It’s been forever since last time I blogged and I have noticed that I find it harder to express myself in Swedish, so I have decided to start writing in English from now on (Hey I do live in Murica!). This will also make it easier for my American followers 🙂 We’ve had so much going on for the past six months so I just haven’t found myself eager enough to blog about everything. Niklas mom and siblings came to Tampa in the end of October, Niklas dad came to visit in November and finally my parent and my aunt spent two weeks here for Christmas 🙂 It was great seeing everyone again and I couldn’t believe that it was actually more than one year ago since last time I met my parents. Time goes by so fast and thanks to Skype you don’t actually realize how rarely you get to see each other. I can’t remember last time I was that pumped for Christmas! Luckily both Niklas and I got to take time off from work, so we got two weeks of vacation too and could really maximize the time spent together. The worst about having people visiting though is that they end up leaving. If you haven’t lived abroad or at least far away from your friends and family I think it’s hard to imagine the feeling, but I’ve felt it every time we drop someone off at the airport. That moment, you realize how big of a distance there actually is between you and the ones’ you love the most. And not knowing when you’ll be able to see them again makes it even harder. Thankfully we had already made plans to travel home to Sweden this summer, so when we dropped my parents off I kind of tried to convince myself that it’s really not going to be that long until next time. Which semi worked!

Since then we spent most of January packing up our apartment. The first weekend of February we moved to Brandon. I guess it’s a suburb to Tampa and it takes about 20-25 minutes by car to get to Down Town Tampa, which really isn’t too bad. We moved in with our neighbor George who found a really nice 4 bedroom house. So now we live in a green and calm neighbourhood with side walks everywhere, perfect for walking and running! We also have plenty of stores conveniently located. Oh and we now have ”step dog”, Otto 😉 A very energetic pointer. Our plan is to stay here and keep building our credit for a couple of months and then hopefully in the summer this year we might be able to buy our own house. Everything has taken a little bit longer then we first anticipated, but we are slowly getting there. I am currently in the process of getting my license to be able to sell life insurance and securities – which will give me a bump career wise. So for the last two weeks I have been studying full time, and I will keep on doing it for another four weeks.

I really want to keep blogging but writing recipes takes a little too long sometimes. So I might not publish as many recipes as before, but I will try to keep posting about things we do and eat – because we do eat plenty of good stuff 😉 George just invested in a new weber grill and a smoker, so there will be plenty of smoked meats in the near future! We have already smoked salmon and chicken wings. Items on the smoke list are currently ribs, brisket, burgers and jalapeños – but we keep adding stuff every other day 🙂 This post was not very food oriented but I felt like I had to ventilate a little bit about the things that have happend during these five past moths. The next one will probably be a foodie post 😉