sabin went home with a friend to play last friday after school. when it came time to pick her up, i realized i'd not been to that friend's dad's house before and i didn't know where it was, so i had to call him and ask the address. when i called, he said that the girls were about to grill sausages and so i could wait 'til later to pick her up. ahh, the sudden freedom of a few extra hours to myself and from the responsibility of having to have that friday evening meal ready. bliss.

husband came home rather late and we started some coals for our own dinner and then went to pick up sabin. her friend's dad lives a little ways out of town on a small farm. they have two ponies and a couple of extremely wooly sheep. he was in the midst of cutting up a couple of old trees that he had knocked down with his big giant digger machine thingie (i think that's the technical term). i wish we'd been there to see that.  he had a big bonfire going and it was there the girls had roasted sausages for dinner. yum. there's just something so good about food cooked outdoors.

while we were waiting for the girls to finish up playing, we got to chatting with the dad. he asked if we'd like some of the wood. husband couldn't believe his ears--free wood for our two woodburning stoves! how cool is that? so he eagerly accepted and spent the entire weekend going back and forth with a trailer and pretty much cleaning up those two trees.

and he had plans for them, that didn't just involve them ending up as firewood.  husband often has grand schemes in the garden. like a little fireplace area for roasting marshmallows and bread on a stick (snobrød, in danish):

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and using some of the thicker bits of tree stump to line a new vegetable bed in the upper garden:

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we have serious slug problems here in denmark, so we always have to think about raised beds and areas of sand/gravel that slugs don't like around the outside of the beds.

another cool thing that sabin's friend's dad showed us was an old fiat abarth that he had recently finished restoring. i'm not really into cars and know very little about them, but this was just too cute:

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the light wasn't great in the garage, so these shots aren't as good as i'd have liked them to be. but you can see from the person standing at the back exactly how TINY this little automobile is. i know mr. bean's car was a morse mini, but this reminded me very much of mr. bean. he started it up and it was LOUD! it would be SO much fun to go down the road in it. super cute.