That headline pretty well encapsulates the period covered in this post—mid-February right up to my birthday (which you all knows is smack dab blam in the middle of March).
It’s been a cold, wet winter, featuring periodic extremes of both, and we haven’t had many glimpses of spring. Ordinarily by this time of year we’d have had at least a couple of days where the sun shone brightly and the temperature got at least into the “tolerable” range above 10 Celsius. Not so this year. (Maybe one day in early in March the temperature hovered briefly around 11 or 12.) The days are getting lighter, and that’s a psychological boon, but as I sit down to write this on the cold and cloudy Sunday morning of March 17, there is a dusting of snow outside—not frost, but actual snow. A light dusting, but testament to a little snow squall while we slept. And the increasing light isn’t quite the boon it could be when the sky is thick with clouds. It’s been a gloomy winter, weather wise.
But weather is just weather.
The Kammer clan welcomed its newest addition in February: Josephine, the daughter of Klaus’s son Per, gave birth to a perfect little baby girl. Meet Felippa:
I’m not sure what to call her. Josephine is the daughter of Trine’s cousin, so little Felippa’s relationship to Trine is about the same as any of Todd, Salli, Jamie, or Pam’s kids to me. And her relationship to Molli and Maddie is the same as, say, Roxie or Ramona’s relationship to them. I know it’s one of those “second” or “removed” cases—first cousin once removed? Second cousin? It’s a mystery.
But an adorable mystery.
I don’t feel much older, despite the birthday I just had, but I can’t help noticing that all the people on Trine’s side of the family who were just little maniacs running around at all the family picnics when we first got here are suddenly having kids of their own. Maybe I am getting older.
For a school project, Maddie had to invent an animal and she used AI to illustrate it. It was a blend of a hawk and a parrot: a bird that can taunt its prey before killing it.
I finished scanning of all Nana and Pop Pop’s photographs in time to send them to America with Molli. I then began scanning our mountains of documents (amazing how much clutter we’re getting rid of just by scanning the hell out of things we no longer need physically).
I stumbled over this Molli Malou classic from many many moons ago, and I still think it’s the greatest book report in history:
In English
Book Title: Bears
Book Author: Claire Robinson
Tell the class briefly what the book is about: Bears
Draw something from the book: (picture of a bear)
What it you think of the book? It was good and fun
Why? It just is.
She wasn’t wrong, you know.
Selfie sent by Maddie on February 15.
I say it all the time: when the girls send me a selfie, unless the significance is obvious to me I assume the significance is obvious to them. This is their blog (mostly), so unless the photos are stupid, personal, or plainly meaningless, I will often include them here in the hopes that the girls will someday be grateful to find some trace of their memories (since neither of them ever, ever backs up their phones no matter how many times Daddy asks).
I said it was a wet winter, and I meant it: the groundwater is still just way too high. . . meaning so is Søndersø. The following pictures were taken at intervals, but I brought them all together here rather than having them always popping up in the middle of other things.
In mid-February, the spring teasers popped up all over:
This year it turned to have been just one big psych.
Documentation: I did vote in the New York primary. Molli did not, although she could have, which is wildly weird. (Unless she secretly registered while in New York and then requested, received, and cast an absentee ballot of her own. I find that… unlikely.)
I’m always trimming the apple tree too late, often well into April. I had meant to do it in January this year, but the weather was too awful. I got around to it in February.
Before:
After:
I only took the after picture yesterday, weeks after the trim, because I actually did the work over two weekends (it was cold!), then had to wait another week to haul all the trimmed wood away.
Then I just kept forgetting to get my after shot.
Home Improvement
Anticipating our exciting new fireplace, I took this picture of our old one for the permanent record back in November:
Last month I shared this picture, taken shortly after our contractor informed us the oven we’d ordered wasn’t going to fit in that chimney.
In the end we decided to build out the chimney rather than order a new stove: we had chosen the stove for a lot of very good and very particular reasons and weren’t in a mood to compromise. (The contractor gave us a discount on building out the chimney because, after all, they were the geniuses who’d done the measurements and told us it would fit.)
The next set of pictures were taken over several weeks.
That’s it! Structurally complete!
That was our first fire: February 26 (in case it comes up in a trivia question, which it just might). The cement was still drying but the contractor had said we could probably have a fire that Saturday night, so of course we did.
Next came the aesthetics.
Pretty much all done, except for the moulding around the base. And here it comes:
Except:
Yeah, the big dodo was supposed to take out the old molding from the shallower chimney and replace it. That was the agreement he’d made with Trine—but only verbally, alas. Instead he just added to it. I was working from home the day he was doing it, and when I came out and noticed what he was doing I said, “whoa, weren’t you going to replace the whole panels?”
He said, “If I was gonna do that, I should have done it before I painted.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then you probably should have done it then.”
“Yeah, well,” he said.
It’s not a catastrophe, it’s just annoying.
That much said, we are now having fires almost every night. They’re easy to start, they produce great heat, they’re gorgeous, and we are very, very happy with the new fireplace.
A couple of other adjustments had to be made, however. For one, our chimney fan is way too powerful and it’s also either on or off: there’s no “dimmer” to control its sucking power (oh for god’s sake, stop snickering, don’t be children about it).
For the permanent record, then, here is the next problem to solve: after providing the following photographs to an expert, we were told we have an Exodraft RSV9 Røgsuger (“smoke sucker”—stop snickering!). We needed the expert to tell us because the panel that tells you that sort of thing had faded completely.
Fortunately there are several models of control mechanism that can be installed to control the sucking power (stop it!) and usage, ranging from a simple manual dial to a system that includes chimney temperature monitors, “smart” automatic control of fan strength, and an app for remote control. We’re figuring we’ll go with a middling route—neither totally manual nor supersonically automated—not because the simplest (and cheapest) model wouldn’t be fine, but because we figure our fine smart house should have fine smart features for eventual resale. The house is, after all, our biggest investment.
Anyway, for the permanent record: our smoke sucker.
I said we had to make “a couple” of other adjustments: the smoke sucker was just one.
The other arose because these stoves work optimally with smaller logs than those you get when you buy by the pallet. We have an axe, so I figured I could just chop our bigger wood into littler pieces on an as-needed basis.
That’s what I figured. Then I tried it, and got nowhere. Our axe is old, dull, and weather-beaten. It was misery. I was defeated.
Then Trine found the King Cracker online:
It’s bigger than it looks: the diameter of that thing is 23 cm (9 in). You plop a log into it, tap it a couple of times with a little sledgehammer, and bada bing—split wood!
It’s so easy! I actually kind of like splitting wood, and am much less likely to lose any fingers or toes!
(Actually the product history informs us that it was invented by a girl whose mother had hurt herself badly with an axe while splitting wood.)
Back to Life
Trine, too, paid a visit to Kvickly during Maddie’s working hours to get a view of the hard-working girl.
(She was actually smiling in one of the pictures, but it was otherwise a crappy picture so I went with clarity of subject rather than expression.)
Molli in New York
On the afternoon of March 2, we drove Molli to the airport for her trip to visit Sophie in New York.
The poor thing had been sick all week. Had been to the doctor and everything. Negative for covid, so assumption was: bad cold or flu or whatever. They took some tests, but didn’t detect anything.
Anyway, she wasn’t too sick to make the trip, so off she went!
Next morning, there she was chez Sophie:
I’m not sure these pictures are in the right order: I got them from multiple sources, and because they came from SMS transfers not all of them had their timestamp data embedded.
(Revelation: Molli didn’t remember ever having had a McDonald’s hash brown before, and was apparently awed by their sheer deliciousness.)
Molli’s heart had been set on a “seafood boil” from the moment she booked this trip, and based on Aunt Deb’s account (and the pictorial evidence) Molli savored every bit of it.
Unfortunately, however, Molli was still sick and wasn’t able to really taste her seafood boil.
Then one day she got a text from her doctor back here in Værløse: oh by the way your test came back you have strep so I entered a prescription in the system and you can pick it up any time.
The poor girl had been adjusting her behavior to fight a cold or flu—resting, drinking tea, eating soup, even spending one whole day of her New York week in bed—when all she’d needed all along was anitbiotics. Getting her the antibiotics in New York was a tricky bit of business but eventually succeeded. Molli even managed to go out and have another seafood boil, just by herself, so she could taste it fully.
In front of Macy’s:
(Clearly just taunting me with that one.)
That’s Molli’s travelogue from her trip to New York—from our point of view, anyway.
Most importantly, she finally loves New York.
And Finally
A couple of Didi shots from the period:
And a few shots from Friday, my actual 59th birthday.
Came into work to find this deliciousness waiting on my desk:
Properly festooned per Danish tradition:
Big AP Pension party that night—not for me, although it obviously should have been, but just because (reasons).
Two big Danish acts performed: here’s Jada:
And then Infernal—just your typical hard-rocking electro band with a lead bagpipe:
The reason those pics are from so far off is that I preferred to keep my distance from the amps. And a good thing: the 20-something girls who pressed to be up front got completely spattered with smoke from the smoke machine, vodka from the guys and woman of Infernal, and finally the confetti you see in that last shot. They thought that was fun, so good for them.
I thought being dry and comfortable on the train ride home was nice, so good for me.
And that’s it. Like I said, it’s March 17th as I write this. We had a little family celebration of my birthday yesterday—very little, really just a family dinner out at Hai Long and then opening of presents at home.
In front of a blazing fire.
Obviously.
# # #
It looks like we may get a sneak preview of spring this week—a couple of days with temperatures over 10 Celsius—and the week after that is already the start of the spring holidays: Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, plus the following Monday after that off as “Easter Day 2.”
Molli will be going to Tenerife over her Easter break with a work colleague she’s befriended, so maybe there’s another Molli travelogue in the next post. Unless I wait long enough to include Trine’s and my long weekend in Poland to visit Lisa on April 19.
Which I think I will, because we’re awfully busy until then.
Meanwhile, I’ll just focus on the up side of this protracted winter weather: we can keep having fires every night!
