A Fig in Sweden Portland

Mmmmm ... pudding!

So, I'm not sure how else to say this ... but we have blood pudding in our refrigerator.

Ummm, yeah, I could read you the ingredients off the label, but the name pretty much says it all.

You should have seen me asking the person behind the counter at the Konsum (local grocery store) what the heck this was. I said in my broken Swedish ... "OK for min hund?"

Yes, this latest mouth-watering morsel of Swedish cuisine is for the one carnivore in our family: Tilly. We ran out of soft food for her to mix into her kibble. A Swedish coworker of mine who is into natural foods once said she mixes "blodpudding" into her dog's dish.

I figured what the heck. (Of course, when I got home I searched the Internet for an hour before I gave it to her!)

So what's the verdict?

Well, I'm nervous it's going to give Tilly the runs. Lewis is worried it's going to turn her back into a wolf. I actually haven't seen her go so nuttso over food. I think I just stumbled onto a goldmine for the dog food industry. 

Plus, it's just fun to gross Lewis out by asking if he fed Tilly her blood pudding yet.

A snow day!

I've been a little depressed that we can't seem to find a house and get settled in. All of our stuff has arrived in Sweden, but we can't get to it until we have a place to move everything into. So now we're even more impatient.

But ... today, Saturday, we woke up and it just felt like everything will come together soon. Nothing in particular happened. Just a few inches of snow came down during the day. We took Tilly for a hike to the huge lake in town. Literally we just walked out our door and found a trail to it. I can't believe I've been here 3 months and never found it before.

It was nice. We passed one person the whole time we were out. I guess it was a little over an hour to get there and back. So it was really peaceful. Tilly was in heaven, of course, but I think it was just as good for us to be out there.

Our car arrived no problem on Thursday. Lewis got to drive it first, and he was like, "It's sooo good to be in our car." It sounds like such a silly thing. But it's really our only possession that we have right now. So it felt like a little bit of home was out here with us.

Tomorrow, the home search continues ... we are driving out to the West coast to a town called Landskrona. It would mean a bit longer commute for me, but it looks like an ideal spot. I KNOW you will all want to come visit!! :)

When you are out here, you can help me de-head and de-shell the "shrimps" they sell here. Yeah, kinda freaky. The worst part is that after all that work, it's a shrimpy shrimp!!

drowning in house hunting

I haven't blogged in a while ... guess you could say my previous journal entry was getting kinda moldy.

Actually, we've had a lot of mold in our life. (clever transition, eh?)

We have been really busy searching for a house and thought we found a really nice one in our price range (pictured above). We got approved by the bank to make an offer. Then Lewis took the inspection report to his Swedish language instructor. Good thing we did. It seems the house has the potential to have a mold/mildew problem. This may not be a big deal in this part of Sweden, since it is right by the ocean and has a wet climate. In other words, maybe every home has a potential mold problem. But since we don't deal with mold in Colorado, it seemed too risky.

We are really disappointed.

The good news is that our container has made it, and we are going to pick our car up on Thursday. Woo-hoo! If it doesn't snow we're planning to take a road trip around the area this weekend to check out some towns along the ocean. More soon ....