We’re in early August as I write this. I offloaded all my July pictures last weekend, just hoping to sort of clear the decks and get caught up before Didi delivered her litter. Missed by an inch. She brought her six pups into the world (“two bitches, four sons of bitches”) on Monday, July 29th. So if you’re expecting a lot of puppy pictures, you’ll have to wait a month.
First, a flashback to Molli’s party thanks to some pictures forwarded to me after the previous blog was posted.
I guess we’re actually starting in June — the week after Molli’s big party. That Thursday, Søren and Bodil’s son had his studenterfest, the equivalent of a high school graduation party.
Astonishing to me, and worthy of inclusion here because our families are so close (we were among the only non-family there). We’ve known Holger since he was barely out of diapers–we try to get our families together every two months, which is probably the most consistently we see anyone–and here he is graduating high school. And this is just a few days after Molli has a party and gets drunk with her friends in our back yard — and she wasn’t even born when we met Holger. Damn it goes fast!
Here’s Søren saying a few words to mark the occassion.
The next day I took a day off from work and drove down to Germany with Mads combining (side) business with pleasure. We’ve been doing a lot of work for Scandlines, the ferry company that runs between Rostock DK and Puttgarden DE, so it was helpful to take their ferry to their bordershop and get the same experience their customers get. And, while we were at it, a good opportunity to load up on cheap soda, beer, wine, candy, and booze.
The next few pictures are really just for me. They’re taken from the Danish queue for the ferry to Germany. People have to wait here 15-20 minutes, so they’re an utterly captive audience. And although there’s a lot of advertising for the border shop and the loyalty club, it’s pretty boring and does little to excite the traveler who isn’t thinking about spending money at the bordershop right on the other side of the trip.
Yeah, not really relevant for this blog, but keeps it easily accessible for me.
Anyway, it was a pretty relaxed trip.
And fruitful.
The Bordershop is actually just a giant barge repurposed as a three-story warehouse store.
And it’s within about 100 meters of the ferry drive-off ramp.
On the ferry there was an interesting phenomenon: look very closely at the little highlights on the top of the glass windscreen.
As you can see from the zoom shot below, the “highlights” were actually prismatic rainbows.
They were there regardless of which angle one looked at the glass. I was actually surprised the phone camera caught it so clearly. They were enchanting on the trip — literally enchanting, Mads and I were both mesmerized watching these rainbows sliding along the glass.
That weekend we attended a Hagemeister clan get together, including the regular game of rundbold, which I still don’t understand.
Just for fun, here’s a copy of my interpretation of the sport from my first encounter with it. It’s from the old Moron’s Almanac, way back on June 19, 2003 (I’m not correcting any typos or misunderstood Danish–it’s part of the charm):
There were about twenty-five adults at this particular kolonihave picnic over the course of the afternoon and evening, most of them with young children. Not long after the majority of us had arrived, it was announced that we would be walking over to the nearby park to play a game of rundbold, or “roundball.”
I had the rules explained to me, repeatedly and with unflinching patience, by more or less everyone at one point or another, but these so often contradicted one another and were at such odds with the actual experience of playing the game, that it’s probably better if I describe the game not by its rules, but by the practice of playing it.
There are two teams, each of which has a large and roughly equal number of players. Once assigned to a team, a player is expected to remain upon it for the rest of the game, except to wander off for more beer or into the woods for a pee. Players under the age of ten must spend the game alternating teams until no one can remember the team on which they’d started.
Persons on hand but choosing not to play seat themselves outside the playing area and are designated as umpires. It is the duty of an umpire to delegate his or her responsibilities to three- and four-year-olds, angry at being too young too play, who then use their power to inflict random acts of retributive vengeance on the players.
Any broad expanse of park will do for the playing field. There are four bases and a “Now Plate”. The Now Plate is a crushed plastic two-liter bottle of Fanta; the bases are small plastic orange cones. The four bases are set up in a perfect square, about one hundred feet apart, and the Now Plate is situated between fourth and first bases.
The “Upgiver” from the defending team stands on one side of the Now Plate and tosses a tennis ball straight up into the air, preferably in such a way that, if left to fall to the earth without interference, it would land directly on the Now Plate. The batter—but there doesn’t seem to be a Danish word for “batter” or “hitter”: the DMB says the position of batter is referred to as “the person whose turn it is,” and whoever’s on-deck is “the person who has the next turn.” Anyway, the batter swings a short stick or narrow paddle at the ball, hoping to send it soaring over the heads of the swarm of defenders loitering around the the field, drinking beer, and smoking cigarettes.
If the ball is caught on the fly, the batter is dø—dead. Otherwise, he or she advances to first base. There is no requirement to leave first base once you’ve achieved it, but eventually you’re expected to succeed to second base, then to third, and finally to the fourth and final base, at which point the three- and four-year old scorekeepers giggle and wiggle their fingers and you get back in line for another at-bat.
There’s no limit to the number of people that can congregate on a single base, so a string of dribbling grounders inevitably results in a kind of party on first—a party that becomes a mob panic scene as soon as someone hits the ball deep enough to allow some baserunning.
The only way to stop baserunners is to kill them. To kill them, you must throw the ball to the “Upgiver,” who will ideally catch it, step on the “Now Plate,” and shout Nu! (“Now!”), at which point any baserunners between bases are dø. After three deaths, the teams switch places, presumably for purposes of mourning.
(If you hit the ball deep enough to round all four bases, the dø come back to life. It’s like a home-run that saves lives.)
As the game progresses, more and more adult players will excuse themselves for beer runs and more and more children will begin doing cartwheels or playing soccer in the outfield. The game is officially over when everyone loses interest.
Afterwards the umpires will be asked to declare a winner. They will giggle contemptuously, wiggle their fingers, and ask for more juice.
So here we are, 16 years later, and I’m guessing there are at least a few people on the field here that were in the game described above.
While Trine and I worked through the first week of July, the girls were on vacation. Maddie went to Tivoli with a friend on a day where the park was holding a special promotion, allowing all visitors to get free copies of their ride photos digitally delivered to their phones. So behold Maddie and Esther’s Day at Tivoli.
Not sure whether it was the same day, but Maddie also got in a little tennis with Jørgen.
And a trip to a museum (although I forget which) with Mormor, whom we can all thank for the following photos.
Molli’s actual birthday was a very modest family affair: we had the steak-and-bernaise with baked potato “boat” fries that are her favorite meal.
Not too hard to recognize when I’m approaching the photography maximum with Molli…
And then, finally, Trine and I were also on vacation!
Denmark welcomed us with a weekend of chilly temperatures and perpetual rain.
Undaunted, we took pregnant Didi out for strolls.
And we used our free time to do things with the kids we don’t often have time for, like taking them out for Italian food (in retrospect: why did we take Molli out for Italian three days before her departure for Italy?) and then coming home to smother them in plaster.
Behold the Mask of Molli!
Behold the face of Molli beholding the Mask of Molli!
Behold the pregnant bitch!
The following picture was taken early one vacation morning, but is representative of my workaday life and therefore worthy of commemoration in this, the permanent record (document all the things!).
I usually sleep in the guest room on weekdays so as not to wake Trine when I get up at 5 (or to bother her when I get into bed hours after her), and the animals know this. So what you see in that picture is what I walk out to almost every single weekday morning. And they will all three hover around me until they have been fed. The cats will mew and meow until I feed them; Didi will simply follow me around with inexhaustible patience until I scatter her food out on the lawn. It may look cute. It doesn’t feel cute. Especially in the dark of winter, when the cats are weaving invisibly between my legs so rapidly I often stumble over them.
Enough about the animals.
One lovely day Mormor treated us all to a two-hour canal cruise on a rented motorboat.
It wasn’t much fancier than a tubby Boston Whaler with a picnic table in the middle and benches along the gunwhales instead of running athwart the beam. The throttle was so restrictive that the boat couldn’t exceed the harbor’s very low speed limit (about 5 mph). But damn, it was fun, and it was good to be on the water!
I had the helm most of the trip, but Maddie got to try her hand as well. (Molli wasn’t interested; as you may recall from our last post, she never wants to try anything new!)
Afterwards we were treated to ice-cream at one of the cafés out on Islands Brygge.
The birds were very aggressive about claiming leftovers.
On the walk back to the Metro, we wandered by one of the rentable electric scooters I’d been evangelizing to the family, so I rented it to let everyone give it a whirl. I got video of everybody, but only one photograph: this one, of Maddie.
Note for the permanent record, if it wasn’t noted in the previous post: we are now in the midst of Maddie’s Rubik’s Cube phase. It’s partially infected Trine. I’m immune thanks to heavy exposure in the early 1980s. (Or was it the late 70s?) I find it strange to think Trine was Maddie’s age in 1982…
With Molli’s Italy trip imminent, we spent our penultimate family vacation day together on a family trip to Tivoli.
And naturally, Molli’s ear had been bothering her all morning and suddenly flared up so badly she had to talk to a doctor — and ended up having to leave us to have the doctor take a look at it. (Ordinarily it might not have been so urgent, but with the Italian trip looming it took on added significance: ear infections and air travel have not been a winning combination in our family.)
That evening we took a dip in Søndersø, which had warmed up very nicely since our pre-Estero dip in May.
Molli was kind enough to send us photos of her experiences in Italy now and then. I’ve included most of them, if not all.
Life was not quite as exotic — or sunny — back in Denmark, but we tried to keep things fun for Maddie even on days when we had to work.
I should note that I didn’t invite her into work with me as one of the aforementioned “fun things” — it was something she asked to do, and I was only too happy to have her along. And it was fun.
She was very lucky, in that the day she joined me turned out to be the very day on which the company bought us all ice cream from one of the kiosks out on Langelinie.
Another evening, or possibly that evening, we took her out for dinner and a movie in Lyngby. (The movie was Spiderman: Far From Home, which I would urge you not to watch until you’ve seen the final Avengers movie. We hadn’t yet. That was a mistake, because although S:FFH was a very entertaining movie, it was also one huge spoiler for the Avengers finale.)
Maddie was thoroughly engrossed with the chains hanging as drapes at the restaurant.
Another evening, Maddie was out at a friend’s so Trine and I ended up having some take-out Sushi with Mads and his wife Linda down at their house in Ballerup. They just got a new pup, a boxer, and Mads had just gotten some big old beef bones from his butcher: he gave me one to take home to Didi.
She was more than intrigued.
But very patient.
And ultimately very satisfied.
Another evening, we had hoped to get chicken sandwiches from Kong Kylling but they were closed. So we went to Hai Long and texted this photo to Molli to try and make her jealous. I don’t think we did (she was hanging out by a pool at the time, I think), but we enjoyed ourselves.
We also took a trip up the art museum Louisiana. Unfortunately, we got there on laundry day.
I have to assume it was laundry day — there were lines draped with white underclothes (as in the photo above) hanging all over the grounds. I fear it may not have been laundry day, based on most of the other “art” we saw. In fact, some of the best work I saw came from the artists accompanying me.
Louisiana must really fear their critics, though, because they give themselves the biggest thumbs up I’ve ever seen.
From Louisiana we drove a few miles up the coast to Espergærde. We thought maybe we’d have a chance to see Steve & Elizabeth and their kids, but it turned out they were vacationing in Switzerland.
So we settled for a little stroll on the beach and some ice cream.
Meanwhile, Didi’s getting closer to her due date every day, and things seem to be going fine.
More updates from Molli, these I think from a restaurant on the island of Ischia (Molli: “the most beautiful place I’ve ever been”):
Okay, looked nice enough, but could it really compete with home? I thought I’d try and reply with a rosy view from the home front:
…which I ended up not sending on account of a general lack of semi-tropical gorgeousness.
Mormor managed to help ensure that Maddie got some beach time in:
And all of a sudden one Thursday afternoon: Molli’s home!
We had a few beautiful summery days upon her return, then Danish summer returned.
Just as well: we were closing in on Didi’s due date! Everything was prepared!
And then, within a day or two of that photo being taken — blam!
Along come the puppies. Six of them.
It took seven hours at the vet for the delivery — Didi was apparently not designed for breeding — but in the end we came home with six adorable little golden retriever rats. Blind, deaf, and even week of scent, they have spent the intervening four days (it’s Friday as I write this) eating, sleep, and squealing. They’re growing very well and we’re fattening Didi right up — she’s now eating about 4-5 times her normal intake. Maybe even more. It’s important, because she was horrifyingly thin after the births.
In any case, we’re more or less grounded for the time being, as the pups require an ungodly amount of attention. Trine and I have been taking turns sleeping near them, to be sure Didi doesn’t do anything stupid like accidently smother one of them, but we’re hoping to phase that part out now.
It’s a busy month ahead, so there’s surely be more to the next post than just a lot of puppy stuff…. but trust me:
There’ll be a lot of puppy stuff.
Great post. Especially to a chair bound invalid. Brought life into my screen. AML
Dad, Doug, Pop-ppop