Puppies and Portugal

We begin with the conclusion of The Great Puppy Adventure, picking up right where we left off.

We’re up to September 11 — a date I cannot type, and you probably cannot read, without a lot of negative associations.  But this isn’t the place for those kind of thoughts.

It’s a place for thoughts of precious puppies prancing peripatetically:

Their six-week birthday had been on the 9th, so they were six weeks and 2 days old at this point.  That’s 44 days, if your math is rusty.  (It’s 44 days even if your math is terrific.)

But let me veer aside from the puppies for a moment to share a picture that has nothing to do with them.  It’s a picture from the same date.  It’s a package I’d received in the mail.  It was one of Trine’s birthday presents.  Nothing exotic or fragile — it was in fact a salad spinner (she makes her wish lists, so raise that eyebrow at her, not me) — but the packaging was so crazy I thought I ought to have it documented before opening it.

I’m guessing hjem.dk (“Home.dk”) has a lot of part-time eight-year-olds doing their packaging.  The salad spinner was intact.

And speaking of eight-year-old workmanship, let’s have a look at my own approach to a peculiar problem the pups had manifested.  One of them — Vega, if memory serves — barfed up what looked like cement one lovely day.

This was puzzling to us, because we had been very careful not to feed the pups any cement.  Not much, anyway.

And then we noticed something peculiar about a corner in the foyer where the pups spent their nights:

My inner eight-year-old came up with an easy fix:

…until I awoke the following morning to find the cardboard on the floor, chewed half to hell.  Bits of the yellow painting tape were clinging to several puppy mouths and paws (not just Vega’s).  I found the whole thing highly suspicious.  A quick trip to the hardware store later, my inner eight-year-old managed a solution that proved so lasting it remains in place at the time of this writing.

Problem solved.

We’ll need something better than an eight-year-old’s fix at some point, but for now — let’s not go making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Back to our pups. still on the eleventh:

Find a love that looks at you like this…

I know the next shot is blurry, but it’s a POV shot of me enjoying a puppy bath.

For Trine’s birthday we allowed ourselves a dinner out.

And here are the pups ready for breakfast the next morning.

All those adorable little fuzzy faces, those black eyes and noses staring up at you…  who can endure it?  Let’s just wallow in it for a moment.

We had by now learned to feed the pups outside as often as possible.  (Though we had not yet learned to keep the lot of them outside as often as possible, or to confine them to the foyer at night.)

That picture, and the one below, are from the 14th.

And now we’re up to the 15th… the day before their 7-week birthday.

Molli doesn’t like me taking many pictures of her, as you know, and I do try to respect her wishes most of the time, but this wouldn’t be much of a “Molli and Maddie” blog if I didn’t have any, and she doesn’t always give me permission at moments when I know retrospectively she will someday wish she had (ah, the tyranny of fatherhood!), so I allow myself some exceptions — like these stolen shots of her enjoying some puppy time in the yard.

Dear future Molli, your complaints of how badly the puppies stank and how much noise they made never fooled us for a second: your love for them was transparent from the day they were born.  (Of course, we all complained about their poops and their puddles and their noisy neediness, and we all loved them wildly anyway.)

Who, after all, can look upon such a puppy pile without feeling their heart swell:

And yes, they were stupid and foolish and absurdly enthusiastic about everything, and could look adorable even when getting themselves tangled up in the stupidest of complications.

(The above is actually one of my favorite pics of the whole puppy experience.)

However, life with puppies is not all roses.  Here’s what I woke up to on the morning of their seven-week birthday:

At seven weeks, we felt it was time to begin feeding them unsoftened food out in the yard.  We scattered their kibbles on the terrace stones, to make things a little easier.

Commentary isn’t always necessary.  Let’s just enjoy a few more pictures from the 16th.

And here we are on the 17th… less than a week left with most of these little maniacs, so we all feel the need to squeeze the maximum joy out of our time with them.

We still hadn’t figured out that they didn’t need access to the entire hallway overnight.

(And that wasn’t even one of the worst mornings.  You’ll see.)

So on the one hand, there was poop all over the house every morning — bigger, stinkier poops thanks to the dry, solid food they were eating now — and on the other hand, moments of bliss watching the big games of tug-of-war.

I think the high-water mark of their hallway desecration occurred on the morning of the 18th.

I can count 12 piles from the photo, but remember thinking right after I took the picture, “wow, it doesn’t even capture all of them, and you can’t even see all the pee!”

So imagine my delight straggling out barefoot into that hallway at five in the morning, only to sneak by the jumping yipping pups in the foyer, squeeze myself into the kitchen to silent the barking Didi, set them all up with some food outside, shower, and return to discover a living room that looked like this:

But where were the pups?  I suspect they may have felt some remorse, because look where I found them:

I liked them better that afternoon.

Here’s another favorite of mine: one of the pups lying in Didi’s favorite summer spot, while Didi looks on in the background.

We’re going to blow through the next few days without taking notice of which pictures are from which day, because it doesn’t really matter: for most of the pups, we’re into the last few days of our time together.

I will mention, though, that it was at this point — about 5-6 days before the dogs would start being picked up by their owners — that we were informed we’d raised the puppies in the most difficult possible way.  They were seven weeks old, for crying out loud!  Let them spend all their time outside, the weather’s lovely!  Keep them in the foyer all night — it’ll be easier to clean, and it’s more than enough room for them.  Get them used to some kind of shelter that you can move in and out of doors as weather dictates.  It’ll be so much easier!  And why on earth didn’t you let them spend the first few weeks in their box out in the garage with their mother?

Such was the advice from Janne, the owner of the puppies’ father Max.  Good advice, but a little late in the game!

Uh oh… Paging eight-year-old engineering!

STAT!

And voilà!  Another engineering solution courtesy of my indefatigable inner eight-year-old.

(Laugh all you want.  I’m laughing myself.  But it worked!)

We’re into our last weekend with all six pups, and we’re now strewing their kibbles out on the grass, just as we do with Didi’s.  Which gave her the mistaken impression that their kibbles were meant to be shared.

We tried feeding them in separate parts of the yard, but inevitably some of them would go running after Didi’s food, and Didi would come bounding over for some of theirs.  (“So why didn’t you feed them separately?” “Because we live in a world with only twenty-four hours in a day, and they were all of them being used pretty hard at this point.”)

Another stealth shot of Molli:

Our very last night with the lot of them: I was sipping a scotch while watching them play in the yard during half-time when I suddenly remembered: goldens are notorious for their love of scotch!

And here the eyes begin to water… It’s Monday, September 23rd, and three of our pups will be taken to their new homes.

(Stealth shots of Trine.)

But, oh yeah, I don’t have to be stealthy with Trine.

And here we go:

That’s Vega with one of her new owners.

And here’s Trine saying goodbye.

And me.

She’s going to have a wonderful life!

Limey was next to be picked up.

Now, Limey’s situation was a little special.  The father of the family had come and chosen Limey long ago, and the mother had come for a look a couple of weeks later, but they had said nothing about him to their children, who had been pining for a dog for years.  It was going to be a surprise.  (This is why Limey never got a proper name while in our care: they wanted to let the kids help decide on a name.)  So they had to pretend they were coming to our house for lunch, and we had to play along.  We acted like old friends and greeted them and introduced ourselves to the kids, and their parents were all, “Say, kids, look at this, Greg and Trine’s dog Didi had a bunch of puppies.  Should we sit and play with them a little?”

The kids seemed to know something was up from the get go — kids are never as clueless as we think (or hope) they are, alas — but they played along and gathered around the pups, and when their father finally held Limey up and said, “…and this one’s ours,” do you know what they did?

If you said they burst into giddy laughter and joy, whooping and crying with delight, you’d be dead wrong.  No, they went into absolute shock.  Their eyes got huge, their jaws may have dropped a little, but not one of them made a sound.  It was almost more touching than any outward expression of excitement could have been.

Great joy for them, and a (dog’s) lifetime of love to share — but another sad goodbye for us.

Meanwhile, Otto’s (Otto having been Blue and then Buster) owners had already arrived.

And in a sudden whirl, Vega and Limey (eventually named Olaf — yes, as in the snowman in Frozen) and Otto were gone.

Only Holli, Arthur, and Samson remained.

So weird having six become three!

The puppy piles were so obviously diminished!

Happily, though, we quickly got pictures of all the pups in their new homes.

Here’s Limey/Olaf:

Crimson/Vega:

Buster/Otto/Blue:

The very next day, it was time to say goodbye to Green/Arthur:

…Leaving us with Didi, Samson, and Hollie for the next four days.

…And it looked like Arthur was going to have a lovely new life with his mentor Anton and his new family:

It wasn’t so tough with just two little pups to tend to.

And then it was finally the 28th and time to say our last goodbyes.  First to Samson (Blackie):

And then to Hollie (Pinkie).  Precious Hollie, who’d become our favorite.

Goodbye, sweet Hollie!

Goodbye, sweet puppy adventure!

Or, as Didi puts it: Wait, what?

No sooner was the last puppy whisked away then we began making preparations for Trine’s delayed birthday party.  Just a small dinner with Vibeke, Jørgen, Mette, and cousin David with his wife Bente and their two kids, Elizabeth and Marcus.  The pics aren’t great, but they’re all I have.  Apologies to all subjects.

When the last guests departed, the house was occupied by the four of us, Didi, and the cats for the first time in nearly a year.  It was back to normal.

…which meant the next night, a Sunday, I was able to watch the Patriots while sipping a scotch by a roaring fire.

…and which meant Didi romps were once again possible.

…and it apparently also meant that Dr. Seuss vegetation could begin sprouting up on our property.

(No, seriously, I have no idea what it is.  Anyone?)

I’ve been in the midst of a Chesterton binge this year, and have made my way through about twenty of his books so far — nearly all of his non-fiction.  (Two more books to go before I reach the fiction, starting with the Father Brown mysteries.)  Our good friend Lisa knows all this, and stumbled across the photograph below in one of her online fountain-pen fora, so she sent it to me.  I include it just as a kind of post-it note to myself that 2019 was my Chesterton period.  Also because I like it.

As you can probably imagine, the first week or two of “normal life” did not produce many photographs.  Virtually none, in fact.  Getting over the nine weeks of puppy mania consisted mostly of enjoying the ease of our normal daily life.  Ordinarily we think of autumn as a very busy, almost frantic period; in the wake of what we’d been through, however, it seemed to be unrolling in slow motion.

The weekend before our departure to Portugal, I got to see my first Molli game of the season (to my shame I still haven’t caught a Maddie game this fall, but that will change this weekend):

To try and make the nightmare of airport security a little easier, I had the whole family put all their electronics into tagged plastic bags: the plan was to pack them all into a single carry-on bag (not to be confused with the carrion bag we plan to have on hand for our next trip to Florida for the vultures of Alligator Alley).  They’d be packed along with our computers, so that we’d only have to unload one bag for inspection at security; all electronics could then be easily distributed to their various owners on the other side of security.

Good plan, right?

Except that for some reason security had changed their procedures and didn’t even seem interested in our electronics.  Goddammit, by the time you figure out how to deal with their ridiculous requirements, they go and change them!

(It also struck me that the digital firepower we were bringing with us for this trip exceeded the entire computing power of my entire workplace back in Chicago.  By at least an order of magnitude.)

In any case, having arrived at the airport at around 5:00 in the morning, we were boarding by 6:00.

And by lunchtime, we were in paradise.

Interesting factoid: we all thought Maddie liked olive loaf.  We thought this because Maddie herself  had told us so.  There’s no olive loaf in Denmark, so she gets by on mortadella.

Turns out that while she does like olive loaf, apparently she doesn’t actually care for the olives:

So I told her, “Maddie, if you like olive loaf without olives, what you really like is bologna.”

She didn’t know what bologna was. 

I explained it as olive loaf without olives, and she was eager to try some.  (So I know what we’ll be getting at Publix on our next trip to Estero!)

The girl has happily consumed alligator, snails, eel…  but thinks bologna is exotic.  We’ve either done something horribly wrong or horribly right.

And here it is: the first toe dip of the trip!

While she was dipping her toes, Daddy dove right in.

It was about 28C the day we arrived.  The daily temperatures went slowly down from there, but as you’ll see we never had anything to complain about.  It was perfect summer weather for us, coming as we were from a Denmark that had gotten very cold and rainy the previous fortnight.

Molli chose the sun over the water most of the trip.  I think we’d been there two or three days before she first entered the water — and it was another few days before she took her second dip.

But she got more than her share of sun.

And there was plenty of sun to be had!

Looking out the window our first morning there, I even saw one of the cats lying on its back in the sun.

Flash is still hanging in there, but he’s not quite the playful lad he once was.  Ironic, since he’s almost exactly Maddie’s age, and she was longing to play with dogs — a longing that accrued to the benefit of Blue.

Yes, Blue.  A giant dog of Portuguese heritage — I forget the breed, I only remember that it’s local — and nothing at all like the little Blue (aka Buster, aka Otto) we’d spent two months with so recently.

One morning Trine, Molli, and I went for a good long walk along the beach off of Amancil.

Allow me to note for the permanent record that we (mostly I) found about seven or eight of the most perfectly flat skipping stones I’ve ever had the pleasure of skipping.  Molli didn’t share my enthusiasm until I got one to skip about eight times, at which point she insisted on trying.  I gave her the best rock I’d found and told her solemnly that no greater love hath a father than this: that he giveth his daughter the best skipping stone of them all.

Given her supernatural athletic abilities, I assumed she’d shame me by skipping the thing a few dozen times on her first try.

She sent it flying toward the water and it did the stone equivalent of a belly flop, striking the water hard, at an oblique angle, and sinking at once.

A humbling moment for her, I’m sure, so I’ll leave it at that.

That’s not a picture of Molli dunking her head in shame at having been such a dismal stone skipper, but wetting her hair to get “saltwater highlights.”

I laughed at her and shared my memories of Pop-Pop pouring bailers of saltwater over his hair back in the day as we sailed around Massachusetts Bay on Sunday race days.

“Well,” she said, “he was right.”

So there you go, Pop-Pop: vindication at last!

Here you can see Trine preparing to do the same.

And here you can see her getting a bit more of a slap from the ocean.

We had left the cold, gray, rainy skies of Denmark long behind us.

This next shot looks an aerial shot of some brackish swamp in the Everglades.

It’s not.  It’s a puddle that’s maybe a four feet across on its longest side, surrounded by the weird little marshy scrub that covers the low sands between the mainland and the dunes.

We didn’t have any kind of itinerary on this trip: we’d seen the sights before, we knew the area, and all four of us agreed that we were badly in need of some serious unwinding.

So that’s what we did.  Apart from our little beach walk and some grocery shopping, our first real trip was into Vila Moura Marina for ice cream on our second or third day there (who can keep track? who cares?).

The “ice cream trip” somehow became and “exotic drink” trip.

We got three pina coladas — two regular, one virgin.  Trine shared her regular with Molli, who also shared some of Maddie’s virgin.  I enjoyed a pina colada of my own.

The pictures don’t require much more explanation than that.

Could you see the stress and tension melting away from us?

After drinks, we had ice-cream for dessert.  And we strolled the lovely marina.

You may ask: why does he have a picture of a brick wall?

Well, I’ll tell you: because that had been the site of Anchovymania, or Achovyrama, or whatever the hell that bizarre tourist trap that offered literally nothing but canned anchovies stamped with various years was called.  Astonishingly enough, even a heavy tourist industry was not enough to support such a store.  Go figure!

(While wandering the streets of Faro a few days later, we found the store had merely relocated.)

Meanwhile, back in heaven:

As you can see, the clouds were starting to roll in, so we chose that day to explore the “new” mall down on the road to Faro.  (It was almost two years old, but hadn’t opened until shortly after our 2017 visit, so it was new to us.)

First we browsed the outdoor “outlet mall” outside the main mall.  It featured many of the same shops as the one in Estero, but not quite so many of them, and with much higher prices.  I think the girls enjoyed looking at things they’d bought in Estero and seeing how much money they’d saved by not buying it in Faro.  It didn’t really matter: our baggage restrictions meant there could be little or no shopping in Portugal.

Our first stop in the mall proper was a familiar one.

And our food court lunch featured only the finest local cuisine.

The cloudy morning remained a cloudy afternoon, so none of us were in much of a mood for the pool (we’d all browned ourselves pretty well by this point anyway).  So Molli declared it “eyebrow day,” and gave herself and her mother fresh eyebrow treatments.

And on this evening the mania for Mastermind began.

(Me back in Værløse: “Why are you packing all those games?” Trine: “We might get bored some night and want something hyggelig to do.” Me: “They take up so much weight!  And the girls won’t want to play them anyway.”  Trine: “Well, what if I just take one or two.  Bananagrams is light.  And how about this?” Me: “Mastermind?  They’ll hate it.”  As usual, I was wrong, wrong, wrong.  Even Molli got addicted to Mastermind.  You’ll see.)

The obligatory shot of our rental car for the trip:

They called it a “mini SUV” when I booked it.  I have no idea what that meant, but it was all the car we needed, so no complaints.

Another one of our few excursions was to Loulé (which we now know is pronounced “low-lay,” not the “loo-lay” we’d been using for, oh, the past seven years).  We went on Saturday, their market day.

Tiger shrimp for 55 euros per kilo.  That’s about 20 euros, or 22 bucks, per pound.  Seems a bit much, doesn’t it?  Or have I lost touch with shellfish prices?

Lots of fresh fruit, veggies, meats, and spices to be had.  (All we really wanted were some dry piri-piri kits.  We got them.)

But it was the fried dough that got our attention.

We had fine weather again.

There are fewer “here we are in the sun” pictures than usual this year because the girls decided they should be allowed to sun and swim topless.  Seemed fair enough (I’ve been doing it my whole life), but it made for fewer photo ops.  We are not, after all, Kardashians.

We’d enjoyed the Chinese restaurant last time around, so we paid another visit this time.

More Mastermind…

More bliss…

Apart from her excessive sun color, please do note Trine’s eyewear in the photo above.  I especially love that they’re kind of askew.

Can you hear me going “aaah” when you look at that picture?

Because I am.  It should be audible.  Are your speakers on?

Finally, a picture with morfar!

Another trip to Vila Moura, this time for an actual meal.

They’ll hate Mastermind…

We chose another cloudy day for our one trip to Faro, mainly for the great lunches we always enjoy at Faaron Steak House.

Another Portugal tradition: Maddie’s tasting of the beer.

On previous visits, Trine and I got the ribeyes and the girls got the black angus burgers, and we’ve always all been more than happy with our choices.

But the girls are growing up, so it was ribeyes all the way around this time.  So good…

Time warp time… get ready…  We’ll be looking at photos that are, sequentially, from May 2012, October 2016, October 2017, and October 2019.

The Maddie Pictures

The Molli Pictures

I have to say, I’ve never considered this blog a waste of time — never! — but there are times now and then when I think, “It’s a little bit of overkill, Greg, surely you could limit your updates to a couple of times a year at this point.”  But when I can so quickly and easily use the blog itself as a resource to put together a sequence like that of the preceding four photos…  ah, it’s such a nice reminder of why I do this.  (Apart from the psychological dysfunction of my DOCUMENT ALL THE THINGS compulsion.)

Anyway, at her own request: bonus picture of Maddie with “eyeglasses man.”

Alas, by coming at the start of Week 42 instead of the end of Week 42, we missed the annual harvest carnival (or whatever it is) that’s always been such a seedy mainstay of our Faro trips.

Slight disappointment.

Slight.

Did you ever see such giant calamari?!

And I wonder again: how has Disney allowed this to continue?  Is this an actual product offering?  “Make your carnival trailer stand out with our esteemed line of carnival trailer decor.  Nothing says [fried dough / gelato / anchovy sorbet] like a Disney-branded trailer!”

I still can’t get over the existence of actual communist parties using actual communist iconography.

I think we’ve done a pretty good job getting Swastiskas out of polite company.  When do the hammers and sickles get the same treatment?  I’ll take the answer off the air, thanks.

It dawned on me as we passed by Eyeglasses Man en route back to the car that for the many pictures of him with the girls, I didn’t have a single solo shot of the guy.  So here we go.

Final stop of the Faro excursion: ice cream (and espresso)!

…and big dark clouds following us all the way back.

…but gradually giving way to the sun again, giving Maddie a chance to work on her rock throwing skills.  (Really.)

Yes, I know you can barely see her in the picture at this resolution, but she’s there in the middle, and there’s good reason none of us got too close while she was involved in this particular activity: she was tossing stones as hard as she could at a stone wall to see if she could throw them hard enough to break them.

Did she ever succeed?  You’ll have to ask her.

Another lazy evening, during an apparent break from Mastermind.

And, oh no… our last full day is upon us.  Fortunately the weather was back in fine form.

It took a few tries to get this one right, but Maddie desperately wanted a shot of her spinning the water out of her hair.

And I wanted a photo of my sad face when I realized I was the only one left by the pool, and that it was late on our last day there in the sun.

…And of course, no sooner had I gone up and changed into dry clothes than I got to wondering where the girls had gone…  And it wasn’t hard to find them.

Last dinner in Portugal: Burger & Bowls in Almancil.

And then it was the morning of the 16th.  Time to saddle up and head back north.

Airport food to avoid airplane food.

See how happy we all are to be going home?

And… we’re off!

…and (fast forwarding a few hours) we’re home!

Not pictured: the hour-long taxi ride in the pouring rain.  But here are some shots of the cold wet miserably grayness that greeted us in Denmark.

Who needs these trips to Portugal and Estero and hell, even Turkey, when we have paradise right here in Værløse?

(Snort.)

Ever feel like your own pets are conspiring against you?

Finally, before we move on to the epilogue, here’s a shot Maddie sent us while spending the night with a friend whose golden retriever puppy is just a few weeks older than those we’d ushered into the world.  (“Bailey’s even worse than our puppies were!” she texted us with obvious delight.  She loves Bailey.  We all love Bailey.)

And now, before I wrap up, we have courtesy of the new owners a gallery of the puppies in their new homes.

First, we have a lot of pictures of Arthur, our beloved Greenie, both down at the family summer house and at home.

Arthur, remember, is the companion dog to the elderly Anton.

I love that there’s a green streak in his collar — a lot of the owners, as you’ll see, kept the color motif their pups had been arbitrarily assigned by us.

Arthur, by the way, has turned out to be the big boy of the litter: at last word, he’d passed 13 kilos.

Next we have Otto (our beloved Blue) with a new friend.

And on the night of his homecoming.

And enjoying a very familiar looking toy…

Sweet Blue! — He was Molli’s absolute favorite the first four weeks or so, and she would sit with him on her lap and pet him for the longest time, telling all of us how much she loved him.  Until suddenly she began to love Hollie the most, and lavish those same affections on her.

Here’s a shot of Didi and Hollie that Hollie’s owners took at our house.

And here’s Hollie (our beloved Pink) in her new home.

We never played favorites with the pups, but Hollie endeared herself to us so deeply that from the very beginning, when we were still considering keeping one, she was the one we chose to keep.  Maybe it was just that decision that gave her a little extra extra something in our hearts, but she was the hardest one to say goodbye to, and thankfully her owners are among the most active posters in the Facebook group, so we’ve got lots of Hollie-At-Home pics to enjoy.

And then there’s sweet Olaf (our beloved Limey, the eldest of the litter)…

And then Samson (our beloved Blackie) — for 6½ weeks he was the biggest dog in the litter, often as much as half a kilo heavier than most of his siblings.  He was enormous, as wide as he was long.  And then it was like something clicked within him.  “Look at me,” he seemed to say, “I’ve got to do something about my figure!”  And what he did wasn’t eat less — not Blackie! — no, he just became so active that the extra weight melted away.  And he’ll have plenty of opportunity to keep those active habits out on the farm in Jylland!

And finally, Vega (our beloved Crimson).

But it doesn’t seem fair to end without a shot of the real star of this whole show, the one without whom we couldn’t have had this incredible and exhausting adventure.

Our very proud and tired bitch, Didi:

I hope this long post didn’t get the tl;dr treatment (for those of you dinosaurs, that’s “too long; didn’t read”), but it’s certainly going to get the tl;ngtgbae treatment from me (“too long; not going to bother going back and editing”).  And so, as usual, I absolve myself in advance for any typos, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, libels, or slanders.

I’m an adventurous spirit, but trust me when I say that I look forward to the forthcoming month, which looks to be entirely devoid of adventure.  Boy, does it make me nervous saying so — it’s like begging fate for a kick in the face.  But it’s true: our calendar holds out nothing more complicated than a few dinners with friends.  Okay, wait, we’ve got Halloween and Thanksgiving, and then we’re right on the cusp of Maddie’s birthday, and her party, and the first Advent, and…  Damn, I haven’t even got the Halloween decorations out yet and I’m suddenly realizing we’re weeks away from the Christmas marathon.  Never mind.

# # #

The girls are both doing very well: Maddie is thriving at Atheneskolen, loving it, coming home elated every day.  Molli had her first day at her mandatory “job week” job today, and was jubilant about it.  The girl who was adopting butterflies and caterpillars yesterday spent the afternoon working at a Copenhagen café.  Whoosh.

Didi has had no problems adapting to life as a single dog.  We’ve got her back in her normal rhythms, and it’s a relief to all of us.

And most spectacularly, one of the contractors came by to finally finish (correct) the mounting of the new bathroom shower door, so roughly a year from the project start, the new bathroom is finally done.  (Although it now needs a paint touchup, but that’s in the works and will probably be done before we hit the first anniversary of the start of that whole adventure.)

We’ve already booked our February vacation in Estero and are looking forward to that, but in all honesty I think we’re also all looking forward to a Very Normal Winter otherwise.

And finally, allow me to close on something that crossed my screen at some point in the past month (even though the article itself dates from much earlier this year); I saved the screenshot to share with Maddie, who sometimes gets frustrated with the finer points of mathematics… and still sometimes falls prey to the horribly mistaken notion that the world is full of competent people doing everything properly.

She laughed out loud and it actually took me some time to convince her it was not a spoof or joke of some kind.  It may sound trivial that she laughed at it, but it was a very healthy sign: this is the same girl who once burst into hysterics because the text and illustration of a children’s book didn’t seem to be in harmonious agreement: Why would they DO that?

“Because they’re human and we’re mostly idiots” didn’t cut it at the time.  But she’s starting to get it.

Anyway, a good lesson for all of us…

Happy October!