or so. We had planned a lazy Saturday anyway, so it was a great day for us to have some snow. What's more, by the time we got up the clouds had cleared, so everything was bright and sunny, quite the welcome change from two weeks of unbroken dismality.

It was so nice, in fact, that we decided to take a walk in the woods. This is quite an easy thing for us to do now, as our apartment is completely surrounded by forest. So early afternoon we bundled up more than was strictly necessary—last winter was, after all, lame, and we never got to wear most of our cold weather gear—and headed off into the trees. We immediately picked up a walking companion, a young orange cat from somewhere in the neighborhood. As we moved out onto the trail, he started to pick his way alongside, and wound up alternately following and leading us for our entire 45 minute walk.

There isn't really much else to tell: it was pretty, we walked, other people walked, the cat cavorted alongside. Check out the gallery for pictures of us and the cat.

Härkeberga Church and Konditori Drott

Last Sunday morning I got an email from P., a friend from work, inviting me take a little trip with her, her husband, and two boys out to Härkeberga Kyrka. A few months ago we had talked about the art of Albertus Pictor, whose images had had a strong influence on ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal." The famous image of Death playing chess is found in another church near Stockholm (Täby Kyrka), but his paintings at Härkeberga are well-preserved and quite lovely.

It snowed for the first time overnight—not too much in town, but plenty of snow was sticking to the ground as we drove through the countryside. It was a very pretty drive, with snow on the birches and spruces. Forest and farmland are interspersed, and all the barns and outbuildings are painted a very familiar red. The color is known here as "faluröd" after the town of Falun, because the copper smelters there also made a red-colored by-product, which was put to use as a weather-proofer for wooden buildings.

The church itself is very small and very old, with parts of the building dating from the 1300s. They have an old stave building out front, which may now be serving as the bell tower. The church is surrounded by graveyard with the typical gravel bed surrounded by a hedge, and even now, in the middle of the day and well past All Saint's, some grave markers have candles burning in front of them. I don't have good pictures of the paintings themselves, because it was quite dim inside, but here are links for paintings in Koret (the choir), Långhuset (the main building), and Vapenhuset (the weaponhouse, where people had to check their weapons before coming into the church proper) respectively. The Wheel of Life, the third one down in Vapenhuset, is particularly famous, and includes a porcupine.

After ambling around a church and graveyard in tempertures somewhat below freezing, P. quite reasonably declared herself in need of coffee, so off we went to the nearest town of any size, Enköping, where P. had lived before when she was a writer for the local newspaper's culture desk. We drove through town, which I duly admired for its small-town charm, and then over to the train station, by which stands P.'s old favorite cafe, Konditori Drott. The first nice thing to happen in Drott was that I managed to order my hot chocolate and wienerbröd in Swedish, and even though I have to resort to English in order to get one more pastry to take home to Joe, they kept speaking Swedish to me. They were also good natured, which is a bit of a rarity here among food-service employees. The second good experience was eating the pastry, which was absolutely delicious.

But the best thing about Drott is the decor and ambience (and I use those words ironically). P. describes Drott as being "completely devoid of any aesthetics whatsoever." Newer places that want to be retro strive for this atmosphere, but can never quite get it right. The plastic geraniums in the windows have probably been there for decades; the wall hangings are haphazard and have not changed since the 1970s; the mustard-gold vinyl of the benches lining the back wall of the smoking room (!) is probably original. Drott is unpretentious and cozy and the food is cheap and delicious, and I join P. in saying that it's my favorite cafe in Sweden.

Of course, it probably didn't hurt that by the time we got there we were freezing, starving, and caffeine deprived.

Winter Tire Day

Today was not National Winter Tire Day in Sweden. That's celebrated on December 1 every year, and it isn't so much a holiday as it is the day when all cars in Sweden are required to have winter tires. That's not to be confused with Studded Tire Day (October 1), which s the earliest you can start using studded tires for the year. What's more, I don't own a car, so I'm not likely to celebrate either of these days in any particular fashion in the coming years.

Today was, however, Winter Tire Day for me. The temperature over the last couple of days has dropped below freezing in what feels like a long term way, turning all of those muddy ruts in the forest path I take to school into frozen muddy ruts. What's more, it looks like there must have been some transitional precipitation last night, because this morning everything was covered in a sheen of ice. Tonight, the ice is covered in a light dusting of snow. In short, it's perfect bicycle weather.

How will I cope with this awkward situation? Never fear, gentle reader, for I am now prepared to face the winter. Today I am the proud owner of a pair of Hakkapeliitta W240 studded bicycle tires. As you may have guessed by the name, they're manufactured by a Finnish company. In point of fact, they're made by Nokian, and if that sounds a lot like another Finnish company, well that's because they used to be the same thing. You see, back before the dawn of the 20th century there was a little wood pulp company in Tampere, Finland, which eventually moved to a nearby village which had access to better water power, the village of Nokia. From these humble roots the mighty Nokia Corporation sprung, the most famous rubber boot manufacturer in all of Scandinavia. Oh, and they make some cell phones, too. Actually, that cell phone thing seems to have worked out pretty well for them, cause in the 90s they sold off all their rubber subsidiaries. The boot company became Suomi Rubber, and the tire factory became Nokian.

So now I feel like I have a little piece of Finnish history on my bicycle. They're pretty sweet tires, too: handmade from ecologically friendly Finnish rubber, with carbide spikes for long wear. Now I just need a good pair of crampons and an ice axe.

PHED up

We're finally starting to recover from this year's bout of Post-Halloween Eating Disorder (PHED). Most years it's all the candy that really does me in, but this year there wasn't as much of that—unless you count the night of the pumpkin carving party, for which our entire dinner consisted of candy and beer. Instead, having spent way too much money on pumpkins, this year we ate Jack-O-Lantern for the better part of a week.  Oh sure, there's always the roast pumpkin seeds, but that just wasn't going to cut it this time.

Oddly, I can't seem to find winter squash in the local stores, so the pumpkins afforded us an opportunity to make a batch of pumpkin risotto with spinach and Italian sausage, a perennial favorite that we've been missing this fall. That was so good that we made a second batch when we had G. and D. over for dinner and cards that weekend. And of course, it wasn't bad just cut into chunks and baked, although that does get boring fast.

After all that, though, we still had a whole pumpkin left, so it was on to the pies. I've never made pumpkin pie before, but I've always heard that (1) you should just use canned pumpkin because actual pumpkin isn't worth the hassle, and (2) if you're going to use pumpkin, don't use carving pumpkins, because they're too watery and tasteless. A few minutes of searching turned up a website that disagreed with the first of these assertions, so I decided to give it a try.

After baking the pumpkin, I mashed it up with a fork, put it in a colander, and then let it drain in the fridge overnight. The recipe suggested adding some additional sugar if not using pie pumpkin, but it also called for evaporated milk—an ingredient which does not appear to exist in Sweden—so I figured that my substitution of 2/3 sweetened condensed milk and 1/3 regular milk would make up for the difference in sweetness. Then I made a batch of my infamous All-Butter Pie Crust*, and soon there was delicious pumpkin pie. I made some small ones for us, took a big one to the National Dish potluck, another for Jennifer to take to work on "Cake Day" (don't worry, Devon, it wasn't an actual holiday), and then a couple more little ones for us. Lacking a blender of any sort, they were all a little chunky, but I think I like them that way.

Now the pumpkin's been gone for a week. I think I may be starting to miss the little fellows…

*The trick, it turns out, is to actually add the butter to the other ingredients, instead of cutting it up into little chunks, sticking it in the freezer for a few minutes to chill it, and then finding it again the next week. Who would have guessed?