Our kitchen woodstove, etc.

This little wood cookstove is the center of our 100+ year old swedish farm house. Wood cookstoves are common in farmhouses here. You can see the little firebox in the 2nd picture - it is about 6" x 6" x 16" - so the firewood required is much smaller than you usually see. We love this little stove! We start it up in the morning to remove the chill from the kitchen (the house is also heated by an electric boiler that heats water for the radiators under all the windows, but we have this turned on only minimally) and it is often going all day. If you set the dampers right, you can go for a max of 4 hours (if you are lucky) before the fire goes out. Usually, you must feed it every hour or so. How you set the dampers and which type of wood you burn determines the temperature of the oven and the cook top, and the rate of wood consumption. We often go for days just using the woodstove for cooking and baking, but using the oven can be tricky and it is smaller, so we may turn on the regular oven to bake larger batches of baked goods. I have only seriously burned bread once, but have undercooked it a few times. As you can see from the 3rd picture, we also hang laundry and towels near the stove to get them to dry more quickly. We have no drier here - don't know of anyone who does. People use front loading washing machines that spin the clothes quite dry, and then hang them up - usually inside. We have run into a few driers in cabins and D has one in his coat room at school. They have all been tall like a fridge with rods inside that articles can be hung from and warm air is then blown through them.

Anyway, back to the stove...it has a massive concrete surround painted white. Part of this is a concrete hood which is beautiful, but not functional at the moment - there is a piece of wood across the opening at the top. Maybe they just opened it when necessary or in the summer. There are also 2 kakelugn - ceramic tile wood stoves in the house (which we were instructed not to use) and it looks like there may have been more originally. We have one in our bedroom which was probably the parlour before we came, and there is one in one of the unheated upstairs bedroom. I'll add pictures later.

A Little Work

Both K and H worked in the bush back in BC for a number of years before becoming teachers. The fresh air and hard work are something we both enjoyed. So when the opportunity to get a little fresh air, do something useful and get some exercise presented itself nextdoor, we decided to make it a relatively regular part of our lives. Over the holidays, the boys joined us as well. D, being too young to run any machinery, enjoys tea time the most, while M just wants to run something with an engine. At first H was picking up the resulting mess of brush, but now that they have gotten so far ahead of me and the snow is falling daily, both K and H are working on this while the kids are in school.


Part way through the job, J called to enquire about selling the brush as there was so much of it (the previous owner had not kept up with it) and they had just aquired a tractor. He decided that it was worth moving up to the road side so it can be picked up and chipped. The chips are used for biofuel, I think. Anyway, we shifted our focus from cutting to moving all we had already cut and have been doing that for a few weeks now- sounds like a lot but we usually only work for about 3 hours each day, 3 or 4 days a week.

Back to Leksand for the World Jr Semifinals

This is another post from the past - just didn't seem like I could leave it out. We went back to Leksand to catch both semifinals of the World Junior Hockey Championships. The Canada-USA game was a nail-biter being decided by a shootout after 3 full periods and an overtime period.

Once again we got to hear and sing the Canadian national anthem at the end of the game. One interesting note about the shootout was that players could shoot more than once. Jonathon Toews shot a number of times and I believe ended up getting the game winner. Carey was great in net for Canada. In all fairness though, the USA probably played a better game on this day - we stole this one.

We were kicked out of the arena long enough for the staff to do a quick cleanup and for us to nip out to the car and wolf down our bag lunch and don our swedish colours, and then we headed back in for the 2nd semifinal: Sweden vs. Russia. This game was not nearly as close, but was exciting just the same. The Swedish fans were amazing, cheering almost non-stop for the entire game.

Skating on Flätsjön

I lost a few posts when I switched to a new blogger account and never replaced them, so here're some pictures from a day during the christmas holidays when we went skating with J and H Jönsson. What can I say about this unforgettable day - I think the pictures say it all. (By the way, if you click on a picture, it should enlarge.)

Lillehammer

We stopped in Lillehammar briefly on our way to Hafjell - just long enough to know we wanted to come back and see more after the skiing was done. We wandered around a bit outside the olympic museum (see pictures)and got our bearings and then went on to Hafjell to ski.

Four days later, when the skiing was done and we had cleaned and checked out of our stuga and had tracked down a few souvenirs and some Norwegian beer to sample for K's list (which was VERY expensive - yes we knew it would be which is why we brought all our supplies from Sweden in the first place).....we finally headed back to Lillehammar. We decided to drive up and check out the skijumping facility. Luckily for us, we arrived just as a training session was about to begin. You can see K and D standing beside a row of jumping skis that were waiting to be claimed as the athletes - mostly young men, but a few older men and at least one woman - headed down to the bottom to catch the lift on the other side of the hill. What followed was beyond description in a lot of ways. We spent what must have been 3 hours entranced by the whole spectacle. The magnitude of the whole thing is really not adequately transferred to you when you see it on TV, nor is the sound they make as they fly thru the air. D and H spent most of the afternoon right at the end of the ramp where they took off, watching skier after skier fly by and hearing them - the sound is really incredible. We took lots of pictures of course, but again, they don't do the real thing justice. The skier in the pink suit is at the very top and has just push off from the pole he was sitting on. Once he goes, it springs back upright (you can see two other poles to the right of him). Please note that he cannot see the slope he will land on (it is that steep). Even when he takes off at the bottom of the ramp he is on, he can't see where he will land. D and H are the little black things on the left just past the end of the ramp. D took the picture of the skier in red and blue flying thru the air. He is very proud of this shot - it was not an easy picture to get with a digital camera and his subject going 100km/hr. Eventually, cold and hunger not to mention the sight of some skiers heading in drove us to the bottom. One of the pictures here shows the view back up toward the top and the stadium around the ski jumping area. This was where the opening and closing ceremonies were held for the Olympics 13 years ago. The other picture shows M standing where the torch bearer would have lit the olympic flame.

After dragging ourselves away and having a quick snack in the car, we went down into Lillehammar and wandered the main street for a bit. We were looking for a souvenir t-shirt or something like that, but didn't find anything we wanted. Lots of beautiful things, but nothing just right, so we headed home as we began to lose the light. The pictures of the town show M mailing a postcard in front of the bus/train station. The buses pull up out front, while the trains and the main road into town go underneath. The Norwegians seem to be more willing to tunnel under than blast their way thru obstacles.

Skiing in Hafjell, Norway

We decided to take the kids out of school during vecka 5 (week 5 of the year) and go skiing for 3 days in Hafjell, Norge which is about a 3.5 hour drive from our house in Stöpafors. Here are a few pictures from the slopes. We spent mornings skiing together as a family and then spent the first 2 afternoons helping 4 year old E to start skiing on his own (Yes, Hol, J, E, and A came with us as well). By the 3rd day E was skiing on his own and the Elliots spent their last entire day skiing together. We were amazed at how developed the mountain was. There are houses in large numbers all the way up both sides of the skiing area. There is also evidence of farming all the way up - you can see some farm buildings and fruit trees in the picture above. These were about 1/4 of the way up the mountain. At the top there are some fenced areas which must be used for cattle in the summer.

You can see the man in the mountain - a figure of a man carrying the olympic torch which was cut from the forest across the valley for the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994- in one of the pictures above. There were some snow capped peaks in the distance as well, but these are not obvious in the pictures. The boys went night skiing as well, checking out a rock concert at the top of the gondola the last night we were there. H stayed at the stuga with one or two of the little boys during the evenings so Hol and J could get a chance to get out. Even the big boys could be persuaded to enjoy the DVD entertainment after a days and nights skiing - here they are watching either Pingu, Pippi Longstrump, or Emil. What a great way to learn some more Swedish, and a rare sight to see these two boys sharing anything! As a matter of fact the whole trip was, with only a few exceptions, great as far as family togetherness goes.

Here's the whole gang minus K (who's taking the picture) and Frida the dog (who's finding goodies under the table) sitting down for a meal.