Year's End - Nagan of Copenhagen

It’s January now. Aunt Deb and Uncle Gene are still somewhere down in Antartica, which is a phrase I didn’t expect to ever pen, and the rest of us are muddling on into reality after a refreshing holiday break.

Mostly refreshing. Also a little traumatic. You’ll see.

(ooh! a post with dark foreshadowing! exciting!)

We pick up at the end of November. The very end, in fact, with this picture of the lake taken on the 30th.

The 30th was a Saturday, so the next day wouldn’t just be any old Sunday, but also the first day of December and the first Advent Sunday.

Trine made this beautiful advent candle entirely on her own, and was rightly proud of its classic beauty.

Didi was unimpressed.

(Didi’s always unimpressed unless she smells food.)

So here it is, the first Sunday of Advent!

(And also “Maddie’s Birthday Eve.”)

The first 23 evenings of December revolve at least partly around finding time to watch the Christmas calendar, which this year was Tidsrejsen 2, a sort of sequel to 2016’s Tidsrejsen.

Molli stopped watching with us years ago, and this year even Maddie was only partly invested. Trine and I persevered without the kids and watched every night. We were grateful for their company when either one of them joined us, but their absence didn’t affect our desire to watch.

Maddie turned 16 the next day. It was a Monday, so we kept the celebration small: a family dinner at Hai Long.

Sixteen is legal, so the owner gifted Maddie a bottle of champagne. (Which she saved for New Year’s Eve.)

It’s astonishing that the baby of the family—the youngest of her generation—is now sixteen.

Future Maddie, you can and should be proud of who were as you went into your seventeenth year. You’re doing well at school, holding down a job, maintaining a healthy relationship, and finally even have a group of girlfriends to hang out with. You’re a brilliant, creative, beautiful, hard-working, and very funny young woman, and I’m proud to call you my daughter.

(Current Maddie: don’t let it go to your head. You still need to clean your room and wash your dishes, dammit.)

I finally posted the landscaping post last month, apparently just days before the carpenters showed up out of the blue and finished their work. So here, in a mini-addendum, are the new gates.

First, by the carport:

Why yes, yes that is a considerable gap between the cherry laurels and the gatepost. But that’s a project for next spring.

Here’s the back gate, between the back yard and the alley. First from the yard looking toward the alley:

And now from the alley looking toward the yard:

And now another shot of the front gate, this time from the carport:

Besides filling that gap, this spring we’ll paint both gates black to match the house and it’ll all be gorgeous.

Mormor had us all over for a belated birthday dinner of her own on the 4th.

We’re all incredibly annoyed by Didi’s barking—she’s really the perfect dog in every other way, sweet and affectionate and calm, except anyone visiting or even passing by the house instigates a five minute freakout of barking.

I asked GPT how to stop it and was informed it could be that she’s just bored. Give her a dog puzzle or something to occupy her mind, it said. That might help.

So I did.

She figured it all out way too quickly, making the toy useless within about an hour of getting it.

I tried again with a puzzle cube Christmas present for her, but she can’t figure that one out at all.

So much for that theory.

We had a nice birthday dinner for Maddie on the 7th.

I was in town to meet a friend for a drink one Wednesday evening, and I got in a little too early so passed a little time in Tivoli.

That’s actually the only picture I took, but there are more (better) Tivoli Christmas pictures to follow, so hang in there.

The AP Pension Christmas lunch was postponed until February so we could enjoy it in our new building, which we move into on January 20, so our little team had a little julehygge of our own out at our team leader’s house in Nærum.

I’d been working from home that day. Trine needed the car that afternoon, but Google Maps said it was just a 45-minute bike ride, so I decided to saddle up and make it a bike trip. It wasn’t too cold, and the day was dry.

I only realized when it was too late that the route went through the woods—or rather, I’d recognized that all along, but didn’t realize until too late that the bike path in question was narrow, windy, hilly, and in some places under a layer of slick leaves. Like banana peels. Making it even more exciting, there was one stretch of a few hundred yards where the path got especially narrow and ran along the edge of an almost vertical drop into a lake.

I made it without any problems, but realized there was no way in hell I could possibly make it home the same way in the dark. This was December 12—the eighth shortest day of the year.

Just for the permanent record (and my probably eventually fading memory), from left to right that’s Niels, Kenneth, Marthine, Louise, Cindie, Frederik, and Pia.

So I made it there, and it was fun, but at one point I noticed the sun was getting awfully low in the sky.

I checked, and it was just 23 minutes to sunset. Could I make it through the woods, which were a good 7-8 kilometers away, in time to get through them before darkness fell?

I left in a rushed panic and rode like hell. . . and didn’t quite make it. I was most of the way through the woods when darkness fell very abruptly. To make things even more fun, I lost my signal and Google Maps just kept doing that damn “recalculating route” thing, so I had to go from memory.

Except in my memory, the woods had been visible.

Fortunately, after walking my bike up a hill I didn’t remember having come down on my way out, I was able to see lights twinkling off not too far away. I set off in that direction, and a moment later was on a broad, flat path that led me straight out of the woods.

I took Friday the 13th off—I’d been taking a lot of days off here and there all fall because due to a policy change I had to use or lose a lot of days off I’d accumulated. Trine got off early that day, so we went into Tivoli to enjoy some Christmas cheer.

A kind woman saw me taking the awkward selfie above and offered to help us out.

Saturday the 14th was a dark day for us. The girls were out all day and Trine had spent most of the day Christmas shopping so I was home alone. It was a quiet and very ordinary day.

I was writing in the office. As evening fell, I heard a cat meowing outside the office door. I assumed one of them wanted to get down into the basement: that happens now and then.

But when I opened the office door, there was Charlee, just lying in the hallway. Didi stood at the end of the hall, looking on.

I assumed Charlee wanted to go in the living room and that Didi was blocking her way, so I got Didi to settle into her bed in the living room. Charlee then wandered into the foyer as I walked back to my office, and I assumed that would be that.

About half an hour later, I heard a couple of weird barks, and some more meows.

I went into the living room and found Charlee lying in the middle of the big open space there. She didn’t seem right—her just being there wasn’t right. I skritched her little head and she was responsive enough, but she didn’t move much. Something was wrong.

I put a little of her favorite wet food in a bowl and brought it to her. She wasn’t interested. That was my clue that something was very wrong. Meanwhile, though, Didi had started prancing around and barking because we always feed the animals at the same time: if I was feeding Charlee, she damn well wanted some food of her own. I thought it would be good to give her some food if only to get her out of my hair so I could return my attention to Charlee.

I quickly got her food, poured it in her bowl, turned back to Charlee—and she was gone! I mean gone! I hadn’t seen her whiz by my into the hallway, but she wasn’t anywhere to be seen in the front of the house, so I assumed she’d scrambled outside to avoid Didi’s attention and I just hadn’t noticed the sound of the cat flap.

Since she’d had the energy to disappear like that, I assumed everything was fine again. I went back to the office and resumed writing, until half an hour later it happened again: some barks, some meows.

I went back into the living room, and Charlee was lying close to the terrace door and panting. She was drooling. She didn’t look well. I called Trine, who was not just on her way home but almost literally around the corner.

She was home a moment later, and was just as concerned as I was. It was after hours, so she called the emergency vet. She sat beside Charlee, stroking her gently while she talked to the vet on the phone. It would be expensive, but they could see her immediately.

I’d been running around getting dressed and ready to go out. Trine told me to grab a towel or blanket to carry Charlee in while she herself put her coat and shoes back on. She went to pick Charlee up so we could leave, but there was no longer any Charlee to pick up. Only the shell of her. She had slipped away.

Rest in peace, sweet Charlee.

I should mention this wasn’t a total shock: she was diagnosed with a terminal illness back in May, and we were told that she had very little left but was not suffering, so with medication we could extend her life a little. We’d been medicating her twice a day for six months.

I have a picture of her lying peacefully in front of the terrace door. I’m not including that here because frankly I don’t remember whether I took it before or after she died, and anyway that’s not how she should be remembered. (Although it is nice to know she died peacefully and easily, with Trine holding and stroking her during her final moments.)

So instead of a picture of her last day in her home, in which she’s either dying or dead, here’s the first ever picture of Charlee in our home, back in 2010:

And a few more from that same day (Maddie and Molli were mere kittens themselves!):

She was a good cat.

She’ll be missed.

That was a little bleak for a holiday blog post. There’s no real way to segue smoothly from the death of a pet to Christmas festivities, so we’ll just let these three sentences suffice. Back to Christmasness.

Molli will show up again, but she’s hardly ever home on Sundays, which is why we did most of our Advent candle lightings without her.

We went to the regular place on Ballerupvej to get our tree this year. It was a Mor and Daddy adventure, no girls along with us. We’dplanned to go on Sunday—we almost always do it the Sunday before the Christmas weekend—but that had been a cold and very rainy day. So we did it Monday afternoon.

We parked, walked to the orderly rows of available trees, and marveled at how short they all seemed to be. Row after row after 3½-4 foot trees. It had never been like that before. I don’t know if it was some kind of weird pygmy tree promotion, or if dwarf trees were all the rage this year, but it was odd.

Finally we reached a row of what seemed like more normal trees—six and seven footers—and the first tree in the first such row looked weirdly perfect. We twirled it around, and it was perfect on all sides.

Reader, we bought it.

It looks a little sparse in some of these photos. It was not sparse at all. It was full and symmetrical and perfect. The girls astonished us by both agreeing it was the most perfect tree ever. Even Didi fell in love at first sight.

On the afternoon of Friday, December 20, school let out for the holidays and Trine, Molli, and I were officially on Christmas vacations from work.

Maddie held a Christmas lunch for her entire class at our house. We’d spent the whole afternoon and evening of the 19th prepping for it—including a little nest feathering of the basement so Trine and I could hunker down there with Didi while the party raged upstairs. Molli wisely planned ahead to spend the night at her Lucas’s.

The first guests didn’t arrive until about 18:00 or 18:30, and the party lasted until 1:00. It seemed to go very well, and not much got broken or damaged. Didi did very well down in the basement with us (she still won’t use the back stairs, so the only way to get her down there is to walk her around outside, but that’s also nice in a way because I’m sure that otherwise she would have been trying to get up the stairs and bark at people through the hallway door all night).

Did you enjoy the reprise of Christmas spirit?

Good, because it gets dark again.

The next morning while I was drinking coffee and reading the news (on my computer), Trine called me to the kitchen with a tremulous voice.

“We lost Emma!” she was saying. “The whole back alley is covered in scraps of her fur. A fox must have gotten her. She’s gone.”

I won’t leave you in suspense: she was not gone. (But judging from the amount of fur in the back alley, it hadn’t been unreasonable to assume she was.) She was down in the basement, chilling out on the couch. I found her during the routine sweep of the house I conducted as soon as Trine told me she hadn’t really looked for her yet.

I brought her upstairs to the great relief of the family, all of whom were still mourning her loss. (Maddie had overheard Trine and me in the kitchen and texted Molli something along the lines of “now emma’s dead too,” and Molli had called my phone, which I had handed off to Trine on my way down to the basement.)

She clearly had been in a hell of fight, however: she had a huge wound on one of her sides that Trine immediately set to washing.

It was a big wound but she seemed okay otherwise, and not at all traumatized, so we figured she’d dodged a bullet.

(We only changed our intepretation of the fur pattern outside from “the fox nabbed her just as she came out of the cat flap, fought her down the path, then dragged her through the cherry laurels and into the neighbor’s yard and then off into the unknown” to “the fox nabbed her in the cherry laurels and they fought like mad as Emma struggled valiantly and with eventual success to get to the cat flap and through it into the safety of our house.”)

By Monday, which was the 23rd (and “Little Christmas Eve”), it was clear that the wound was infected. And badly. We contacted the emergency vet that afternoon. They asked if she’d had her dinner yet. When we said yes, they explained that, well, we need to anesthetize her to clean the wound, and she can’t have eaten before that, so why don’t you come down and pick up a “cone” tonight, so she can’t pick at her wound, and then call first thing tomorrow to make an appointment to have her wound cleaned that morning?

Reader, we did that.

Are you good at math? Can you do calendars? Because what this meant was that we had to set our alarms for the morning of Christmas Eve. Trine called as soon as the line opened at 8:00, and was told she could bring Emma in right away. Which she did. Except what they didn’t tell Trine was that the animal hospitals “servicing” the emergency line rotate, so that the hospital expecting Emma was not the nearby one in Gladsaxe where I’d gone to pick up the cone the night before, but one way down in the middle of Frederiksberg. Which Trine only learned when she showed up with Emma at a very closed animal hospital in Gladsaxe and called to be let in.

Trine coached me over phone calls and texts on what I needed to do to prep the house for Christmas Eve while she stood by in Frederiksberg and the vets tended Emma. (They found other wounds all over her.)

Trine didn’t get home with Emma until about 15:30 on Christmas Eve, and no sooner got in the door than she began searching through her bags and swearing: there were some salves and ointments we needed to keep Emma clean that they’d given her but hadn’t found their way into her bags.

Trine called them immediately.

“Yes,” they said, “we have the stuff here. You can still pick them up, we don’t close until 16:00.”

It was 15:33. And reader, I made it. It was a tense drive, but I parked in front of the hospital at exactly 15:58, and triumphantly texted Trine a photo of myself holding the missing packages by 16:03.

To which she replied by telling me to head straight to the Væløse pharmacy, where Emma’s prescriptions were awaiting pickup. Annoying, but at least the pharmacy was open until 18:00, so I was able to make the drive home at a leisurely pace without any stress.

As for Emma: she looked like Frankenstein’s cat. She had shaved patches all over her little body, the biggest of them around the deep wound they’d had to stitch shut, and into which they’d inserted a drain so that any infectious pus would just ooze out of her.

You can thank me for not including pictures of that.

We now return to the Christmas Spirity tone of this post.

Did I mention that Didi had gone into heat at about this time? Well, she did.

The next picture isn’t as majestic as it was in real life, but I have always loved the shape of this tree off Søndergårdsvej, and on a walk with Didi that weekend I happened to catch it just at sunset.

I have video of our fourth Sunday advent, but it’s not very good, so here’s the only picture I got.

And now, after all that backstory, all that long-winded set up full of tragedy and anxiety and drunk teenager parties, now at last it’s Christmas Eve evening.

And the annual shot of the girls in front of the tree:

Mormor and Moster Mette joined us around 18:00. (Unfortunately Jørgen wasn’t feeling up to it and wasn’t able to join us.)

I have to apologize to Moster Mette, because although I do have a couple of pictures with Mormor, I didn’t get any of Moster Mette. (But don’t feel too bad, Mette: there aren’t any of me, either.)

Despite the hell we’d been through that day, dinner came out perfect.

(Isn’t nice that that picture didn’t even need an explanation? Imagine if we’d made it this far without my having given you any context for that! Note the shaved forepaw, and be grateful you can’t see the side with the infected wound and its drain.)

We did such an abbreviated dance-and-sing around the tree this year that when I felt enough time had elapsed for me to demurely step out of the circle and start taking pictures (usually about 40 seconds), we were already done.

Morfar even got to “dial in” for a little while.

And the next day—Christmas Day—Mormor sent this picture of thanks from Jørgen, who wanted to let us know how much he’d enjoyed all the good food we’d sent to him with Vibeke.

That was our Christmas. A damn good one!

On second Christmas Day we went down to Sydhavn for a very informal but lovely Christmas lunch with the ex-step family clain we lump together as Hagemeisters. In the next shot, Nicolai is arranging the whole family on the staircase of the community room where it was held for a group photo.

Here’s my own group photo.

And here are Moster Mette, Anne, and Lise Lotte adoring Jesper & Gitte’s dog, whose name I’ve already forgotten (again).

Emma’s been healing nicely. On the Friday after Christmas she had her stitches removed, after which she no longer needed a cone of shame because her body stocking prevented her from reaching her wounds.

With everything going on with the cats this month, I tried to be sure and give Didi plenty of attention so she wouldn’t feel neglected.

And next thing you know, it’s New Year’s Eve! Both girls were off to parties with their friends, but I made sure to pictures of how fabulous they looked before they went out.

They were both out the door by about 16:30, leaving their mother and me to celebrate our first New Year’s Eve alone together since. . . ever.

It wasn’t half bad! We enjoyed a dinner of ribeyes and lobster tails, and a dessert of—I don’t know, I think it was just heavy cream or something. It was whatever indulgence Trine’s carnivore diet could even remotely accommodate, and I was grateful for it.

We had a very mellow New Year’s Eve, the two of us—might have even gone to bed early if we hadn’t promised to pick Maddie up whenever her party ended.

The annual New Year’s Eve speech from Amelienborg was a little weird this year.

I mean, the setup was the same:

But then right at the point where for the past fifty years we would have seen Margrethe seated behind her desk, we just got an image of an empty desk. . . and the King Frederik scrambling in to seat himself and address us.

It’s hard to say “the poor guy” about a king, but I think that’s how all of us in Denmark felt—and he knew it, and even began his address by acknowledging that he understood we all probably felt weird not seeing his mother on the screen.

Unfortunately, in the weirdness of it all I forgot to snap a pic while he was saying GUD BEVAR DANMARK at the end of the speech, as his mother always did. But he did.

Nice job, king. Keep it up!

And that’s it.

It’s the evening of Thursday, January 2, as I finish this off and prepare to publish. Maddie started back at school today, and both Molli and Trine had to work. They’re all in bed now, but your vacation-hoarding scrivener is still wide awake and enjoying his vacation.

So that’s a wrap on 2024, and the end of my twentieth year of my maintaining this blog.

I have no idea what’s headed our way next week, much less next month or over the next year… But you can be damn sure that I’ll catch as much of it as I can right here in this neverending blog.

And now an unusually long segment of my favorite Internet Stuff of the Month.

First, the usual memes I just thought were fun:

This was in my camera roll because Maddie had an assignment on “clickbait” in school and that led to a conversation in which I remembered this famous National Lampoon cover (which was, I suppose, more comedic blackmail than clickbait, but tomayto-tomahto).

I still laugh every time I see it and only include it because I assume you do, too:

I’m acutely aware of my forthcoming 60th birthday and therefore more observant than usual of age-related memes.

(Private aside to Aunt Deb: ’74 was the year we moved to Marblehead. And that’s now fifty-one years ago.)

But as I hurry to finish up my funny novel (Hitchhiker’s Guide meets Men In Black meets Stranger Things meets Life of Brian), it was the writer’s memes that really caught my eye this month.

I feel their pain.

(I really did worry back in the Hitman days that the Danish FBI was gonna come knocking on our door at some point because I was doing some deeply, deeply, deeply disturbing Google searches.)