Chasing the Rainbow

Last night when I looked out of my living room window, around 19:40, the sky to the south-west had strange colour - and when I stepped out on the balcony for a closer look, to the east I could also see part of an impressive rainbow (and even a double one).

The first photo taken with my phone, 
the second one with my Sony camera shortly after.

As I could only see part of the rainbow from my balcony, I decided to go outside to check if I could see more. 

Alas I found that the high fence around the old football field (about to turned into a park and just now partly dug up)  didn't make it easy to take photos from the ground either...

But by walking a bit further to the left, and finding a wider hole in the fence, I managed to get a wider view - but still couldn't fit the whole rainbow into the same photo. 

But at the cloud-free other end of the wide bow, the sky was blue!

Back up on my balcony a while later, looking west rather than east, with the evening sun hitting the clouds in the sky, it was a strange (and even somewhat ominous) shade of glowing pinkish orange:

 Linking to Skywatch Friday 

Textile Art Exhibitions

Sunday 30th August turned out rainy, so we (my brother and I) decided to abandon the idea of another excursion into the countryside, and instead visited the Art Museum and the Textile Museum in town; which were both still showing exhibitions of textile art connected to the past summer's Art Biennial. (I did not get round to visiting either museum on my own during the summer.) To further enhance the holiday feeling we also had lunch at the restaurant in the same building as the Art Museum.

Kulturhuset = Cultural Centre; with art museum, library, theatre and café
(My own photo from July 2024)

  

 

From our table in the restaurant/café we could look out on the nearby Gustav Adolf Church from 1906. (The yellow tables are outdoors, and you can see why we preferred to stay indoors on this day...)

Me sitting in the grand foyer in between café (left), library (behind you), theatre (right) and art museum (entrance in the background).

 

 

Don't ask me what the textile "work of art" behind me is supposed to symbolise - I have no idea!  

 

 On the upper floor, a selection of objects from the museum's own collections are on display. This sculpture was one I could not recall having seen before: A tiled stove lying down - and serving as tunnel for a small car with lights lit. (Again, I have no answer to "why"... The best I can come up with is something to do with climate - but if you have a better suggestion, feel free to share!)

 

(My own photo from August 2021)

 From the Art Museum we went on to the Textile Museum, incorporated in the Textile Fashion Center, together with schools and businesses related to textile industry as well.

 

The official poster for the art biennial

 

 

 

From the big exhibition hall at the Textile Museum

Somehow I managed to forget to bring my phone with me on that day. The colour photos above were  taken by my brother; while the two black&white ones are my own, from the past. (Edited to b&w to tune in with the grey weather we were having now.) 

PS. In three of the photos I'm wearing the green rain jacket that I bought the same weekend. 

Antiques for Weekend Street/Reflections

After our visit to the glass museum at Limmared last Saturday, we also went for a little stroll to have a peek in the windows of some antiques/second hand shops nearby. We kept strictly to "window shopping" and did not really step inside any of them... But when looking at some of my photos afterwards, it's a challenge in itself to sort out what's supposed to be inside vs outside!! :)

 

With this one it may even be hard to guess what that "thing" is supposed to be in the foreground... It's actually an old "double-sided" rocking horse (with the seat in the middle).

 These animals are easier to identify, but I have no idea where or when they were made.

 One  or two shops had put some big stuff out on the street as well - like rusty coat hanger stands...

 Linking to Weekend Street/Reflections

 

A Visit to Limmared Glassworks

The photo above was copied from a brochure about the village Limmared, about 30 min drive from Borås. It's famous primarily for its glassworks (Swedish: glasbruk), founded in 1740, and still running. Internationally it may be best known as the manufacturer of the Absolut Vodka bottle - which visitors are now reminded of with the entrance to the museum "House of Glass" (Glasets Hus) being designed to resemble that shape.  

At the museum you can watch glassblowers at work, look at examples of their production through the centuries, and buy more recently made glass souvenirs. They also have a café where you can have lunch. In the village there are also several antique and second hand shops, selling both glassware and other things.

- - - 

My brother drove down here from Karlstad on Thursday last week (27 August). On Friday we had lunch at the restaurant in the park in the city centre, and after that drove "across town" to a big shopping mall for a few errands. Primarily I needed a new rain jacket; and managed to find one. (It will probably appear in a later post, with me wearing it.) But I also happened to find another item on my wish list - a new winter jacket/coat (fairly long, but not quite reaching my knees). I was glad to also get that rather bulky purchase done while I had the company of a chauffeur/carrier! ;) 

"On the road again" - driving to Limmared, 29 August 2026

Saturday the 29th was my 71s birthday; and to celebrate that we drove to Limmared to revisit The House of Glass. We've been there together once before, but that was several years ago now. (Neither of us could recall exactly when. I thought it might even have been back in Before Blogging times - but a search now informs me that it was in 2013.) 

When we arrived, we had a look around in the museum first, then had lunch in their cafeteria, and after that explored the museum a bit more, plus got to watch a professional glassblower giving a "lesson" in that noble art to another visitor (who had pre-booked and no doubt paid extra for that experience). 

I took quite a lot of photos, and might save some for "later", but here is a selection:

Model of the village in the past. The glassworks is the building with the tall chimney.

 

Various old items from the past

 

 

 

These may look like ceramics, but they are actually painted glassware.

Here you can see the "ghosts" of my brother and me reflected... ;)

 

Old tools

 

 

▲ Items for sale ▼

I bought the dark blue bird as souvenir and birthday present for myself. 
Back home, it got to join an inherited blue glass bird on the window sill in my bedroom:

 

September Calendar Photo

 

My calendar photo for September 2026 is this one (above), from Linköping Old Town, in August 2025.

This year, my brother and I didn't go on any longer road trip; but we still spent a few days together at the end of August, and made a couple of "outings" from here. He went back home yesterday. I'll be sharing some photos in a couple of separate posts to follow. 

August this year ended with rather "mixed" weather, and September has started much the same way. /(Neither "hot" nor "cold" - and not raining all the time, but showers on and off.)

Skywatch Friday

23/08/2026

I'll be taking "Time Off" from blogging for a few days as I have my brother visiting over the weekend - but I'm throwing in this sunset photo from earlier in the week for Skywatch Friday. :)

Old Friends Revisiting

 

In July 2024, I wrote a post entitled Old Friends, or "How Terribly Strange to Be Seventy" * - about a brief visit then from friends of mine (a married couple) from Karlstad (where I lived back in my 20s), whom I then hadn't seen IRL for 38 years. This past weekend they happened to be visiting Borås again - this time to attend a big national family history research society event, at which one of their daughters was one of the speakers. 

M informed me of this in good time, and expressed hopes of us being able to meet up for a while in connection with this as well. While the event was still vaguely "in the future" I had half in mind to perhaps try to attend part of it myself. But as it got closer and I understood how big an event it was (held at a large event center, and with pre-bookings for lectures etc), I realised I didn't really feel I had enough energy for that. Luckily M+K proved more "flexible" than me. So instead of us meeting up briefly in a crowd, they stopped by to visit me at home for a while on Sunday (late) morning, before starting their drive back home. And as then there were no other "distractions", we again had a good catching-up chat both about family history, our own current situations, and mutual old memories and friends. 

And on top of that, they came bringing a lovely bouquet of roses (photo above), wishing me happy (71st) birthday a week in advance! :) 

(Photo edited with a Picasa3 filter)

 

 * The 2024 post includes a video clip with the Simon & Garfunkel song "Old Friends"

August Skies

 

Monday 17/08/2026 (20:23)

Tuesday 18/08/2026 (20:24)

Saturday 22/08/2026 (14:08)

Saturday 22/08/2026 (19:18)

Saturday 22/08/2026 (20:13)

It's already Sunday Evening when I'm finding the time to put this post together. Perhaps a bit late for Skywatch Friday - but I decided to post (and link) my sky-watching photos from the past week anyway. It's been a week of swiftly shifting skies; and rain showers now and then - but rather brief, with some sunshine in between. Personally I'm grateful for a further drop in temperatures over the past few days, which has also brought down the indoors temperature in my flat to "normal". Since two or three nights I even have the duvet back on my bed. (Just a light synthetic one, but still giving a bit more "weight" than just the empty cover I've been using all summer...). 

Goldenrod Again

 In a recent post or two I showed some photos of the plant (herb) Goldenrod (Solidago); which I thought were of our (Swedish) native kind virgaurea rather than the canadensis - which is considered invasive here. (The Canadian kind may still have been around for 200 years, though!)

Today I noticed a whole field of Goldenrod in a wild area behind a parking lot, where they definitely looked rather "invasive" - which made me think again. So I went up close to take some more photos; and back home compared those again to Wikipedia. Actually these do indeed seem to be of the Canadian kind. And if so, the ones I saw in the cemetery and the ones growing on the slopes down to the railway are probably of that kind as well... (In fact, I'm no longer sure if I ever actually saw the virgaurea in real life?!)

Which just goes to show that you can't really take for granted that everything you happen to read online is true. "Not even" on this blog! ;)

 

 

 

Goldenrod - Solidago canadensis
Public domain picture from Wikipedia

Solidago virgaurea
Public domain picture from Wikipedia