Just like last Sunday, it was sunny today. But there is one major difference to the landscape – now it’s white! And not just a little bit. It snowed non-stop on Friday and Saturday and the result is a generous snow cover that has truly transformed the scenery. If I may complain, then it’s that it has also been quite windy so the trees are not as decorated as I would like them to be. I drove to Hudiksvall yesterday and it was snowing even more on the coast and the trees seemed a lot nicer there. But there’s no need for despair, I’m pretty sure that this was not the last snowfall of the season!

The snow cover is thick enough to get people out on their snowmobiles. When I moved here in March, I saw a lot of snowmobile tracks across the field below my house and sure enough, a couple of snowmobiles did their best to mess up that beautiful field of snow yesterday. I’m trying not to get upset about it, but I do. But I’ll try to see the positive side of snowmobiles as well, which is that during the winter when more and more snowmobiles are out and about, I will have a lot of tracks to follow so it will be interesting to see what new places there are to discover that are inaccessible to me in the summer!

Earlier I’ve mentioned that there’s a risk that the sun won’t reach my house at all in the winter, and today I got a confirmation of that. The sun doesn’t come up high enough even at noon to shine any light on this side of the valley, but I did find the sun today when I walked my usual route.

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In the past few weeks, I’ve had uninvited house guests. A mouse found its way into the walls and it’s just amazing how much noise such small creatures can make. It is impossible to sleep without earplugs when it gnaws the wood inside the wall and then there’s the psychological issue as well… always wondering if it finally gnawed its way through the wall so it’s running around the room. In a way it would’ve been good if it got into a room so I could use a mousetrap to catch it, but it kept itself inside the wall. However, there is one hole in the wall and that’s the one I made myself, so I could put a network cable through it. I used this hole to pour in rat poison with the inevitable result that the mouse bit through the cable – last Friday I suddenly lost all network connections! That meant war… since the cable was history anyway, I poured in some more poison and it seems like the mouse finally ate it because now it’s been quite quiet. When I pulled out the cable today to replace it, it was completely cut off. Now I have a steel tube through the hole with the network cable well protected inside it, and metal plates around the openings to make sure that no animal is going to come through there.

I had to move my bird feeder far away from the house in case the mouse was eating the spills. I bought an ultrasonic device which supposedly would keep rodents away, but it obviously didn’t reach inside the walls. Or it’s just otherwise totally ineffective. I put out mousetraps on the outside of the house but since I don’t know they the mouse comes in, I struck out. So my final option was the rat poison and after two weeks, it finally ate it. Now I just hope it doesn’t have any angry relatives bent on revenge…