Dinner with friends

Tomorrow we'll have friends for dinner at home. Don't know what to prepare yet. We're going to discuss/plan a "cottage weekend". We want to rent a small house for a weekend and just leave town and hang out together, cook good food and drink good wine.

Puhhhh

What a week! It has been a tough week, lots of work and extra activities. On Wednesday Core Bosu at Friskis&Svettis. This kind of excercise suits my body soooo well. It is regular Core but on top of a half Pilates ball.

Yesterday I went to a Wine Tasting organized by a collegue at my work (http://www.guide.se/). Elisabeth (that's her name) and her husband Robban held a wine tasting of Austrian red wine. We tried grapes we never heard of before: St Laurent, Zweigelt, Blaufränkisch. They also had a lottery and I won one bottle of MAWE06 (St Laurent and Zweigelt) from Wendelin vineyard. One of the wines that we tasted, Prophet, was a mix of Zweigelt, Shiraz and Merlot. Oh I do so not like merlot. This was the "finest" one among the six wines that we tasted but I did not like it. First of all the fragrance reminded me strongly of roasted coffee beans. Yummy you say but it did not appeal to me. However that fragrance disappeared after half an hour. Elisabeth and Robban imports wine and soon their web site "bonum vinum" will be available.

More improvements at home

I have finally finished these cushions that I started to work on two or three months ago. I found myself with two obstacles when making them. Firstly, I had never tried quilting before and secondly, I had bought too short zippers. But here they are:

Looking good?
The front

The back

Improvements at home

Today we have made some longed-for improvements. We have put up two new shelfs in the walk-in-closet and four wall shelfs "stripa" from IKEA. We saved a gap between the two upper wall shelfs to add a fifth one.

Now it is a pleasure to enter the closet and you can actually find something

We still need to develop some photos for all picture frames (a mix of new ones and second hand purchase). See the gladiolus in the right corner?

MBT - Masai Barefoot Technology

I have used my first MBT's for a week now. I'm very pleased with them. They are supposed to do much good, such as: "activates neglected muscles, improves posture and gait, tones and shapes the body, can help with back, hip, leg and foot problems, can help with joint, muscle, ligament and tendon injuries, reduces stress on knee and hip joints." (www.swissmasaius.com). I'll come back after a month and two to let you know if they have made wonders or not.

The ugliest shoes I've ever bought?

SPA weekend at Smögen

This weekend we've been at Smögen Havsbad, a SPA 1.5 hour from Gothenburg.

It has been wonderful. Paco had a back massage and I enjoyed a body scrub. It was so lovely to sit by the pool with a wonderful view of the rocks of the west coast. Paco taught me how to play chess. Well, he started to teach me, I guess I have a long journey before I'll bet him in chess.

After treatments, chess and jacuzzi we enjoyed a delicious dinner:

Starter - gravlax with sea buckthorn

Main Course -Nubb (a kind of cod) with potato and vegetable purée

Dessert - Raspberry mousse with lime chocolate

To help the body to digest the food we went for a walk in Smögen (by night). Uhhh so scary. It was a autumn storm and very dark. I just thought about the Swedish detective novels written by Läckberg that take place not long from Smögen. I was glad to sit down in my arm chair at the hotel playing a second round of chess.

Today after breakfast we went for a walk on the cliffs and streets of Smögen:

The green building and the brown roof is the hotel complex.

My first pair of (knitted) socks

Puh, so they are finally done; my first pair of socks, KNITTED!!! I gave them to Pakko-Raffa but I think he has hidden them in the closet?!?!?

My next project is a crochet poncho.