How mowing the lawn made me the oddity of Limhamn

With the weather being unseasonably warm, the grass had begun to grow and look untidy.  Kristine had tried to start the lawn mower, but it defied her.

So, while we had a few minutes spare on Christmas Eve, she asked if I could do my husbandly duties and cut down the innocent blades of grass before they grew higher than the roof.  It was an unusually warm 10 degrees outside, so I headed out in my T-shirt and jeans to tackle the lawn monster.. sorry - lawn mower.

I started the mower after a few minutes wrestling with it and started on the lawn.  As I worked, a few groups of people walked past, several pointing and me.  I greeted them all with the customary "Hej, hej" and a wave.  It was only when a family group of about ten people stopped and started to pull out their phone to take a photo that I started to worry that I was doing something odd.

So I stopped the mower and greeted them, they responded with a string of Swedish.  When I admitted that my Swedish wasn't so good, they switched to English and I told them we were newly arrived from Australia.

I asked what I was doing that was so weird and they listed a few things:
1) I was mowing the lawn on Christmas Eve, which is Sweden is when they actually celebrate Christmas,
2) I was wearing a t-shirt and it was 10 degrees (they were all rugged up in snow jackets), and
3) I was mowing the lawn in the middle of winter.

I guess I think I have a bit more to learn before I can fit in here.  And I was hoping that they were just stunned by my good looks and Aussie charm...


No pictures as I was working hard and Kris was baking biscuits for Christmas, but I do have this error message that occurred when I was trying to copy pics from my phone to the computer for the BINGO posts:

Scary Stuff.