All decked out!

When we returned from Iceland, the new front veranda was finished, and we just love it. To paraphrase Mark Twain: 'A veranda with a house attached'. Oh, for an Icelandic Sky, though!

It is the rainiest summer since the summer we bought this cottage. That was also the year when hubby's Swedish vocabulary was extended. He had not realized that the address to our new little place was Kärra and that in Swedish it literally means swamp. And a swamp was what we had that year, with the back half of the property completely awash thanks to the rain and overflow from the far-from-bubbling brook at the back. Hubby's Swedish is actually quite good, but sometimes we come across these little difficulties!

For some strange reason this reminds me of another incident. It must be the photos I was looking at from today's outing. There was this beautiful stone wall, of which we have so many in the Swedish countryside.

Well, anyhow, when we lived in France hubby had a workmate who over the years had collected rocks on his mountain walks. He was intending to build a stone wall, but he was not in a hurry, far from it; he was a scientist for goodness sake!  He was actually enjoying the collecting and planning more than eventually building it. This had been going for years.  But he had a neighbour!  It was an Italian neighbour and we have noticed that very often Italians seem to like building things in cement or at least that was the case with this man.  He was a stonemason by trade and had made his own Olympic-size swimming pool and other constructions.

One day when hubby's mate went away for a long week end, he came back and his "stone wall" i.e. where he had placed the stones carefully, one by one,  every time he came home with a new one, was covered in cement. Voila, the wall was done! By a happy and friendly neighbour who was thinking he was doing a good deed!  Probably because he couldn't stand this excruciating slow way of building a stone wall when it really was so simple! He probably wanted to give the poor chap a hand, since he had the know-how of construction.