"I beg you, friend, be happy. I have the vague sense that on your capacity to be happy hangs our only hope."

People often ask me how I feel about Hobart.  How I feel about Stockholm.  Where is home?

Well, due to the amount of easy cliché sayings involving "home" that come to mind. I think that this is a very common question.  I, alas, do not have an answer.

 Our house in Hobart is a home.  We have invested into the maintenance and garden in ways that an apartment, especially a socially run Swedish apartment does not need.  I would say we have done a fair job of cluttering up the Swedish apartment, it is no match for the remnants of forty-five years worth of slogging stuff from place to place.  Stockholm feels like a vacation because we have so many friends there, and so much to do.  Hobart feels like home, but we are still quite insular in the sense that we don't engage with our community at large.  We are trying to work on that.  Our neighbor and house protector Sue left us a vase of daffodils to prove that spring is definitely coming on.

Tomorrow we will have been back here in Hobart for two weeks.  Zok played a lot of Croquet matches already, and now has a rather large trophy in his office.

I have started Yoga classes at a newish place by the waterfront.  Mostly we have been gardening and organizing the house.  Being gone for months at a time does impact the kitchen. 

I haven't studied Swedish, or gone swimming.  I haven't caught up on my issues of 'The New Yorker'.  

I did start the latest Ian McEwan book.

I have planted many seeds both flowers and vegetable.

I started to 'grow' a vinegar 'mother'- from a bottle of wine we opened and didn't like.

I am waging a serious battle against 'onion weed'.  I have given in and I am just digging out heaps with a fair bit of dirt as well.   They have to be bagged up, sealed up, left to smother in the sun and then they still have to be put into the garbage aka the "deep" landfill not into compost of any kind.

I caught the very last of the Magnolia blooms.  The Lilac tree looks months away from blooming, but the Swedish ones can come on quite late in spring so I am not worried yet.  My newest tree which I call a 'snowball tree' because of its blooms is thriving since Zok had the large tree nearby taken down.

The Clivia, (large orange flowers) that I divided all bloomed which I think is amazing, because seriously, I had to hack it out of the ground.  We added a second bird bath, onto the stumps of the tree that was taken down.  The single bird bath used to be at the corner of the house, on the old apple tree stump- however when the brick work was done they moved the tree stump (?!) too far back, so we are going to just pull it out.  We only left it there because we used to be able to see the flock of new holland honey eaters bath there in the evenings, which is hilarious, and really counts as entertainment.

However, birds do not seem to be attracted to the new location yet, so we might need to move them again, as the space might be too open.

Each day we find ourselves exhausted by our efforts and feeling as if we are farmers. (Ha!)