Week 31 & 32 - Thunderclouds & Kangos
It rained. It poured. Lighting soared. Thunder crackled and shook our floor and all sleep was devoured.
We had our longest power outage yet at the start of the week before this one, almost half a day. The edible content contained within our freezer box container started to thaw, we saw, and so we've been eating previously frozen contents like crazy. Mostly fish. Probably an unnecesary precaution, but you never know! We've also fished, a bit.
Thunder's been around a few times, intertwined with bright light and heavy sunshine. We had short bursts of thunder and rain for two nights at the start of this week, regular spectacular unusually warm sunny summer again for a couple of days, and yesterday one more burst of devestating power-outing electricity. All in all we've probably had a double dozin power outages at least, though most of them not longer than a few minutes. Swims in the lake are a frequent routine; it seems the previously partially quenched heatwave won't be giving in anytime soon.
As far as I know the largest forest fire in modern-time Sweden is still raging in the South (we might've been better prepared for it if our prime minister hadn't sold out most of our military helicopters to the US just recently - at no profit), and despite all rainy weather the ground is dry here as well. I took a trip to the end of the lake yesterday and realized that the stream transporting lake water down to the Kalix river was all dried out, small yellow flowers already blooming amidst the dried seaweed on the stones. As far as I know it's never been dried out before, and yet the water level isn't much lower than usual. Apart from drought, the garden's flourishing, almost too much, and for the last couple of weeks we've been harvesting almost more vegetables than we can hope to eat, salad a common topic for lunch; dinner - and it looks like everything short of tomatoes, potatoes and onions will be picked and devoured way ahead of schedule. Usually most crops ripen in a steady stream throughout August, but this year a great deal of them are already done. There's so much sun.
In other news: wasps are invading the house. We usually open the windows and let them out, but this year they're coming back with a vengeance. I killed 7 yesterday, another 2 this morning, and was having a rather sleepless night until I switched rooms - one after another they ferociously buzzed into the indoor atmosphere, attacking any visible light source and potentionally anybody nearby... like me, peacefully reading the routine bedtime comics. So I eventually switched rooms and woke up 4:30 to the beep of smoke alarm batteries running out and the buzz of yet another wasp. Appearantly there have so far been 25,000 wasp remediations in Sweden, this summer, another effect of this whacky weather. All the while Southern Europe's still flooded.
We are today embarking on a short weekend (and then some) trip to Kangos with the intention of picking cloudberries, maybe blueberries too, though neither of them seem to be doing that well this year. We embark nevertheless with great hopes and ambitions; I'll be back in a week or two, to type and book a flight. Here be last two weeks.