My intentions were good. In the last post I said the next post would be the landscaping post. That was not true. I said some future post would include additional pictures from Geoff and Austin of me, Trine, and the girls. They did not send them. (They gave me access to a photo album of their own favorite pics, but they weren’t the pictures I wanted, damn them.) The hell with intentions: here we are.
That last post was published on October 9. It is now the 29th of November.
There aren’t many pictures of the girls in this post. Hardly any. In fact, if all you want to see is pictures of Molli and Maddie—the stars of this blog and the very point of its existence—just scroll on down to the three group pictures from Thanksgiving, then you’re done. There’s also a picture of Molli’s hand holding a roasted chestnut. That’s something.
For reasons I cannot explain, we open with this picture Maddie sent of some Bistro downtown where she and her Marie Kruses Skole classmates had a class dinner on November 13.
“It’s the finest place I’ve ever been to,” she texted me and Trine, insulting not just us but everyone who has access to this blog, “and we all came in here dripping wet!”
Now let’s go back to the real chronological start of this post. An October 13 romp in Hareskov with Didi: fall is coming.
Two days later, Molli stupefies us all by coming home with a sack of chestnuts that she roasts just like Mormor.
They came out perfectly: buttery soft and smooth. So of course family members were only allowed one chestnut each.
For the permanent record, it was that very day we realized we couldn’t go another day without a working dishwasher. Trine and I therefore raced out to the Power store in Herlev and bought a new one. The landscaping expenses had hit us so hard that we were in a period of low liquidity, so we actually took a big chunk of our emergency cash out of the safe. . .
And three days later a couple of guys came along, removed the old dishwasher, and replaced it with a shiny new model that would go a whole five or six days before coming loose in its mounting and wobbling around like hell—and ejecting the upper rack whenever you opened the door. I’m pleased to report that after a hellish few weeks of dealing with that functional but almost ambulatory dishwasher, a guy came out just two days ago, removed the new dishwasher, gave me a creative soliloquy on the skills of the guys who’d mounted it, and installed a brand new replacement. So far, so good.
We also got a plumber to fix the washing machine—it just needed a water filter replacement or something, so it was really just a coincidence that the two water-using machines should have gone belly up within hours of each other.
Meanwhile, on October 17, I hit the 12 thousand kilometer mark on my bike.
(I could have just said so, but all this “picture or it didn’t happen” stuff has infected me.)
On October 19, Trine and I had our one day of cattle wrangling as part of this year’s cow club.
We bought a quarter share of one of those lovely beasts—#11, as it turned out—and received the meat on the same day we celebrated Thanksgiving. You’ll see.
Here’s Didi playing “catch the falling leaves” in Hareskov. We’re up to October 20th.
By the 22nd we were close enough to Halloween that it was time to decorate at least a little.
I was never a Deadhead, but I sure felt like one hanging that up:
AP Pension, my employer, has built a new building that we’ll be moving into in January. It’s a gorgeous building in a fantastic location. One of the guys responsible for getting all the IT installed correctly is a former PensionDanmark guy, so he arranged a special walk-through for a small group of former PensionDanmark employees now working at AP Pension. (We are many, we are legion, but only a few of us had shown up to the monthly group lunch on the day he made his offer.)
Here’s the building from outside, which isn’t particularly impressive from this angle:
And, left to right, Cindie, Shahbaz, and Louise—all former PDers—and Kenneth, who didn’t work at PD but is part of our group at AP Pension. (I write all this because I know how much you care, I know how important it is for everyone to familiarize themselves with my colleagues.)
The advantage of being with colleagues instead of family is that at least one person always says, “Let me get one of you, Greg.”
The interior is still very much under construction.
The views are much nicer than the apartment blocks and parking lots we stare out at now.
Speaking of AP Pension, on October 26 our good friend Bodil had a 50th birthday party downtown. There were about 40 guests. Through her husband Søren, Bodil has been a good friend of ours since the year we moved here. We have watched each other’s children grow up. We have a lunch together every other month. Every other month for nearly two decades!
And whom should I see when I walk into the bar where Bodil’s party is being held but a woman I have been working with every single day for the last couple of years, who turns out to have been a friend of Bodil’s for about ten years.
In fact, Pia—that’s her name—had been at several of Søren and Bodil’s parties we attended in the past, but neither of us had remembered the other well enough to recognize each other when we found ourselves working together back in 2022.
Small world, right? Especially in Denmark.
There was shuffleboard at the party—Euro shuffleboard, anyway, which is just a tabletop version of the American game—and I only include this picture to show just how crazy curly Trine’s hair has become. She didn’t get a perm or anything: it just started curling on its own about a year ago, more or less.
The next picture is taken from one of my bike rides home from work. This one was on October 27, and it was taken at 15:55 in the afternoon.
I rode my bike to and from work today (Friday Nov. 29) for the last time this year: too dark and too cold in both directions for me to get any pleasure at all from the commute.
Like this guy says:
That was actually Maddie and Lucas’s carved pumpkin, and it’s the only picture I have of Halloween 2024 because we have apparently moved beyond Halloween. No costumes, no trick or treating. Lots of kids at the door, though, which was nice.
On the other hand, the fallen leaves were pretty spectacular.
In full resolution, it’s such a nice picture I’ve thought about getting it printed as a poster. But I think about a lot of things.
New air-fryer trick: stegte flæsk on skewers so they fry perfectly. . .
But you may notice my rookie mistake: I didn’t do them all with the rind side up. Live and learn.
We set our alarms for 2:00 our time on November 6 to follow live American election coverage.
When will I learn? Henceforth we set our alarms for 5:00.
5:30?
We were obviously pleased with the results but this ain’t a political blog so I’ll leave it at that.
Autumn was wrapping things up the next day.
And yes, I actually stopped biking to take the following picture of my bike’s odometer because I am not at all a total geek.
(Oh, come on: you would have, too!)
We’re up to November 16 now, which was both the day our quarter cow was delivered and the date of our Thanksgiving celebration with Steve & Elizabeth and their kids (Rebecca and Sebastian).
Cow #11 looked a whole lot different in our kitchen than he did back in October.
We got 68.8 kilos of meat, about 36 of it ground beef (we made 54 packages of 600g, plus another 14 of various other sizes). We also got another 15 kilos worth of bones and fat, all of which will be put to very good use.
Trine’s carnivore diet will probably help us work our way through #11 quicker than we’ve made it through our cows in the past, especially since the rest of us have started doing pseudo-carnivore.
And here are a couple of shots from what was, I think, our 15th Thanksgiving together.
None of me, as usual.
But wait—!
And now a view of the house under the Super Moon of November 17:
..followed immediately by a view looking out at the yard on the 20th.
The morning of the 21st. . .
That afternoon. . .
The afternoon of the 22nd. . .
(Yep, I’ve snuck in a couple of shots of yard reveals, but there really will be a Landscaping Project 2024 post at some point in the near future.)
On the morning of the 23rd, at what Danes would call “klokken lort,” or “shit o’clock,” Trine and I shoved off for Portugal.
Here’s a fun shot of Lagos as we made our descent:
I’m pretty sure that stretch of beach on the left is where Trine, Maddie, and I visited a couple of years ago.
It was just the two of us on this trip. Prize parenting, right? “Enjoy the snowy crap weather, girls, Mor and Daddy are going down to the sun for five days. Don’t kill each other or burn down the house. See ya.”
We made it to Morfar’s house not long after noon and pulled our rental car in right alongside his new car.
Blue was thrilled to see us.
Scroll up a little to remind yourself what Denmark was like when we left it Saturday morning. And here we are that afternoon. . .
Still my favorite Danish book title of all time: God Mad, meaning “Good Food” or “Good Meals.”
As an English speaker, though, you just see “God Mad” and think. . . well, that’s the whole fun of it, there are so many things you can think.
Christmas at the mall in summery weather. . .
I always dine local when traveling.
That’s a family with the mall Santa, obviously. I lived in LA for 5 years and got used to the whole “Christmas among the palm trees” thing, but it’s been long enough since then that I found it kind of jarring.
Good news, girls—there’s a Normal at the Algarve Mar mall now!
At this rate they’ll have a Joe & the Juice and a Netto by summer.
The visit was very mellow. We hardly did anything at all. We ate at restaurants (almost) every night and then stayed up later than we should have talking over more nightcaps than we probably technically needed.
You have to squint a little to see me, but this is the only shot from the trip in which all three of us are visible.
I went into Loule for a haircut, as usual, and was struck by the weird white metallic Christmas tree they’d mounted in the city center.
Hair cut at “The Barberhouse” was a great success, so here’s a shot for the permanent record:
Gert’s friend Vincent gave us a tour of a property he’s developing. It’s spectacular, and if any of us can come up with 10 million dollars by Easter (his expected completion date), it can be ours!
He called it a “mini estate” and it’s going to have everything — vineyard, orchard, tennis court, 3 hole golf course, stables, everything. It’s only a 4 bedroom house, but every detail is just perfectly thought out. . . and it even has an outdoor bathroom. (Privacy assured.)
Nice, right? So where do we get the 10 million euros?
Look at Lulu in the next picture: I’d never before seen a cat actually smile:
More good news, girls! There are going to be 25 new shops at the Algarve Mar mall by next summer!
The restaurant D’Alena is on a steep hillside overlooking a valley that extends all the way to the sea. It’s as impressive a view at night as it is by day, even if it doesn’t really play in photos.
One last shot of Lulu:
And that was that.
Buh-bye, sunshine paradise!
And about 3½ hours later, hello dreary winter Denmark. . .
That’s it! We’re caught up!
Well, except for stuff not represented in pictures, and there just hasn’t been that much stuff worth mentioning, even for the permanent record. It’s been a busy fall with all of us back at work (and Maddie at school), and a lot of our free time has been spent coping with, adapting to, and recovering from the landscaping project. There weren’t many pictures of the girls because frankly we don’t see them very often these days—we bump into them now and then in the hallway, or in the kitchen, and once in a blue moon we may actually have a meal with them, but we’re all very busy and that’s as it should be.
But I guarantee the next post—the next post after the landscaping post—will be full of Molli Malou and Maddie for obvious reasons. The first of those being that Maddie turns 16 on Tuesday. Here’s a shot of her taken almost exactly ten years ago:
Besides the election, there was a lot of other big stuff going on the world during this period, much of it horrible—the firing of American and British missiles deep into Russia, the firing of an ICBM from Russia into Ukraine, Sino-Russian sabotage of undersea cables in the Baltic (the guilty ship is still being held by the Danish navy as I write this), a pogrom in Amsterdam, and yada yada yada.
So now I’ll wrap it up with my favorite bits of netsam from this period.
I apologize for this one being a little off-color, but c’mon, it’s hilarious.
The next is one of my favorites of all time.
Finally, a finalist on my list of best puns ever:
And that’s it! See you next time.
