Welcome to the real blog! Well, “real” for a certain value thereof since I don’t really know how blogs are supposed to work, but we’ll muddle along together. This post will cover the week and a half between moving off-campus back to Bainbridge and arriving in Sweden. Since I procrastinated writing this and it’s coming out two weeks late, though, look back (hopefully) soon for more on Sweden!
Finals might be over, but I still have some homework in advance of my Sweden program. Luckily, though, I have some very helpful assistants while I work on researching my assigned journal club article.
They’re definitely not distracting. Not at all. How could you say such a thing.
Along with Daisy (cat) and Jeni (dog), we had two other visitors during the week!
This is Jolene. Her person was on a trip, so Jolene stayed with us for a few days. Neither Jeni nor Daisy was ecstatic with this state of affairs…
…And this is Bean, the neighbor dog, who only visited for a couple hours because her people were away, her house was being cleaned, and she’s afraid of the cleaners. This happened to be right after Jolene had also arrived, so we spent the time taking a rather hectic three-dog walk to the coffee shop. My mom says Bean isn’t cute, which I think is blasphemy 😦
Help me prove her wrong by liking this blog post, or something. I think that’s what I’m supposed to say on blog posts. Can you even like these things? Are they subject to any sort of engagement algorithm s.t. I’m supposed to shill for engagement in the first place? I really hope not, I don’t want anyone except y’all to be able to get at this nonsense, and I think I’ve successfully hidden them behind a passcode…
ANYWAY, as you might expect, I’ve been taking full advantage of having access to a private kitchen to get some baking in before I’m shipped off back to another land of understocked and dubiously clean communal cooking spaces.
My mom did offer to absolve me of baking my own unbirthday cupcakes, but I already wanted to bake cupcakes, and I think she would have rioted if I’d tried to suggest we make three batches of cupcakes in less than two weeks…
In my defense, I didn’t make that many cupcakes; just 12 of each kind. Besides, we brought about half of them to Seattle to have one last dinner at a longtime favorite restaurant that was closing and have a little unbirthday dinner with my oldest friend before we went our separate ways for the summer, so it wasn’t like I made eight cupcakes per person in my family. More like five or six, which is an eminently reasonable number of cupcakes to eat in a week!
It wasn’t just cupcakes all week, either; I branched out plenty into other sorts of pastry.
This wasn’t something I baked, but worth mentioning nonetheless: these are khachapuri, Georgian bread boats filled with a blend of cheeses, an egg, and sometimes something else as well. The one on the far side of the table has a spiced eggplant-tomato-onion stew that paired very nicely! I’d never heard of them before, but I’m a fan now. If you’re ever in Seattle, these are from Skalka bakery on Western ave. and Spring st. just off the waterfront.
To wrap things up: if you’re not one of the people I’ve already gushed about this to, I’m working on crocheting this gorgeous starry blanket over the course of the summer:
While it might have been cool to get yarn in Sweden, I decided to buy it in the US so I could take advantage of the week before my trip—and my copious amounts of free time on planes and in airports during the trip itself—to get a start on things. Not pictured are very many trial hexagons made with different hooks and tensions and pattern modifications as I tried to figure out how to make the pattern work with thicker yarn than intended so that I could have a bigger final blanket, but here’s where I was on the real blanket by the end of my week at home. It may not look like much, but there are more annoying colour changes and fiddly bits to this particular hexagon pattern than you’d expect, so they each take awhile to crochet.
Tune back in whenever I make another post to see where I’ve gotten since this picture!
I think you’re supposed to have some sort of thematically relevant sign-off for these things, so: hej då, and see you next week (or before)!
Lyra Cromwell 
there is no mechanism by which to like posts, but Bean is absolutely cute and your mom is wrong
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