We left off at the end of February, a short month with a long post. It’s getting near the end of April as I write this, and there’s comparatively little to show since February.
Maddie switched handball teams and is now playing for her mother’s old club, Ydun, based in Frederiksberg. She and Trine spent Easter Weekend out at the Kolding tournament while I held down the fort (and the dog) and finished up the edits on my book… meaning I spent most of my time in the basement.
Molli Malou spent a week in Milan, most of which I spent walking around saying, “Molli Malou’s in Milano.” This summer she’ll be in Malaga: that’ll be another fun bit of alliteration.
I had another birthday. They’re piling up, those things. Aunt Deb and Uncle Gene had birthdays too… that’s 168 years of birthdays between the three of us. Yeesh.
Also, spring finally arrived.
Because almost all of the pictures in this post are from one of the handful of events I just described, and because the majority of them are from other people’s cameras and the timestamps are hopelessly mixed up, and because I’m tired and really just want to get this blog done and off my to-do list, we’re just going to take the pictures in the order they appear, chronology be damned.
Lez go…
Can you guess what that is?
Why, yes, it’s a plate of spaghetti served to Molli in Italy.
Which the next picture, oddly enough, shows her flying off to.
And here she is, hearting Milano:
(We just say Milan in English, right? I just realized I’m being inconsistent in my usage. The official Molli and Maddie blog stylebook allows it.)
It’s no longer technically winter, although at the time that picture was taken I’m pretty sure it was still wintry. What you’re seeing is what Trine sees at least three times a week all year at about 6:15 in the morning: the little bathing pier down at our ole swimmin’ hole from which she takes her polar dips in the winter (and slightly less bracing dips the rest of the year).
And here’s another pic from Trine:
“New life shooting through the old,” she wrote me when she texted me the image. Something she’d seen while romping Didi in Hareskov.
And now suddenly we’re out in Kolding, where Maddie is being convulsed with hilarity among her Ydun teammates.
It’s good the kids got out once in a while, because indoors—well, jeez, have a look:
They’re all focused on their phones. Every one of them.
Trine sent the photo above a few moments later to show me they weren’t always all on their phones.
Molli’s school trip to Milano included a visit to a… a rice farm? A rice processing plant?
It also included an excursion out to lake Como, on whose shores she came across this endearing creature:
I’m not sure Molli was interested in saving a lot on insurance, though.
While Molli was enjoying spring weather in Milano, the rest of us were stuck in hellish wintry Denmark, where it was not only very cold but very rainy… even in our living room.
Here come some more pics from Milano. Take them for what they are.
For the permanent record: it was toward the end of Easter vacation week that Molli Malou attended a party during which her and her friends’ bikes were apparently smashed by an errant driver.
We’ll leave it at that.
My friend Mads startled me one night by texting that he had to postpone a business call we’d had scheduled because he and his girlfriend had just gotten three new kids.
The picture he sent clarified his little joke.
Meanwhile, back in Milano…
On the night we celebrated my birthday, Molli drove us to Bymidten where we had a dinner at the new Asian buffet restaurant, Chop Sticks, which is apparently now Sjælland’s largest buffet restaurant. (Family consensus: meh. We’ll stick with Hai Long.)
Molli’s parking job was the evening’s entertainment.
We seem to be back in my own “camera roll now,” which is why we’re seeing things that happened before things we’ve already covered. Here, for example, is the last picture I have of Maddie playing for Furesø:
I had to attend a meeting at a Tuborg Boulevard 12 one afternoon, and the name of the building caught my eye:
And here’s this birthday’s “self portrait.” (I got lazy.)
When I said we decided as a family that we’d “stick with Hai Long,” I meant it. That’s where we ate on my actual birthday.
We get rain in the house, and we get lakes in our basement.
Next we have a few Didi pictures of no particular significance (beyond “awww…”):
Danish meteorology doesn’t care about the goddam calendar: it was still snowing in April.
And here’s Molli on her way to a big school dance—I got a picture of her in her fancy new dress, but it wasn’t a very good one. So here’s a shot of her impatience at my insisting on a picture as she left the house.
At some point we went down to the Ballerup go-kart speedway.
We’ve tightened up as a family: there wasn’t even 1½ seconds between Molli’s best lap time and Maddie’s, and Molli’s average lap time was less than two seconds faster than Maddie’s. (I’d complain that my own average time was damaged by one round where I mistakenly thought I’d been called into the pit, but that 1:06 round was actually 5 seconds shorter than Molli’s 1:11, so that’s no excuse. I think I just got stuck with a slow car this time. That must be it.)
Molli: best 38.729, average 41.726.
Trine: best 39.215, average 41.755.
Greg: best 40.132, average 42.442
Maddie: best 40.139, average 43.542.
In January I made a rule for myself that I would take the train into the office whenever the temperature was under 5 degrees Celsius. As a result, I didn’t resume biking until April 19.
I took the picture below on a walk to the station one morning because the cloud formation was weirdly interesting. But I also like the picture even at resolutions where the clouds aren’t as visible.
Snow and hail. Some really big hail storms… in April.
When Molli sent the picture of her pasta dish from Milan, I replied with this picture of my own lunch that day (I was working from home).
She wrote back that there is no food in Italy as good as a Danish dyrelægens natmad.
In case that hasn’t been explained her before, that means “the veterinarian’s midnight snack,” and it’s Danish liverwurst (not really liverwurst, but that’s the best I can do) on Danish rye bread, topped with a slice of saltkød (cured and salted pork), aspic, and diced onions. It’s one of my own personal favorites. Such are the things we miss when we’re in America.
Or Milan.
We keep accumulating bids from various contractors on the various house projects, as I mentioned with respect to the rainy living room. The odd thing is, there’s no visible leak on the roof.
Also, for the permanent record, depending on the exchange rate it’s just around a hundred bucks to fill our 12-gallon tank. By my reckoning, that puts Danish gas at about 8 bucks a gallon.
Trine continues to amaze with her “better than takeout” Chinese recipes:
And Didi continues to amaze with her dramatic poses.
(She’s much more laid back when she thinks no one’s watching.)
I began giving the shrubs and hedges some badly needed haircuts…
But there were too many parts that were difficult to reach with the hedge trimmer while precariously balancing on that little step ladder, so I went out and bought myself a little mini scaffolding.
I still can’t get over the fact that I own my own scaffolding.
(Who’m I kidding… I still can’t get over the fact that I’ve got a job.)
At one point while Trine and Maddie were off at the tournament I’d asked Molli if she’d sent any messages to Maddie while she was in Kolding. She told me she hadn’t, but she would.
Later that day, Molli texted me a screenshot of her text and Maddie’s reply, and future Molli and Maddie… I hope this makes you giggle when you’re both in your eighties.
In English:
Molli: Hey Maddie! How’s it going with the games? Hope you guys have won a lot! (Heart emoji)
Maddie: it’s going well. why are you writing like that?
Maddie later told me she said it sounded mormor-agtig. “Grandma-like.”
I was the only one home when the Easter Bunny swung by. So I grabbed him, clubbed him over the head, and chopped off his giant, candy-filled—no, I can’t say that in this blog.
But still…
And we close with Didi at peace…
That’s it. That was how we made it through the last weeks of our long winter into the start of what will hopefully be a glorious spring.
