Catherine and Eva went to the local garden shop Plantagen and picked out a wide variety of herbs and flowers. On their way back they picked me up as there was also some good manual labour that needed attending to. While Catherine and Eva created attractive planter boxes, baskets and pots and Anders spread some wood stain on their huge new deck I moved a bunch of big rocks into an attractive rock wall (aka pile) on the outside of the yard.  It was fun to do some manual labour again and it was right up my alley as I’ve been moving large rocks since I was young. The glaciers that covered Sweden during the ice ages really spread an incredible amount of medium to large rocks all over the landscape so there was no trouble finding specimens for the wall. We worked for a couple of hours and then Eva fed us a great dinner out on the deck in the sunshine.
Due to our highly packed social schedule we needed to run pretty much right after dinner. Jennie (Canadian working at CBF) had invited us over last minute to a little surprise celebration for her husband Richard’s upcoming birthday. Jennie and Richard made an awesome cake based on a recipe that Richard’s mom normally makes for his birthdays back in Canada. It was a layer cake with a special Swedish addition of a lingon berry layer. It was topped with what they called a German butter cream which I have never heard of but tasted great. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the cake and went back for seconds thus requiring an early bed time so as to not sleep in for Sunday morning run at Hemlingby…