I’m not planning to make this a seasonal or quarterly blog, but (as I forewarned in the last post) after a very eventful summer the past two months have mostly been about the house.
The last sentence of the previous post predicted the content of this one: “…mainly it’ll be about the house, because right now pretty much everything is about the house, and will be until we have it back.”
Here we are in the middle of autumn vacation, a full eight weeks later, and we still don’t have the house back entirely. We expect all the contractors to be done by the end of this week, but it will probably still be a few weeks beyond that before we’ve got all our stuff unboxed and resettled.
And yet this post is not going to be about any of that: I’ve set all the pictures of the house aside and am saving them for one big post exclusively about the renovation. (You’ll notice changes to the appearance of our home throughout the photos below, but that’s incidental and I won’t be taking note of them.)
Another big part of my life that I’m deliberately going to exclude photographically from this post is my own Series of Unfortunate events.
Here’s the very abbreviated version: at some point in early August I developed gout in my left foot. Happens every 6-7 years or so. Bridge of the foot gets crazy swollen and hurts like hell, and makes walking very difficult for the first few days, then gradually fades away. It’s impossible to wear shoes during a gout episode, but I was able to work from home. One Saturday morning in late August I woke up to find my left foot looking and feeling almost entirely normal: I was even able to slip on a shoe!
A few hours later I was moving a sofa across the yard on a dolly when it I hit a bump, the sofa fell, and one of its stainless steel legs slammed down onto my left foot. It was horrific-looking injury and hurt like hell, but I didn’t seem to have broken anything. I cleaned the wound thoroughly, including with alcohol, and bandaged it up. My cleansing was apparently inadequate: Trine made me call an online doctor the following Wednesday, the online doc set up an immediate visit with my own doc, and the substitute doctor filling in for my regular doc gave me a tetanus shot and prescribed amoxicillin as an antibiotic.
The following Saturday it was still looking bad: I went to an ER and the doctor there seemed surprised the original doc had only prescribed amoxicillin. He said I needed that, but also needed dicillin. So he wrote me a script for that. The following week I visited my own doctor’s office every day and they cleaned and rebandaged the wound. By that Friday the infection was completely cleared up and I was allowed to drop the antibiotics. The next day we celebrated Trine’s birthday with a dinner out at Hai Long (as you’ll see below): I woke up the following morning with a bad stomach and by the middle of Sunday afternoon it was clear I had food poisoning. No one else in our party did, and I didn’t eat anything that others hadn’t eaten as well, so we’re assuming I had just one bad piece of sushi or one undercooked bit of meat in my Mongolian barbecue. But it wiped me out for 48 hours: I don’t even remember Trine’s actual 50th birthday. (We’ll make up for that!)
I spent another week or two visiting the nurses at my doctor’s office twice a week, until they were confident the infection was really gone and not coming back but the wound was healing slowly enough that I’d have to have regular appointments with a “wound nurse” operating out of the local senior center. I’ve been seeing them once or twice a week since then, and progress is steady but very slow.
But at this point it’s mostly just an inconvenience: my foot is functionally fine, I can wear sneakers over the compression bandage they’ve got me in (from toes to the top of my calf), and I’m leading my normal life—including biking to and from work three times a week.
However, between the invasion of contractors working on the house (and often not working on it) and all that foot stuff, plus a lot of freelance work in September, there hasn’t been much room in my life for other things.
This post is therefore going to seem unusually light given the amount of time that’s passed. Most of the pictures are from just five events: a trip to Bakken, Trine’s 50th birthday, Maddie’s week-long school trip to Bornholm, Klaus’s 90th birthday, and this year’s cows.
I took a lot of pictures of my foot to record its progress, but am sparing you all of those.
Maddie had a weekend tournament in Nyborg, Morfar was up for a visit, and Molli spent a weekend with her friends up at a summerhouse at one point. There aren’t many pictures from those events.
We begin with a shot that overlaps a little with the previous post’s “General Summer” theme: I had mentioned that Trine and I had ended the last evenings of our summer vacation with a drink on the terrace—and then, when that got torn apart, down on the evening terrace (until the basement got torn to hell and scaffolding went up out there).
Here’s a cute shot of one such evening nightcap:
As I write this in mid-October, the basement is very nearly done, but the evening terrace is full of construction waste.
The next shot is from Trine’s office: it’s not her birthday, but her 10-year anniversary at work.
Respect! Ten years at the same job is something I’ve never managed. (I’ve never even made it much more than five—but I’ve done that three times: Northwestern, Berlingske, and PensionDanmark.)
For various reasons I had to tend the cows on my own a couple of times. On one such visit I could only find six. It was only with considerable effort I finally found the loner, who actually seemed to be deliberately hiding. I don’t know how this picture plays on a small screen, but it’s spectacular in full size and I’ve even thought about printing it in poster size.
I’m guessing that’s the notorious #65, who everyone has noticed is unusually aggressive and independent, as cows go. That’s the cow I hope we get a quarter of come November, because every bit of that difficult beast will be seasoned with the delicious taste of vengeance.
I don’t remember why Maddie texted me the following image, but since she considered it significant enough to send me and since this really is her and her sister’s blog, I’m gonna post it.
This is Didi in our bedroom expressing her excitement at the presence of so many contractors galumphing around the house:
And galumph they did. There were days in August and September where we had guys in the roof, guys in the basement, guys in the kitchen, and guys in the back yard, all at the same time—electricians messing around with the house circuitry, plumbers rerouting pipes in the kitchen and basement, carpenters all over. Didi loved them all and she never got used to them enough not to bark maniacally whenever any of them showed up.
With all that going on, it was a great relief when my foot was finally doing well enough that I could take her for a little romp in the forest… until she ran way.
See her in that picture? Of course you don’t, because the bitch had gone bounding off through the pines and into the woods behind them.
It was quite a while before she returned to me, none the worse for the wear, and all I wanted to do was drive straight home and get my feet up. Except…
Whoops.
I assumed we were just low and oil—which in fact we turned out to be. I added two full liters of oil at a gas station on the way home, but the light refused to go out.
The car ended up needing some expensive service. Because of course it did, right as we were about to find out our quarterly natural gas bill was going to be more than we ordinarily pay for a full year’s worth.
Meanwhile, AP Pension held an employee day at Bakken. Molli had to work, so we let Maddie bring her old friend Astrid. We’ll get to them in a minute, but first: years ago Bakken recreated downtown Korsbæk, the fictional setting of the beloved miniseries Matador, and I had never seen it before.
They even had actors interacting with the public in character:
Trine and I ended up having hot drinks at the Korsbæk bakery while Maddie and Astrid went amok on the rides.
Including this old beauty, a wooden rollercoasters from 1932. (Bakken bills itself as “the oldest amusement park in the world,” which it is, but the Coney Island “Cyclone” predates the Bakken roller coaster by five years.)
But Coney Island doesn’t have actual Ents:
I will forever associate the floom at Bakken with the ride Nana took with Sophie at the time of our wedding, but Maddie and Astrid had a pretty good time on it:
This Bakken visit came while the Mar a Lago raid was still in the news, and I couldn’t help feeling that the park’s restaurants had come under FBI scrutiny…
That’s it for Bakken. That was August 28th.
About a week later there was an extraordinary meeting of our neighborhood union (grundejerforening). One of our members was suing the board—it is his way, the whole reason I dropped out as revisor after four or five uneventful years serving in that stupid, simple capacity was that the effer dropped several letters in our mailbox threatening to hold me (among other board members) personally liable for the expense our union had incurred by building the bathing bridge that the union had enthusiastically voted to have built because, in his stupid twisted view, the expense was somehow not a legitimate use of neighborhood funds.
In any case, without getting into too much detail, the same crazy wanker was suing the board that had replaced those of us on the previous board (who had resigned en masse from lawsuit-threat fatigue), and he was making demands that, while insane and absurd and opposed by every other resident of our neighborhood, actually might be technically sustainable given the right judge in the right mood at the right time because his entire mania was based on a particular reading of a particular sentence in our by-laws.
The extraordinary meeting was held to determine whether we should simply cave in to his demands, or commit to hiring a law firm to stop his lawfare harassment for once and for all.
There were many fine speeches—god, I love local democracy; I love the way the most unassuming people can be suddenly be transported into flights of rhetoric of which Aristotle and Cicero would have approved.
I’m not being ironic. It was remarkable. A yea-nay voice vote was deemed too informal, so a piece of paper was passed around the room with the instructions that each household—not person, but household—should indicate with an “X” whether they supported going to court against this jackass.
It was democracy in its purest form, and I had to have a picture of the voting tablet:
Is it not beautiful? That’s a neighborhood taking a vow of solidarity and fellowship. I love it.
Speaking of beautiful: now a couple of pics of the proper subjects of this blog.
First, a selfie Maddie sent me… at some point. It’s in its right place chronologically, but I no longer remember where she was or what she was doing, although I suspect it involved sports.
Next, Molli. These are also pictures she sent me, both of them from a day of political events for youth.
The first from a booth that I assume was set up by the American embassy or consulate:
And the second is a shot of former two-time Prime Minister (and current party leader of his own new “Moderate” party) Lars Løkke Rasmussen giving a speech at the event.
And by now we’re clearly up to September 8th, because Maddie is not otherwise in the habit of sending me portraits of (the late lamented) Queen Elizabeth II.
Yes, and because it’s chronologically before this shot of Maddie all dolled up for a party at school on the 9th:
Morfar was in town at this point, and had been all week. He was therefore able to join us—along with Mormor, Jørgen, and Moster Mette—for Trine’s birthday dinner, which we celebrated at Hai Long.
We agreed presents would be opened at home over coffee and cake back at the house after dinner, but I had one small gift I demanded Trine open before the meal: a child’s princess jewelry kid that included a sparkly tiara that I insisted she wear.
Only a month earlier we’d celebrated the 25th anniversary of our being a couple, so Trine has now spent half of her life with me. I don’t know what I did to deserve that, or what cosmic lottery I won, but I’ve never stopped being grateful (and surprised) to have her by my side.
(I’d go into a whole, “Kære Trine…” speech right now, but we’re going to celebrate that birthday at some point in the near future and I’ve got save my speech for then.)
Now just some candids from the festivities back at the house…
Apparently I’m the only one who remembers Bill the Cat from Bloom County:
That was Trine’s big present from her parents and sister: a special outfit for winter bathing. Plush and warm on the outside, water- and windtight on the outside. And with gloves and socks to keep her digits cozy.
The new kitchen setup doesn’t include a bar, and the basement bar was eliminated years ago, so it was finally time to say goodbye to the last of the captain’s chairs. (We sold them within about four days of putting them up for sale.)
I spent a lot of August and September taking periodic breaks to elevate my feet: Didi got in the habit of wandering over to the bed, sitting beside me, and demanding affection.
It was meme-worthy.
At around this point we were fortunate enough to come by 9 kilos (about 20 pounds) of pork and 5 kilos (around 12 pounds) of lamb from a friend of a friend working for a butcher that had just completed their autumn slaughter but whose new freezers hadn’t yet arrived. We’re still finishing up last year’s cow, so by the time this year’s is ready for our freezer we should be thoroughly stocked to get through the winter. We’ll still need to buy fish and fowl, but meat prices can do what they want for the next few months.
It was a great relief when the kitchen came together enough to be used again—we’d made it about five weeks with only a toaster oven to cook with and the bathroom sinks for doing dishes.
One early mistake we made was putting the leftover food bin (recycled separately from ordinary garbage) under the new sink, the cabinet for which still lacked its door.
Didi quickly discovered her opportunity.
As I’ve already mentioned, Maddie’s class spent the last week of September on the Danish island of Bornholm. Here’s the first selfie she sent on arrival:
Quite a coincidence that her class should be on Bornholm at the one moment in all of human history at which all the eyes of the world were upon it: the discovery of the Nord Stream pipeline leaks occurred the very day of their arrival. (Maddie has assured me they had nothing to do with it, but she hasn’t actually proved it.)
Meanwhile, I was still having to elevate my foot several times a day, and it was no longer just Didi craving my attention at such times.
Emma was clearly the animal least distressed by all the renovations: while Didi and CharLee seemed to be anxious about the disappearance of their favorite hangout spots, Emma took them where she could find them.
Three cat pix in a single post? I doubt I’ve done that since they were kittens.
I got my vote mailed in on time for the mid-terms:
I had given Molli all the information and materials she needed to register to vote, and had offered to help her if wanted help, but I also said I wouldn’t register her myself because if she couldn’t make the effort to do it herself then she probably wasn’t engaged enough to vote anyway.
The deadline has now lapsed and she will not be casting a vote in the mid-terms. She says she didn’t feel like she knew enough to make an intelligent vote, and I respect that.
Meanwhile, more pictures from Maddie’s Bornholm expedition… as with all the girls’ unaccompanied travel pictures, I’m not really sure what we’re looking at in all of these, but I figure if they meant enough to send them to us, they’re worth preserving here in the world’s largest and longest-running family photo album…
The last night in Bornholm, Maddie lost track of her phone. She called on a friend’s phone for help in locating it. Here’s what Life 360 showed me:
I was having a hard-time trying to access the phone on Find-My-iPhone, which would have enabled me to activate the phone’s siren, making it easier for them to find it (since it was so obviously in or near their lodgings). Naturally, though, her phone’s battery died before I was able to get Find-My-iPhone up and running. So that was that.
Buh-bye, phone.
Speaking of finding things on the internet, though, our new stove can be controlled remotely with an app:
So can our new fridges and freezer. I’m not sure what the advantage it is, but I entertained myself for one whole evening alone at home by turning the oven on and off from the couch. (Yes, I’m chronologically slouching toward sixty, but in terms of my amusements I’m still stuck around nine or ten.)
On the first of October, Klaus threw a party to celebrate his 90th birthday. (That’s 1080 months.)
All the usual suspects were there, but there were also a lot of people I didn’t recognize. I was relieved when Trine said she’d been experiencing the same thing: “there are all these people here I don’t think I’ve ever seen before,” she told me.
(I feel like I have to note that that’s not exactly what she told me, because I’m so frequently accused of having cited my subjects inaccurately. She almost certainly used different words in a different order to communicate that there were a considerable number of individuals present whose acquaintance she had not previously had the pleasure of making.)
Later she found out why and told me: the gregarious Klaus is a notoriously social man and had apparently been inviting everyone he met for the foregoing couple of weeks to come by his party. So a lot of the guests were people no one but Klaus knew.
I had brought the Olympus along so I could get lots of good pictures of everyone in attendance, only to discover that its battery was dead. So I just went around taking random shots with my phone to try and get at least one including everyone in attendance. I failed, and the pictures are mostly awful, but they’re what I have.
There was plenty of fine food and drink to be had, including a Pølsevogn—a sausage wagon—that offered several kinds of sausage and hot dogs as well as flæskesteg sandwiches.
That last pic is a shot of our contingent making its way back to our car. There are horses up there, and I remembered with a kind of pang of the heart how long I used to think that driveway was, back in the days when the girls always wanted to walk up and see the horses: with their little tiny legs and insatiable curiosity about everything, just getting up and down that little bit of driveway was often a 20-30 minute excursion.
I was always impatient at moments like that: why can’t they walk faster? And now in retrospect I look back and think, why was I in such a damned hurry? What is better than taking such a walk with one’s own precious toddler, examining every fallen leaf along the way?
Here’s a photo of a dish Mormor had prepared and frozen for us: it belongs in the permanent record because it’s the first dish to have been prepared in our new kitchen.
This next picture also absolutely belongs as part of the permanent record: it’s Maddie getting ready for her first day of work at her first job, delivering papers and circulars once a week.
She’s getting 11-12 bucks an hour… the first job I ever had, I got $1.90 an hour. So good for her!
I accompanied her for the first part of her route on her first day: here she is setting off on her own (waaay in the distance) for the second part of her route, which she did on her own—as she’s been doing ever since.
Also for the permanent record: I wanted to know the cow’s numbers so I know which one we’re enjoying all next year.
I didn’t get them all, but I got a good start. Her’s 5932:
1910:
1964:
1973:
The difficult one is 1965, so I’ll need to get a picture of him or her because it would give me great, great pleasure to look at her obnoxious cow face while tucking into a delicious slice of her. (Friggin’ jerk cow… harumph harumph!)
Now we’re all caught up.
I won’t let as much time elapse before the next post, which will be dedicated entirely the house. As things stand now, we ought to have been almost entirely done on Friday, the last day of our autumn vacation. Instead we’re now crossing our fingers that things will be finished up in the forthcoming week.
Experience has taught us to be skeptical.
Beyond that, Halloween is rapidly approaching, and then we go bounding into holiday season: Thanksgiving, Mormor’s birthday, Maddie’s birthday, Advent Sundays, Christmas, New Years… and we’re doing our best to keep it all minimalist so we can afford our next round of utility bills in January, when we also have to make a property tax payment. It’s October 22 as I finish this post off, and we still haven’t turned the heat on for the season. It’s been bearable so far—we’re wearing warmer clothes and making a lot of fires, and using space heaters to give cooler rooms a 5-10 minute blast of warmth before settling into them. So far, so good, but we’ve only one had overnight frost so far
Winter is still coming.
