Yesterday we stopped by Kristianstad on our way from Åhus to Växjö. We walked around the nature preserve and stopped Naturum Vattenriket Museum before heading to Max for lunch.

Today is our second day in Skåne. We headed up to Wanås Konst this morning and spent a few hours exploring the sculpture park.

Today I dropped Hoagie off at Susanna’s parents and took the train to Kristianstad to meet my dad and step-mom. We had lunch in the city and then headed to Åhus for the night. Here are some pictures from today:

I have family visiting this week. Yesterday we went to Kalmar Slott (castle). Attached are pictures from our visit. This is one of my favorite places to visit in the region. The day started cold and overcast, but the sun cam out in the afternoon.

It has been a while since I’ve updated this. Apologies to my avid reader(s). That is to say, “Sorry, Mom!”

Things are still moving along here in rainy and a bit chilly Sweden. My dad and step-mom are visiting this week which is exciting. They are staying in an Airbnb that is next door to Izzy’s school; Izzy is pretty excited about that. They’ll be doing a road trip down the coast here, starting at Kalmar and ending in Kristianstad/Åhus. I’ll be joining them for the day in Kalmar and then for a few days in Åhus.

I am planning on visiting the US next summer for a few weeks. In the meantime everyone is welcome to visit here. We can’t really host in our apartment, but my schedule is flexible, and I’d love to hang out. A great time to visit is December and January. Especially if you don’t like sunlight or warm weather.

Learning Swedish is going full force for me. I’m in SFI two nights a week and listening to various learning Swedish podcasts whenever I’m in the car. I think I’ll start trying to go to a språkcafé (language café) one night a week later this month. That will give me more practice talking. Swedish is hard, and I’ve never found learning languages easy. And I don’t think it gets easier with age. The word order can be a bit confusing for an English speaker. I sometimes feel like I’m trying to imitate Yoda; “Tomorrow go I to the store” and “Yesterday drank I not coffee.” The last one is patently not true, but you get my drift. And don’t get me started on pronunciation. How does one expect to know how to pronounce “sj”? And why is it pronounced sort of like a “wh”? What about “tj” or “gj”? And “k” is sometimes pronounced “k” and sometimes “sh.”

Anyway, SFI is interesting even if not super fun. Lots of people from various parts of the world. Currently we have students from Pakistan, Ukraine, Belgium, France, Italy, and Colombia. One of the students from Ukraine lives with her husband in Rottne, not too far from my workshop. Her husband is originally from Chile and has family living in the city. The two of them stopped by the shop for fika (coffee and pastries) the other day. It is a challenge to talk to her; she doesn’t speak English, so we have to try to communicate in Swedish which is hard. Her husband spent many years refinishing exterior doors, so he may stop by and hang out more often.

I’ve been busy. I helped Susanna’s dad, Dan, build a new outhouse down by the lake. Complete with a framed picture of the King and Queen! I’ve been building a deck (or rather an outdoor wooden floor), some fencing and other minor repairs for Susanna’s preschool. In the workshop it has been mostly repairing furniture, some for family, and some for a second-hand shop in the next town over. I do have a potential new line of work for a local window company, but we’ll see how that plays out.

The family is doing well. Izzy is back to school. Summer is fun, but by the end, it is time to get back into a routine. She seems to be thriving here. It is nice for her to just be able to walk to the store or to the city center and not need a parent to drive her. She doesn’t hate school, so that is a positive sign. She started 4th grade, which is “middle school” here in Sweden. Susanna’s job is moving along, though the commute and inconsistent hours are tough. It would be nice to have the same hours every day.

Hoagie is enjoying his time here. He doesn’t seem to mind moving from a big house with a big yard to an apartment in the city. This week he is recovering from his second surgery to remove cancerous tumors, but is pretty good about not chewing his stitches, so doesn’t need the cone of shame. The hardest part is that they removed a tumor on his back foot, so he doesn’t get as much time outside as he is used to. He gets the stitches out next week and will hopefully be back to 100% by then.

It’s been a bit over a year since my last day working for the DoD, and a bit less than a year from when I formally retired as a civil servant. A year ago next week, Susanna flew out to Sweden to start our life over here. All this churn is thanks to DOGE and Elon Musk. I don’t think it saved any money and certainly didn’t help the country become stronger. But it provided me an opportunity that seemed too good to turn down.

So how has retirement been? For the most part I think it has been good for me and the family. Though not always in the most straightforward way.

Moving to a different country has been a lot of work. And I’m still not done with everything needed for the move. It has been quite an adventure. Some of the things about the move have been harder than I expected:

Selling the house and getting rid of two decades worth of belongings was a lot harder than I expected. Of course, I didn’t get ahead of it as much as I should have and the last day before Izzy and I flew over here with Hoagie was stressful to say the least. We had to get everything moved out, which wound up with us just tossing everything into a dumpster that we didn’t want to put into storage. That and saying goodbye to everyone the morning we were heading to Boston was the most stressed I have been in a long, long time. It didn’t help that we were flying a dog overseas, and I didn’t really know what to expect from that. Checking in and customs were pretty straightforward, but I didn’t know that at the time. It was hard to find details on what to expect.

Another thing that I’ve found very hard is Swedish. Swedish is hard. I’ve never found language very easy (my French grades in high-school can attest to that), and trying to learn a new one in my 50s is even harder. One can easily get by here without knowing Swedish, but I’m a guest in their country, and I should learn the language and culture. So I struggle through SFI classes and use ChatGPT to help quiz me.

The bureaucracy here has been tough. It takes a while for things to get done. I don’t think it is any harder than the US, nor did I expect it to be easy. ChatGPT has been a great help in translating and searching websites for things. It would have been a lot harder a few years ago without that sort of automated help. It took a few months to get my personal number (i.e. Swedish Social Security Number), which allowed me to get a bank account, which allowed me to get a BankID and without a BankID there is almost nothing that a person can do here. Except spend money – I think that is easy to do in whatever country one is in.

But a lot hasn’t been as hard as I had expected.

School for Izzy was a lot better than I had expected. None of us knew what to expect putting Izzy in a public school here in Sweden. She did speak Swedish, but we didn’t really know what it would be like being a foreigner showing up in the middle of the school year. But the school is great. It helped that she had to go back into 3rd grade last year to be with her age group, so the material wasn’t difficult for her. Having her coursework in Swedish was challenging enough alone without having to learn a lot of other material. In addition, she was able to find friends. It took her a while to find people she clicked with, but she eventually did. It was really good that we came here in the fall so she had all winter and spring to make friends before the summer, and I think she is having a great summer!

Meeting people has been relatively easy. There is a stereotype that Swedes aren’t friendly. They are, but just typically mind their own business. Unlike in the US, it would be very unusual for a Swede to talk to a stranger on the street (or in a grocery store, or bar). But having a dog makes it different. About half of the dog owners will say “hi” when you pass on the street while walking your dog. And I’ve met lots of people at the dog park, some of whom I see several times a week. I don’t really speak much Swedish still, but English works most of the time. It would be a lot different if I spoke neither Swedish nor English.

I was really lucky in finding my workshop space a short drive away for a very reasonable price. I knew we had decided to find an apartment in the city, so was worried about what I would do for my own space. I could have found a place out by Susanna’s parents, but that is a 45-minute drive away. The place I found is 20 minutes and the perfect size for me now. It’ll be slightly better if I can get the room below my shop, but I’m not in a rush.

Keeping busy hasn’t been a problem. It is more challenging now that I have to fully structure every day, but there are plenty of things to do. Susanna’s preschool needed someone to help out and build and repair some of the outdoor furniture and structures, so that has given me a place to go. And getting out and working with my hands has been good for my health and soul.

Healthcare has been easier than I expected. At least it was once I got my personal number and BankID. It is pretty straightforward, even though routine things take a bit longer to schedule than it would have been back in the US. I think there are private doctors that I could use if I desired, but I’ve been pretty happy so far.

I was a bit worried about the winters here. It doesn’t get much colder than back in the US, but it is a lot darker. We came for Christmas in 2024 and I wasn’t prepared for how short the days were. But we moved here in the fall, so the short days creep up on you. I was also pretty busy, and hiking around in the winter here is beautiful. Plus Hoagie prefers hikes in the cold to the heat. However, by the end of February I was ready for spring. And the summers here make up for the winters!

I do miss my friends and family back in the US. I was glad I got to see most everyone in December before I fully moved here. I know Izzy misses her friends back in the US a lot, and was very angry about the move for a while. But she has been resilient and is good at making friends. The city is small enough that we give her a lot of freedom to explore the city with her friends. She will ride her bike into centrum or to the lake. The kommun offered very inexpensive bus passes for the summer for students, so she has been fully using the buses when it is too far to bike. With the sun setting late (9pm or later), we haven’t really had to worry about her wandering the city after dark, though we will have to eventually cross that bridge as the days get shorter.

I’ve been spending a few days a week building stuff for the Norlandia preschool in Hovmantorp. My tools have been sliding around in the back of my car, or have been stuffed into some plastic buckets which tend to tip over. So, I decided to make a few toolboxes. There is a stack of 2-foot long boards in the workshop left over from when the factory built furniture for IKEA, and the landlord has said that I am welcome to use them.

As part of my woodworking journey, I’ve been trying to do some hand-tool warmups weekly in the shop. I decided that I would dovetail the bottom to the end boards to make it a little stronger. The sides are screwed to the bottom and end boards using some old brass plated screws that I also found in the shop. They work much better than the buckets, though I probably need a third toolbox….

I’m making progress on the chicken coop. It has been slower going than I had hoped. The weather hasn’t always been the best to work outside in, and then over the past two weeks a stomach bug has gone through the house. But today I was able to get there for a few hours to make progress.