The end of a year and the start of another

December had been unusual warm with not so much snow. I had to be away from the farm during this month and the women from Schwabia stayed at the farm, taking care of the animals. Around midwinter I returned to the farm with three others. It was nice to be back home. We arrived in the evening and brought our stuff up the hill with sledges.

Every day we were out on the close by frozen lake fishing. The ice was a decimeter thick and we used an ice drill to get through. The perches had awaken and we got plenty of fish every day.

The last day of the year we prepared an ice-hole with axes. The plan was to take a dip in there. We returned to the farm to start a big fire there we could warm our self after the dip. It was not so cold around -7 °C and a little bit windy. Later back down at the lake we prepared our self for the ice dip. I jumped into the water first and the others followed. It was freezing to run back to the farm but the fire gave a good warmth. After this we prepared the new years eve meal, it was a nice evening with storytelling in front of the candles. We saw only a few fireworks around 12 o´clock, that had been detonated in the village. Three o´clock in the night the neighbors arrived on snowmobiles. The house was crowded with people and the party lasted for awhile.

The following days we continued the work with preparing logs for the sauna. One of the man that came with me had a chainsaw license and showed me the correct way to take down trees. The days were short so we could not work outside for long, during the long evenings we made a lot of handcraft. A danish girl taught me to spin yarn and make gloves with an old technique called nålbindning in swedish. It is an old technique to make stuff from yarn that people used before knitting and crouching.

The temperature dropped to -20°C to -30°C for several days. The lowest temperature was -32°C . It was difficult to heat up the old house with the small stove , some mornings it was below zero inside. The cold made it more difficult to work and to get water from the spring we had to crack the ice. The spring only freeze when its below -20°C .

One day the chainsaw stopped working, after a while I found out that t was the spark plug that was malfunctioning. I did not have a spare one so I had to order one. Since we did not have the chainsaw to help us we had to use a big handsaw for cutting big logs (timmersvans). I had bought it in a flee market a year ago. The saw was very smoth to use I was surprised how easy it was to saw big trees.

I had to return to the city to work, but two people stayed at the farm to take care of the animals. I wished I could stay but we were far from self-sufficient and we needed money to keep developing this beutiful place. The first day after i was gone one man cutted himself seriously and had to sew the wound.