Even though the temperatures have plummeted to minus double digits, it is blindingly sunny, with blue skies and sparkling, pure white snow. When the sun shines through the windows, it is in fact quite hot. Walking past our apartment towards the entrance, Lars-Göran looked up and spotted this:



That's Bruce working on his tan, sitting on his little shelf that Lars-Göran built for them. They get a great view of what is going on out in the street and are able to catch a few rays of light as well. It just looked so sweet from the street.

Earlier in the day, it was more like a blizzard



It was lovely to sit here and watch the flakes rain down. I never get tired of a scene like this and I imagine myself as some great arctic explorer heading out into the snowstorm. Adventures like that have always interested me and I've read a great deal about both artic and antarctic exploration. The latest book has been the wonderful The Endurance : Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition by Caroline Alexander, recounting Shackleton's heroic endeavour to cross Antarctica on foot from 1914-16. It is a stunning story of endurance and survival in an unforgiving terrain.

My love affair with extreme adventures began with this man pictured on our old $100 note - Sir Douglas Mawson. He lived in Adelaide and so we learned a great deal about him and his exploits in Antarctica. I guess I first heard about him in primary school social studies lessons and became fascinated with why people would push themselves so hard in such an alien environment. I couldn't even imagine snow and ice in sunny Adelaide and the more I read about how difficult it was to survive in these places, the more I wondered about their motivation (and sanity). One unbelievably poignant and sad documentary I saw was of the Swedish explorer Saloman Andrée's failed attempt to cross the north pole in a hot air balloon. I still get shivers down my spine thinking of the footage of that journey.

While I was searching for information about Mawson, I mentioned that he wore a balaclava and as my husband had no idea what they were, I googled an image and came up with the ultimate one, that I simply must have - the Pippi Longstocking Balaclava! Isn't it wonderful? And perfect for a cold day here and oh so very Swedish! After all, the legendary Pippi Longstocking is one of Swedish author Astrid Lindgren's best loved and famous characters. It is a sign of how seriously Swedes take their Pippi that when I jokingly suggested I could rob a bank wearing it, my horrified Swede said very seriously "I think that the small children would be very upset if you did that". Though that wasn't as funny as when I talked about it to an American friend and she was confused about how I was going to knit a baklava! I laughed for the longest time over that.

After the blizzard, the sun came out and it looked beautiful and fresh out in the street again.



The other night, a house was broken into not far from here. The owner was woken by the noise of breaking glass and phoned the police. They had an easy time catching the thief. As the snow was new and fresh, they simply followed his footprints from the house, up through the town and directly to his apartment where he was promptly arrested!

Treking around to the bays closest to the open sea, the weather closed in again with dark skies and the snow falling again for a short time. I was thinking of the photograph I posted a month ago, when we were talking about our "non-winter" and predicting an early spring and no ice. On that day, Fagerviken looked like this - quite a change from today's view:



With cold weather and more snowfall is predicted for the rest of the week, I can see that it will thicken the ice layer on the water. No sailing for the boats in the water now until spring.