The Autumn of Our Year

These Corona times don’t lend themselves to a whole lot of photography: firstly because there’s obviously not much going on, secondly because what there is going on isn’t very interesting (or photogenic).  There aren’t any parties or events to speak of, no big adventures or trips, and now that the weather has turned and the days are so short, there’s not much to see.

And I’ve gone another whole month without a single picture of Molli Malou, I’m sad to say, but fear not: in the next week or two we’ve got plenty of events and she’ll be around for all of those, so plenty of Molli next month, I promise!

I left off the last post in early October, which is where we resume.  But before I get into our lives, I’d like to take a moment to celebrate a discovery of my own: that of the Furesø hedgehog.

I think by now you Americans all know that Denmark is divided into kommuner, which I usually call “kommunes,” which are the main geopolitical building blocks of the country.  You can think of a kommune as a county or borough or even a very tiny state. In any case, our lovely Værløse sits in Furesø kommune, which has a population of about 40,000 souls, most of them in Værløse and Farum. I’ve never had a problem finding Værløse on a map — you just go a up and to the left of Copenhagen until your eye finds a pile of lakes, and we’re right in the middle of them.   But all the covid maps of Denmark, which have become such an important part of daily life, are geographically organized by kommune, and the maps don’t really show lakes or cities or anything, just the borders of the kommunes and the regions.  And there aren’tlabels on the kommunes.  So I kept struggling to find our stupid kommune every time I looked at a covid map, until I finally realized that Furesø has the shape of an upright, ambulatory hedgehog.

Behold!

No more problems finding Furesø kommune on a map for me… or any of you!

And now: on to October.

This first picture is from October 5, when I noticed that it looked like Maddie had had another growth spurt.

Indeed she had.

We’ll come back to that theme a little later.

Meanwhile, the really exciting thing about October was that we were nearing the end of our cow-tending duties.  To be fair, those duties had mostly been carried out by Trine over the course of the summer, but they had been easier then: go down to the pasture, find the cows, be sure they were all present and okay, check the electric fence, and that was about it.

In October it was important to begin training them to allow themselves to be herded into the small pen in one corner of the pasture, because that would be the pen from which the butcher would fetch the cows in November.  So suddenly my presence was required on these visits.  We had only two such adventures, and neither of them went according to Hoyle.

On the first trip, our main problem was finding the damn cows. 

Could you spot them?

Neither could we.

We spent about 45 minutes scouring the landscape for seven stupid cows.  Trine finally found them in a copse of trees about a thousand miles from the little pen we had to herd them into.

Have you ever herded cows on foot?  I never had, but didn’t figure it would be a very big deal.  They’re cows, right?  Gentle, stupid cows.

If you’re giggling now it’s because you have herded cows on foot, and because you know I survived or wouldn’t be writing this.

Suffice to say, herding cows on foot is indeed a very simple affair right up until the point they make the transition from “a bunch of stupid, gentle cows meandering along behind you” to “an excited and agitated bunch of surprisingly swift and nimble and temperamental creatures the size of refrigerators running straight at you.”

Trine had wisely chosen the tail-gun position, herding them from behind, while I got to be the rodeo clown leading them along with a bucket of feed.  They got so damn snorty and aggressive I ended up having to scramble up a little staircase (crossing the electric fence onto a pathway) to avoid being trampled.

The one on the extreme left in both photos, by the way, is #33.

Trine reminded me to use the big stick she’d told me to pick up earlier to scare them — to cow them into submission.  So I did, and we continued the adventure:

Success!

But I’ll tell you: I no longer had any misgivings about the fact that we were just training these cows to walk willingly to their own slaughter.

I had a good day of shooting that weekend, imagining that every clay pigeon was a goddamn cow.  (A very small cow. That could fly.)

We now pause for a permanent record entry: it was one rainy day in October that it began drizzling in the living room. That required some rooftop inspection, which revealed a hole in the outer layer of our roofing:

We had a roofer come by, and naturally enough he found many more problem areas on the roof.

“I can patch these up for you easy enough,” he told me, “but you’re gonna need a whole new roof within the next two or three years.”

We hired him to “patch those up easy enough” and to send a quote for the whole roof.  Haven’t got the quote yet, or the bill for the patching (which he did in fact do, easy enough: no more living room drizzles).

But Didi found the whole thing wildly intriguing:

Ah,  Didi.

Ironically enough (by which I think I mean something else–something with a lot more Anglo-Saxon in it), that was the same week that our long-ailing bathroom ventilator began whining like a tortured banshee every time it detected 0.001% humidity in the old master bathroom.

It was finally time to replace it.  We called in an electrician who gave it a quick once over and told me the fan had just burned out and he could replace it easy enough once the right part came in.

I braced for the other shoe to drop: surely we would need to replace the whole bathroom in another couple of years or something, right?

But there was no other shoe.  The needed part arrived the following week and he did indeed replace it easy enough.  Not necessarily cheaply enough, but easy enough.

Not every home repair is a tragedy in three acts.

But you know what had become a tragedy in three acts?  My hair.

That’s the day I scheduled my haircut.  (The fruits of which you will not see in this post, alas.)

Meanwhile: Maddie-Mor shopping trip in Frederiksberg!

I’m sort of oddly disappointed they didn’t buy this mask.  Also a little intrigued at the idea of stores allowing masks to be tried on in these weird times.  Also retrospectively wondering why Trine let Maddie try on a mask in the middle of a pandemic.

I was still at work a few days a week, which was nice… and picking up on some nice omens.

That was Friday, October 23.  There had been badly escalating case counts in Denmark all week, so as we left the office that afternoon (those of us who’d been on rotation that day), instead of saying “Have a good weekend!” or “See you Monday!”, we exchanged farewells more along the lines of “See you when I see you,” and, only semi-ironically, “Enjoy the holidays if I don’t see you before then!”

And we were right: I haven’t been in the office since and probably won’t be back so long as it says 2020 on the calendar.

At about that time Didi began to go into heat, which meant she could only have outings on her leash.  But that was sort of okay, because the “leashed dogs only” part of the forest is actually prettier than the “unleashed dogs” part.

On our last tour of duty with the cows it was less difficult finding them, but no less horrifying herding them.  To get a sense of the horror, the pictures below were taken a second or two apart.  Those refrigerators can move!

Weirdly, though, we got them all fairly close to the pen but then had a hell of a time getting them into it.  And we were running out of daylight: in the pictures below, that’s the moon, not the sun. 

We got all but two into the pen: I spent five or ten minutes telling the stragglers how I hoped they’d be the ones I’d end up enjoying with bernaise sauce and potatoes and a nice burgundy.  They didn’t seem to care.  We’ll see who gets the last  laugh.  We’ll see very shortly indeed…

Meanwhile, as I noted in the last post, Friday breakfasts have become an actual thing:

But you know what did not become a thing this year?  Halloween.  For all the obvious reasons. But we did what we could.

Thanks to social limitations I can’t even go to the girls’ handball games, but one of the fathers of Maddie’s team broadcasts their games on Facebook… so I get to experience them like this:

In more exciting family news, Trine and Trine’s physical therapy private practice is getting closer and closer to reality.  Trine needed some pictures for their (not yet live) website, and I got a couple that I really like.

Those are the only pictures of the last three or four months taken with the Olympus.

By early November, those 16:00 walks with Didi were twilight time.

Twilight is pretty, but timing matters.  Those same pictures would have had to be taken at about 23:00 in June, which is lovely. Taking them at 15:30 in the afternoon (which is where we’re at now, in late November) is a horror.

On weekends I’m able to get out with Didi a little earlier: we’re pretty much out of the pretty part of fall and getting close to winter desolation.

And speaking of fall, and by implication leaves, look how nicely I raked the lawn!

Only took about 45 minutes for that damn tree to carpet the lawn in a new layer of yellow leaves, but it was nice while it lasted.

One thing I’ve learned recently that I hadn’t known before is that most of the paths in Hareskov, the woods where we’ve been taking the girls and then Didi for over a decade, actually date back to the stone age, and some of them were even important throughways in the Middle Ages.

This shot might have been recognizable to a stone age Dane living in this area 1500 years ago, or to the local Bishop 800 years ago:

Just a few weeks after the shot you saw at the top of the post, we have this:

Maddie is now just under 5’9″, and the tallest girl in the house.

And damn near twelve years old.

At the end of a Didi walk one day last week the low sun was just hitting the top of our birch tree, turning its yellowed leaves to gold.  Doesn’t seem to be quite as striking in these pictures, but was really just glowing with a golden aura.

Random shot of Didi.

Remember those annoying (and weirdly intimidating) cows?

Here’s our last laugh…  we got 64 kilos of usable meat and bones out of the 70 kilos that constituted our quarter cow, formerly known as #33.  Can’t stampede me anymore, can you, wise guy?

Our freezer is just about full: after a full afternoon and evening of weighing and sealing (we called it “bagging and tagging”), we ended up with thirty packages of 500-1100 grams of ground beef each, and about three dozen packages of different cuts from every part of the cow. 

We’ve had our first burgers already, and they were really and truly delicious.  The girls said they were glad they hadn’t met the cows in person.  I was glad I had because every bite had just a little extra seasoning from the savory taste of vengeance.

And beef isn’t the only thing we’ve got a one year supply of these days:

In fairness, it’s only about double the amount we’ve always tried to keep on hand anyway.  (There are paper towels there too, and I’m pretty sure we used about that whole pile’s worth of paper towels, at least, in just eight weeks of puppy raising last year.)

# # #

That’s it for photos.

It hasn’t been an uneventful period: we came into it worried about Maddie’s finger healing properly, and then Molli got horribly sick at the end of it.  (Better now, and back to her usual frantic schedule, but was basically out of it for eight horrible days.)  Trine continues planning her private practice with Cousin Trine.  I’m enjoying some time without my usual gig work (and have been grappling with a cold I think I picked up while sitting in the doctor’s waiting room with Molli on Monday).

Trine and I foolishly stayed up to watch the election returns back on the third.  I even took the Wednesday after Election Day off so I could stay up late in case it stretched out the way it did in ’16.  I thought I was making allowances.  Ha.  That’s it for me: with Tom Brady off the Pats and the country unable to settle an election in a single night, I no longer have anything to stay up all night for.   From nowonI’ll be perfectly happy to wake up from a good night’s sleep to news of what non-New England team won the Super Bowl, or which swing states still can’t be called.

It’s kind of a relief.

And now it’s time to look ahead to the first Thanksgiving of Maddie’s life without Steve & Elizabeth and their kids.  That will be followed in short order by Mormor’s birthday, Maddie’s 12th birthday, first Christmas advent, and, by golly, the holidays themselves.

No julefrokoster this year, obviously, because CANCEL ALL THE THINGS, so that’s one less stressor.  It will be for us, as it will for so many others, a pretty “off” holiday season.

On the plus side, however: just on the other side of the holidays lies the beckoning paradise of 2021.

There’ll be one more post before Christmas, though, so I can do my wishcasting then…  along with plenty of pictures of Molli and Maddie,  I promise.

And finally, my favorite meme of the month: