It’s been a while.
I mean, yeah, sure, I published the Renovation post pretty recently, but I haven’t done an actual family post since the one that ended with Christmas.
So this post covers everything from New Year’s Eve right up until the very start of March.
And unfortunately the images got horribly scrambled somehow (it happens sometimes, I don’t understand how or why), so although a lot of photos from the same event or clustered together, a lot are not.
Instead of struggling to get them all in order, though, I’m just going to take the pictures as they come.
So forget all about chronology—we don’t need no stinkin’ chronology—and let’s just have some fun bouncing around the past couple of months… the very last of my twentieth full year in Copenhagen. (We flew out of Newark Airport on the 28th of March in 2003, and arrived in Copenhagen on the morning of the 29th.)
We start, weirdly, with a picture of Maddie at a museum she visited with Mormor during winter vacation.
Cut to: the forest in winter.
A shot from late February: spring beginning to sproing!
A birthday lunch for Moster Mette on or around her birthday in the middle of January (there are more of these to come):
Back to late February and spring really sproinging:
And now some shots of (and around) Kirkeværløse Church one sunny but cold February afternoon.
(Relevance to follow.)
Working from home one day (doesn’t matter when), I heard weird animal sounds from the hallway. Opened the office door to this:
CharLee and Didi were having a mad stand-off in the hallway; I just managed to get this pic right before CharLee decided she’d put Didi in her place and could at last retreat into our bedroom.
Our dentist’s new office has a great view of Tivoli and the Main Train Station.
Tivoli looks awfully bleak this time of year:
But I think this is a pretty nice stock photo of Hovedbanegaard:
Not a very snowy winter this year, but we did get dustings.
Oh my god, excitement: I check our gas meters weekly, and I just happened to catch it just before it rolled over! So exciting!
(I didn’t have the patience to wait for it to roll all the way over, sorry.)
And now we’re back to Moster Mette’s birthday lunch.
And now we zig a zag to a picture from Trine’s annual julefrokost with Chicksene. Superhero theme.
Scenes from the Nyborg factory shut down… Morfar was out there most of the month of February working around the clock to break everything down, and Trine and I helped out once in the middle of winter vacation and once on a Sunday in the end of February. We were able to help by schlepping stuff off in a trailer to the very nearby recycling dump and providing a little extra brute force.
We got to know the dump staff pretty well.
This next picture looks in on the factory floor from the door to the offices and was taken the morning of our winter vacation visit.
And this next one was taken from about the same place but only a slightly different angle at the end of our Sunday ten days later.
I have a lot more pictures and there are plenty of stories, but none are really relevant here, so we’ll move along.
We finally got Maddie set up to paint in the basement, and she’s been very happy to resume painting, but she’s also been sketching a lot lately.
For the permanent record: at some point this winter I bumped into an article about trends in Danish naming, and it got me curious, so I did some quick research and found:
There are 34 people in Denmark named Molli, and 104 named Maddie. There are 13,129 named Trine and just 17 named Greg. The “peaks” for each name were as follows: Molli peaked in 2019 with 5 newborns getting the name. Maddie peaked in 2016 with 14. Trine peaked in 1988 with 397. Greg peaked in 2001, with… one.
Sigh.
I thought it would only be fair to check the American stats.
There are 673 Americans named Molli and 1,959 named Maddie. There are only 506 Americans named Trine, but there are 327,538 Gregs.
Greg power for the win! Boo-ya! That’s more Gregs in America than there are men in Copenhagen!
Weirdly, although 100% of Americans named Molli or Maddie are female and 100% of Americans named Greg are male, only 90% of Americans named Trine are female.
One sad note this winter:
Because we’re all mixed up chronologically, my favorite bit of netsam during this period comes in the middle of the post, instead of at the end:
Hey, we’re back to the museum!
That exhibit was focused on H.C. Andersen, by the way, and it included a little shadowbox that one could use to put on one’s own production. We have a video of Maddie doing an improvised story in the shadowbox, in the role of H.C. Andersen himself. It’s in Danish and it’s a variant of the Little Matchstick Girl with a happy ending (and therefore nothing at all like the original). If you’d like to see it, just let me know.
Meanwhile, we’re back to Kirkeværløse Church, and Maddie getting baptized in preparation for her Confirmation in just a couple of months.
…alongside her Dad!
Trine’s ex-step-brother Uffe visited New York in February. He’d dropped me a line in January asking about that dive off of Times Square where Trine and I used to sit down and have drinks while whatever friends or family were visiting us went gawking around the Square. I sent him the address for Jimmy’s Corner and promptly forgot all about it until I awoke one morning a few weeks later to find this in my inbox:
According to Uffe it’s still the same old Jimmy’s.
“I just can’t believe that they charge less for beer in 2023 than I used to pay at the dives in Milwaukee twenty years ago.”
Nice to know some things stand the test of time.
One of the final touches of our renovations was mounting exactly the right coathooks in exactly the right part of the foyer. I was skeptical at the level of thought and planning that went into them, and of my ability to mount them correctly, but everything seems to have worked out very nicely.
The best way to tell if you’ve hung your coathooks in the right place is to see whether or not guests just instinctively hang their coats and jackets there without asking “where do I put my jacket?”
The new hooks have so far passed that test with flying colors.
Zip! Suddenly we’re back to New Year’s Eve.
We begin, as always, with the Queen’s speech:
Some sparkles to heighten the excitement:
It’s now an ancient family tradition to have fondue on New Year’s Eve, but this year Trine introduced a curveball: a shrimp-salad-serve-in-avocado-halves appetizer.
Curveball closeup:
I hate this picture of me, but wanted to prove I was in the house:
Whoops: brief warp in the space-time-continuum. Look, we finally got a handle on our under-sink cabinet, and it actually now closes properly!
And now back to New Year’s Eve: same procedure as every year, James.
The city hall clock we traditionally rely on to chime in the new year was sporting a Ukrainian flag this year. Is it bad to be feeling Ukrainian Flag Fatigue? Russia bad, yes, and hooray for Ukraine, but do we have to put their flag everywhere?
Aftermath:
Aftermath with photo bomb:
There were a bunch of pictures of the kitchen here: I’ve deleted them because first of all I think they were used in the previous post, and second of all because they’re missing some of the final very minor adjustments we’ve made this winter.
But I am including this shot of a Danish pork roast because it was made in the new air fryer and came out perfectly… like almost everything else we’ve cooked in that machine since Christmas.
Emma in her element:
For the permanent record (this photo and many like it are saved in the “Technical” folder): we finally dismantled the handball net that’s been a dominant feature of our yard for about ten years.
With its dismantling, our yard has now fully transitioned out of childhood. At one point we had a sandbox, a swingset, a trampoline, and a handball net. They’re all gone. I’m glad to have the yard back, but it’s a little bittersweet to say goodbye to the last of the kid’s equipment.
Søndersø in winter:
As previously mentioned, we celebrated Mette’s birthday at our house:
A fallen log in the forest was covered with what I just now learned are called “Chicken of the Woods” mushrooms, which I thought weirdly photogenic.
Apparently they’re not just photogenic but edible, and allegedly quite tasty… when cooked, the authoritative sources inform us, they have a consistency similar to that of chicken. Hence the name.
Our old New York friend Cheyenne came through town and I managed to have time for a beer and then dinner with her and her Danish boyfriend.
Rooting for that relationship to work, because it would be great to have an old American friend here in Denmark.
Chicken of the Woods II:
And somehow the chronological disruption seems to have clumped a bunch of Hareskov-in-winter pictures together, even though (I think) they’re from very different periods:
…and here’s a set of house pictures I won’t delete, because I think they’re more recent, and in any case I can’t even tell whether the finishing touches had been applied before they were taken.
I love that Maddie is old enough to be reading Jane Austen but still young enough to think a Rapunzel bookmark is pretty neat.
I’m sure I took this picture for a reason, but I no longer remember it. Probably it was just part of the preceding cluster.
We had some car problems from December into February; at one point after jumping it I had to take the car for a long drive just to get the battery recharged enough to be reliable, and I swung by the old factory in Væssingerød… and was surprised to see the old signage still intact.
And there’s the old Stormax:
Didi can be very needy sometimes.
We once had an annual tradition of the Pats in the Super Bowl at the start of each February (the girls grew up thinking of the Super Bowl was just the Pats’ last game of the season). Times change, and now it’s a biennial tradition to watch the Danish men’s handball team win the World Championship.
Seriously: third time in a row (2019, 2021, 2023).
Not that their championships are a given…
Out of nowhere, in the middle of the World Championship final against France, here’s one of the fine old paintings Maddie sent us from her internship at Statens Museum for Kunst.
The girl has exquisite taste in fine art, I think. I can’t remember the artist or period, but I am 100% with Maddie that that’s a spectacular painting and work of art. There’s so much going on there: it’s like the girls are very happy to have the artist’s attention and are being quite coquettish, while the guy’s all, “What the hell are you looking at?” And there are the three businessmen in the background, one of them getting all in the face of another, probably spewing a bunch of business buzzwords from whatever century they’re in. And the cat!
Maddie was unimpressed overall with her one-week internship, however. Not because she didn’t enjoy getting to go “behind the scenes” at the museum, or because she didn’t love being around all that awesome old art, but because there really wasn’t that much work for them to do so mostly they were just shown around a lot or given busywork.
And now back to the Final, and it looks like Denmark is about to seal the deal…
And indeed they did. Mikkel Hansen stands on my personal pantheon of sports heroes alongside Roger Clemens, Michael Jordan, and Tom Brady.
Maddie made it into the big reception at City Hall the next day, but I never got any pictures from her.
I was at a team-building day at AP Pension that day: we started with a lot of personality-type voodoo that was, well, just a lot of silly team-building voo-doo, but I did find out that one of my colleagues thinks I’m “competition minded and wants to win at any price,” another thinks I “can make the impossible possible,” and another is very pleased with me but really needs to work on her handwriting. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
Seriously, it looks like “Greg murdered analy deter sladder lil daladreens beoburger,” which makes sense in no language I’m aware of.
We then went to one of those “escape room” places, which was fun. (And I only include this dumb photo of their sign to remind me of the name of the business in case some day we want to do it with friends.)
Afterwards we went out for Korean Barbecue served by robots. Really.
And oh, look, Maddie’s unerring eye finds another masterpiece:
That’s just a spectacular work on so many levels: the long-suffering look on a very human Jesus’ face, and the stupid mockery of a centurion who knows not what he does. It’s a strong piece. But only Maddie can name the artist and period: I have no idea.
February was mostly very cold but also unusually dry until the end of the month.
One weekend I woke up to one of the most fiery sunrises I’d ever seen, hence the next two pictures. They only hint at the blazing red that bathed the eastern sky.
I wish they did it justice, but the iPhone SE just isn’t a very good camera. I tell you the sky was ON FIRE!
Molli decided she wanted Moules Frites for dinner one night, and damned if she didn’t make it for the whole family… and aced it!
And yes, it was every bit as delicious as it looks. The mussels were steamed, obviously, but the potatoes were courtesy of the air frier and put any mere french fry to shame.
And finally… Didi wants all of your goddam attention right now!
That gets us through January and February, and maybe even a day or two into March.
March has been much more eventful: Maddie’s been taking final exams and taking school visits to gymnasiums. Her Thursdays are a little frantic: she gets home from school, does as much of her deliveries as she can, runs off to Farum for her barista class, then hurries home to finish her deliveries, which have to be done by 20:00. Amazing to see her get it all done every week and in some awful weather to boot. Molli’s been grinding away at her SRP, which I guess is kind of like a thesis that gymnasium students have to write and defend to graduate. She’s doing hers on American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis and seems to be doing good work on it. (From what I’ve seen of it I’d say it’s better than good.) Trine whisked me away for a birthday visit to Tallinn, and we’re still only about halfway through the month. So much more yet to come!
