So I guess there won’t be a flood, despite what must surely be close to forty days and forty nights of rain.

I’d been looking forward to this afternoon for over a week because today was the day that Helena was coming to visit. It had been over a month since we last got together so a few hours of girl talk was long overdue. I always have the best time when we’re together and the hours just fly by — I wasn’t ready for her to leave when it came time for her to go catch her bus. We had a lot of fun catching each other up on all the latest news and swapping stories, and Tage provided a fair amount of entertainment by spending a good half-hour eating butter straight from the tub.

Near the end of her visit, we went out to the garage to see the doors that Olof and his dad had brought from storage to use for Lydia’s new room, and we took Helena on the grand tour. It’s a pretty big garage/outbuilding and there’s all sorts of neat stuff hidden in its nooks and crannies. Today’s cool find was this painting, which Helena and I loved and Olof hated. Against his protests, I hanged it up in the big room where we’ll be having our new living room: