Second Wave

As I noted in the last post, Blogger.com “upgraded” their blog composer in a way that was completely incompatible with how I work, so I had no choice but to move. I chose the path of least resistance and moved it to my NaganOfCopenhagen website, which is built with WordPress.

A few quick notes on the technical stuff: although there are a few challenges I still need to resolve, and although I’m going to start things off with a very spartan look and feel, WordPress has a lot of capabilities that Blogger didn’t, and I intend to take advantage of them… eventually. This blog is going to get prettier and easier to work with for you guys, just not right now. Moving the damn thing was effort enough for now. (In doing so, however, I learned that, not including this one, the Molli & Maddie blog has 510 posts.) I also moved all the images and videos from the Justmorons.com site over to NaganOfCopenhagen, and while I was it at I archived the entire Justmorons.com website onto NaganOfCopenhagen, as I intend to let that old site wither away… I hadn’t updated any of its pages in so long that it was really no longer worth maintaining anyway.

With respect to privacy, I’ve blocked robots and crawlers from the new location, so we’re safe from the search engines as long as everyone remembers not to share links to the site. The blog is in the digital equivalent of a secret hidden chamber of NaganOfCopenhagen and will never be exposed to the public. (Although just to be safe, I may at some point buy another domain, move it all there, and make that domain entirely invisible to the web. Might be nice to have a family server where we can share stuff without any risk of it falling off into the public cloud.)

That’s why it’s been longer than usual since the last update.

And now, without further interruption…. the Molli & Maddie blog.

We can start with some pictures from August that didn’t make it into previous posts because the pictures were emailed to me by Mormor and I forgot to save them into the right pictures folder.

They’re just pictures of Maddie painting at Lyøvej, but they’re pretty and significant because Maddie is now deeply into her painting phase, and these were among its earliest days.

She’s had a lot of support and art instruction from Jørgen (both girls have), so I like how he’s kind of looking over her in that picture.

That’s it for forgotten pictures from the summer: now we’re back to the proper period of this post: late August and the month of September.

I was still working at Langelinie, still biking there and back every day in all weather, and life was as close to ordinary as it had been since February. (Still far from ordinary, but moving closer.)

Mads was out of town for a week and asked me to feed his cats and check in on his chickens every other day.

He said I could keep any eggs the hens might lay. They were “new hens,” he said, so there might not be any.

In fact there was always at least one egg, though never more than three. It was nice having eggs that fresh. At least, I think it was: the girls always got to them before I had a chance.

We had a nice taste of Indian summer at the start of September, and you can sort of “feel it” in this picture from a Didi walk down by the lake.

I’d been back in the office all summer, as I said, and things felt normalish, but every once in a while something would just smack me in the face. Limiting elevator capacity to two at a time made sense. Expecting colleagues who work with one another all day, five days a week, so adopt the posture suggested by the footprint stickers while riding together is, on the other hand, pretty damn unrealistic.

But PensionDanmark continued to surprise us with special treats: one day for lunch a boat pulled up with its morning catch, and it was converted into our lunch right there.

Grilled white fish — some of the best I’ve ever tasted. Little things like this go a long way toward dulling the pain of the funky footprints in the elevator and other weirdnesses.

I love Indian summer. It’s like summer, but sweeter because you know it’s really not. It’s stolen time.

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about the dish “brændende kærlighed” on these electronic pages. It literally means “burning love,” and it’s a Danish staple. I made it one night and it came out so well that it was a thing I have to chronicle.

First you make mashed potatoes just the way you like them: with or without peeling the potatoes, with or without milk, cream, butter, salt, garlic… do it your way. Then fry up a big batch of cubed bacon.

I don’t know if “bacon in cubes” is available in the states: it wasn’t when I lived there, but I’ve noticed things have moved on a bit in those 17 years.

Okay, just fry up a bunch of whatever kind of bacon you can get your hands on, and remove the bacon. Leave the grease in the pan. Throw in some thinly sliced onions and sautée them in the bacon grease until they’re caramelized.

Put a pile of mashed potatoes on a plate, top the pile with the onions and bacon, and surround the whole thing with diced pickled beets. (Which is also maybe not a thing in America.)

Easy and delicious. Great stick-to-your-ribs, hearty fare… a real winter dinner, so not sure why I chose to serve it on a 25-degree day.

Unfortunately, as September matured the case counts in Denmark started going up. and on September 8 the government put the 18 kommunes around Copenhagen into modified partial lockdown. Værløse is left alone, but employers in those 18 kommunes were urged to let all employees work from home who could. PensionDanmark strangely decides that half its workforce should be sent home, and I’m part the half in our little team that got sent home on September 8th.

(It’s the second week of October. I’m still home, and my return has moved from October 4th to October 18th to November 1st, although I am now allowed to “rotate in” a couple of days each week until then, as long as another member of team goes home to offset my presence. Also, the restrictions expanded to cover the whole country a couple of weeks ago. We’re regressing. Things are probably going to get worse before they get better.)

For Trine’s birthday, Vibeke and Jørgen had us all to dinner in the city at Barbar Bar & Café. In our rush to get out the door, we somehow forgot the umbrellas that the birthday girl had set aside to bring along. It wasn’t raining, but rain was possible, and we were planning a Tivoli tour after dinner if the weather wasn’t too awful. By the time we realized the umbrellas hadn’t made it into the car, we were already a couple of kilometers from home, and already running late, so we decided to trust our luck.

We chose… poorly.

We shouldn’t have trusted our luck. It was still dry when we parked downtown. It was only about half a kilometer to the restaurant, but the misty rain that began falling after the first hundred meters quickly became a light drizzle, then a regular drizzle, then actual rain, and finally, about twenty meters from the restaurant, an apocalyptic downpour so intense we found ourselves cowering in a shelter just two doors down.

We waited for a few minutes, but eventually had to just make a run for it.

Compare Trine to Moster Mette, who had been seated before the skies had opened.

Also seated before the deluge:

I, too, was sporting the “drowned rat” look.

(Where’s Molli, you ask? Where she always is when she’s not at school or handball, or a party: at work.)

The usual dilemma: fifteen group shots to be sure I’d get at least one good one, and then not a single one that’s good of everyone. These are the best of the bunch:

The rain, as you can probably tell, had by this point let up, so we didn’t need our umbrellas for Tivoli after all.

It was, as usual this year, eerily uncrowded.

New booth: Schmidt & Schmidt Cocktails! I meant to check for relations…

We had coffee and cake at the coffee and cake place in the middle of Tivoli.

Except–erk–we don’t all drink coffee.

So some of us ran across the midway to spend their own allowance money on bubble tea.

I wonder if it’s the same peacock we’ve been seeing all these years. If it is, why aren’t its chicks growing up?

I can’t wait to look back at pictures like this and think, “Why isn’t anyone there?”

Trine, Maddie, and I squeezed into a single Pirate Boat for a sail. We reminisced about how scared both girls used to be of the animatronic pirates in the middle (Molli in particular).

Maddie wanted to do the Demon rollercoaster alone, so we let her, and to kill the time Trine and I rode the old veteranbiler. Wasn’t it just a couple weeks ago we were riding around with our little girls?

Trine posted a video on Facebook of me riding along. I can’t return the favor, because I was trying (and failing) to get a decent still photo of her.

And now, just a bunch of Tivoli pics.

I like the following sequence.

And this one’s also okay, I guess.

She’s 48 now, and was 24 when we got together in 1997 (a few weeks before her 25th birthday, but still). So that poor girl has spent half her life with me.

But that’s nothing: this poor girl has spent her entire life with me and Trine!

“Take care of each other.” It gets old. It gets grating. There has to be some kind of reasonable middle ground between “every man for himself” and “we’re all in this together.” Grinding civilization to a halt to check the spread of a disease whose average victim is older than the average life expectancy in the victim’s country doesn’t seem sensible.

Naturally, the very first day of the very first week of my “Lockdown 2.0,” our little capsule coffeemaker died. I was going to replace it, but then I decided a real coffeemaker would be justifiable now that I was home every day and could work my way through more than a single cup.

So I looked around online and found a great coffee machine with a built in grinder for a pretty good price:

“But wait,” you say, “there are two of them.”

Indeed there are. Because I was so excited about the coffeemaker I’d ordered, I went surfing the internet that night to look at more reviews and maybe some tips and tricks on using it.

In doing so I stumbled across a site selling the same model for less than half the price I’d paid for the one I’d ordered! In American currency, the one I’d ordered was about 285 bucks: the one I’d stumbled across was about 125. So I ordered it.

The expensive one arrived first, and rather than return it I held onto it in case the other one turned out to be a different model or something. Really, the price difference made it hard to believe they could be the same machine.

But they were.

So I returned the expensive one and have been enjoying fresh coffee from whole beans ever since.

It’s the little things, right? Like a cup of real, hot, freshly brewed coffee from fresh, whole beans, instead of some chemical soup out of a plastic capsule.

And like a dinner off the grill of ribeye steaks, portobello mushrooms, and a hokkaido pumpkin.

Or casting a ballot.

I spotted a strange mushroom in Hareskov one day while romping Didi with Trine.

It looks like a tortoise shell, doesn’t it? Or the kind of hat that Trapper John would wear on M*A*S*H?

I just thought it was interesting.

We hired a guy to clean and stain the undereaves all the way around the house, and horrified the neighbors with the sound of his sander for a few days before he burned through the money we’d set aside for the project and we had to finish the job ourselves. (For the record: it was Lasse, and his one-armed assistant was Casper.)

For the permanent record, here’s what we used:

Also for the permanent record: the undereaves around the evening terrace are tough to reach! (That’s a roller on a four meter extension that we bought specifically for this job.)

To try and keep in shape and keep myself sane, I’ve been doing bike rides before and after my telecommuting work each weekday. Trying to, anyway: family life is what it is, and there’s not always time in the afternoon, and from time to time I need a morning off, but generally it’s been pretty nice.

And back when there was still a little daylight before seven in the morning, I was treated to some beautiful landscapes.

(That’s from the road that cuts through Hareskov: the little brewery is about fifty yards to the left.)

Being home alone all day every day (once Maddie was finally allowed to resume school: she missed about three weeks due to a cough, despite two negative covid tests), I got used to the rhythms of the empty house. One morning, that rhythm was clearly off: I could hear the Roomba much more distinctly than I normally can. I went upstairs to see what was going on:

It’s not armed and it’s not self-aware, but it was creepy: it had somehow escaped the front of house and begun patrolling the living quarters.

I’m keeping an eye on that thing now.

I mentioned that Maddie has gotten very deeply into painting. It was a useful distraction for her while her injury prevented her from playing handball and her cough kept her out of school, but it’s evolved into something more than that. (It was a knee injury that knocked me out of football and into theatre, so there’s parental precedent.)

For the permanent record, few things in this period made her happier than the arrival of two new sets of acrylic paint.

Despite her enthusiasm for brushwork, I couldn’t persuade her that doing the back terrace would be a great artistic challenge.

That’s a before picture. We got everything ready one weekend, then ran out of time and our yard looked like this for a week:

So it was nice to escape periodically to the forest.

And eventually I got around to applying the protective layer:

And then one layer of stain:

So here’s a look of the one-layer stain, along with the nicely stained undereave. (Sorry for these boring pictures, but the permanent record requires them.)

On the first of October, I stopped by the bakery on my morning “commute:”

It was so popular I’ve now decided to make such stops every Friday. We’re all too busy to sit around the table and enjoy breakfast together, but it’s a nice way to celebrate the end of a week.

Or the end of a blog post.

# # #

But wait! Maddie did a pretty good drawing of Boo from Monsters, Inc. that I wanted to include:

And I also like including my favorite memes of the month. This is certainly in the running for the most thoroughly 2020 photograph of the year (so far), although for perfection it should have murder hornets flying by.

And my least favorite screencap of the month:

This isn’t a real football season so I haven’t been paying any real attention (the Pats almost drew me in, then Cam Newton went out with C19, as many other players are sure to do in this already hopelessly damaged season), but seeing seeing “Football Team” the Washington Redskins was just embarrassing.

You don’t like your team name? Change it. But don’t cancel the old one before you’ve chosen a new one.

“Cute kid, what’s her name?”

“Kid.”

“That’s her name?”

“No, we named her Rose at birth but she didn’t really seem like a Rose. Except we haven’t chosen a new name yet. So she’s just, you know, ‘Kid.’ But she’ll answer to whatever you call her, so it’s no big deal.”

# # #

Scrolling through the month, I notice there isn’t a single picture of Molli Malou. It’s understandable–she’s always at school, handball, or work, and with the tiny little bit of free time she has beyond that it’s either homework or off with friends. I can’t photograph someone who’s never around, and it’s perfectly normal for someone her age not to be around very much. But she’s doing fine and she hasn’t been deliberately omitted… I’m just sad that I’m no longer sure I have at least one picture of each girl from every month of their lives. (It’s possible there was some crappy picture of her that didn’t make the cut when I was picking pictures for the blog, so I’ll cross my fingers.)

Maddie’s finger is doing better and she’s back at handball. She hit a little turbulence getting back into it, but that’s all been smoothed over and she’s back in the groove. She also appears to be slightly taller than Trine now. It’s not official, because Trine refuses to acknowledge it, but she certainly seems taller to me.

Efterårsferie (autuman vacation) is next week, October 11-17, and we’re not doing anything: I’ll be working all week (three days in the office), Trine will be working a couple of days, and both girls will be home from school. Not the week of fun in the Portugal sun that we’d become accustomed to.

We’ve also learned that Maddie has allergies. Dust mites in particular, but also dogs and cats. And the allergies are giving her a kind of “effective asthma” that isn’t real asthma, but could become so if we aren’t diligent about keeping her room dusted and aired out at least twice daily. So we’ve got to kick off a whole new hygiene in her room, which is going to be a challenge. Also she’s been advised not to cuddle too much with the animals, which is kind of sad, but certainly better than having to get rid of them, which more severe allergies would require.

So there we are: six months deep into the new reality, and no sign of things abating any time soon, but we’re doing just fine.