2026-05 – SFI Exam

May started off with ice hail storms and ended with long sunny days. It’s quite a crazy month for weather. Often the nights are chilly but the long sunny days give sunburn if you’re outside. The plants need a lot of watering because new plants have only just gone in the soil and haven’t yet established their roots and yet long sunny days will dry them up quickly. Some of the trees and bushes have come back fine after winter. Others, especially ones planted last year, it’s a waiting game to see if they have survived. By the end of may I’m starting to get anxious about the ones showing no signs of life. It could just be that they’re slow due to the shock of being replanted but time will tell.

Although early in May we had hail and cold nights, later in the month it was much warmer during the daytime, and we had our first barbecue.

SFI-B and SFI-B National Exam

I took and passed the national Swedish for Immigrants / Svenska för invandrare course B exam. I passed with 100% in the listening and reading sections, and no comments made for writing and speaking. That doesn’t mean my speaking was great but rather that it was good enough for what was expected at this level. The important course/exam is SFI-D which is the final level for the initial government Swedish courses. Improving our Swedish improves our luck with everything from job applications, government procedures, to neighbour interactions.

I’ve been told that I will either go up to course C, C/D, or D. At the time of writing the tutors hadn’t yet decided. If I move straight to course D then I might be able to skip having to do a few months at the intermediate level before taking the SFI-D exam.

In our kommun teaching, Course C covers more verb tenses (laypersons description follows), and course D covers more more complex sentence rules. Both are still at a fairly basic level but enough to provide the support for a person to start talking Swedish daily, from where the improvement will grow itself. Or there are further adult learning courses, after SFI, under a different scheme.

SFI-B covered future, present and past tense. Specifically the basic past tense where something happened and is now over. For example “I went to the library”. You may have heard this as the “past imperfect” tense in English or in Swedish as “preteritum”. SFI-C will cover the past tenses for situations where something has occurred and is ongoing. “I have gone to the library every weekend for several years”. I’ve been taught this before but used it with significant frequency. SFI-D will cover word order in “bisats” which I’ve covered before but not mastered yet. Essentially Swedish uses word-order rules for verbs and adverbs that are similar to German, when joining dependent sentences together.

Community Work

I’ve been working on a local community “stuga” that needed some maintenance. This is a cabin in the forest used as a meeting place and resting spot, both in the summer by hikers and in the winter by snowmobile riders. The paint was peeling off and other bits of the stuga need maintenance.

Working on the cabin involves a 3km hike with 250m of elevation which isn’t much but it’s enough that I notice it when carrying paint, tools, and water in a rucksack.

I sanded most of the paint from the door before my orbital sander gave off a loud pop and a puff of smoke and it died.

I primered what I could and came back in later visits with a different type of battery powered sander and finished primering. Later I got the initial layer of gloss paint onto the door. Then after a short period I added another layer before leaving a warning that the paint was wet. I came back a week later and the tools in front of the door had been moved so people must be using the cabin.

On subsequent visits I set about sanding down the windows and other external white-painted wooden details. This was going great until the triangular head on the second sander broke which meant the sanding pads wouldnt stay on. It’s a cheap part but I didn’t have one on me so it means coming back again to finish the sanding on a different day (in June) and delayed things a little further.

Where sanding was complete I primered the door and window frames. I used up a tin of primer. Due to the hot sun I need to come back with the appropriate paint thinnners to dilute the second tin that has dried up a bit.

If money and time were no object I would work on this stuga more but May is a busy month at home and so there were lots of conflicting time requirements.

Mountain Bike Club

There has just been two of us this month doing rides but a highlight was that I got guided though how to join up my nearest/favourite hill climb route with an adjacent track that leads across the hill and so could turn it into a great training loop. I am out of shape and although it is a short loop of about 1.5-2 hours I was quite tired by the end, but it was a good ride.

There has been a lot of windfall trees this spring, so part of riding has included clearing the occasional tree. I removed a small tree with a handsaw where it was interrupting a mounting bike route. Some of the other members have cleared much larger adult fallen trees with chainsaws where it was closer to the local village and blocking peoples walks.

Yet More Car Faults

The black car was back from having a shock absorber mount fixed. It then displayed an engine fault light under acceleration and started behaving like a much smaller low powered engine. The gear change has been awkward too and the engine feels bumpy at idle which has been happening for some time. The garage identified it as the clutch and flywheel needing replacement.

The red car has new tyres and was behaving great. Then the rear number plate lights fell off. And now an ABS warning light has triggered, which is likely to be one of the wheel sensors.

There is never a dull moment with cars.

Bridge Work

I fitted rigid wire mesh over the wooden footbridge that leads from our property to the village. I had it left over from trying to build bird covers for the raised beds. The protection wont stop a determined unsupervised child from reaching the water below. It is just intended to make the bridge safer for escorting small children across without one falling over the edge the moment an adult is distracted. This looks really simple but cutting and placing the wire took most of the day and involved ladders in the stream below in order to complete the middle section.

Gardening Actions

My wife has a medical condition that affects her ability to garden this summer but will be resolved in August. It means our plans are scaled down a bit this year with no ambitious projects.

We prepared the greenhouse and the first plants are now growing. May is already hot with long daylight hours so it can be tricky starting the plants when their roots aren’t large or deep enough to reach a reserve of water to survive the entire day.

May is when all the dandylions are out and there are masses of them. I have been using a gardening knife to pull them out with the taproot but there are so many. I filled a wheelbarrow and multiple buckets the first weeding day. I then repeated the same the next day and I have a compost heap full of them.

Out the front of the house, I moved lots of woodchip onto the embankment and we planted up a mix of flowers that my wife likes and native ferns and mosses to try to create an understory to the hedgeline that will help retain ground cover and moisture. As the month went on we got fern donations from a neighbour, and the plants we’d placed began to take root and start to thrive. I also transplanted some native flower species from other parts of the garden. The thick woodchip has helped keep the sun off the soil in other parts of the garden and protect the soil from drying out in the constant sun. I’m hoping the rotted woodchip will also help improve the soil over the years.

Around the adventure path area, some of the Thyme plants haven’t survived the winter. It’s hard to put a finger on the exact cause as some plants survived fine but in other nearby areas multiple plants have died. It doesn’t seem to be related to exposure or soil moisture content and some of the plants had survived a previous winter. My plan is to add more plants in the future where the pants are surviving and try something different in the other areas. But significant plant buying is on hold until I get a new full-time job.

Citizenship Changes

Next month Sweden is changing the citizenship rules from 5 years to 8 years of continuous living in the country, adding a civic knowledge exam, adding a language requirement, and adding a minimum wage requirement that must have been earn by each applicant for at least 3 years before the application date. Although the changes come into effect on the 6th June, the civics exam isn’t ready yet. The current processing timeframe for citizenship applications is about 5 years and growing. So if we re-apply in 2028 it may go through in 2033.

Other

There are a lot of time pressures this month so I’m going to publish this blog post early and then edit and expand on it as time allows.

I’ve been selling lots of unused building supplies from completed projects. This also means I get to meet new people who come to collect things.

We visited the Ikea to the south to pick up some supplies. It’s quite a morning to go around all the different areas and displays.

There have been lots of different birds spotted this month, including some exciting birds of prey. It’s hard to photograph far off birds with a standard lens but I tried anyway.