Flashback Friday

    Summers in Madison are hot, I mean hot for being a northern girl. A girl who spent the last six summers in the field in Alaska. There was a reason for us to buy that air conditioner to put in the bedroom as soon as I arrived in Madison. Before I moved to Madison I looked up different diseases and alike that cats could acquire in Madison during the summertime. Bot fly came up, and surely I told W about this, but he insisted that this was something that would not ever happen. Well, it did. Tycho got really sick and he eventually threw up a bot fly larvae, and that is when I called the vet. She said he was lucky to be alive. Poor Tycho, my little kitty cat. Other than that the summer was pretty calm, once W got back from Yellowstone we started to venture out on both long and short hikes around Madison. The best thing that happened was probably that I got a job!

July

    W went to Yellowstone so I tried to explore most of my immediate surroundings by myself. I realized pretty early that I had no clothes suitable for hot summer weather, but after a trip to the local thrift store I had updated my closet to a more "summery" closet. In some way July was the worst month for me, I was trying to find a job, W was gone and it was hot. And then by the end of the month Tycho got the bot fly larvae. But everything turned out great anyway. Both W and I have July birthdays but we haven't celebrated them together the last couple of years, which is kind of sad. Maybe next year? Oh wait, probably not. I did a lot of gardening and also went to the local farmers market to get cucumbers so I could make Swedish pickles. 

August

    More hot summer days, and ice cream. Did you know that Alaska has in the past been the no.1 consumer of ice cream per capita in the US? I don't think this is true anymore, but either way, I love ice cream. I can't say that I eat more ice cream here compared to Alaska, but I definitely had some days by the ice cream shop. W's mom and aunt also came to visit, we did what I like to call the tour of the midwest, well a light version. We went to Minneapolis to meet up with them, also because W's brother studies there. We went by the Swedish institute and Ikea of course, gotta love Ikea, well, gotta love Ikea bed sets, cause I at least haven't found that quality for that price anywhere else. After that all of us went to Madison for a few days. There are no mountains here, so I do the best of the situation, practicing macro shots and finding new avenues in my photography. 

September

    September came, with more hiking, and helping W out with his experiment. We did quite a bit of exploring outside Madison, and found several nice places to hike. We also went to La Crosse, for a biking and camping trip. W met up with his brother to go road biking and I went on my own little tour. It was still hot of course, but you could start to see signs of fall. We went on a beautiful hike at a place that I like to call the fairytale forest, because it really did look like a fairytale forest. We camped that night and of course ate s'mores. Have you ever added a slice of banana to your s'more? Well, just do it! After that we went on another trail which is an old railroad, and goes through several sets of tunnels.  Even though my garden wasn't that successful in 2016 we did harvest quite a bit from it during the course of the summer. In september the harvesting kind of trickled down but the garden was still producing! At the end of the month we traveled to Colorado, colorful Colorado as they say, for a wedding. We of course encountered our first snow for the season there. 

    Did you do anything interesting late summer early fall?