Early Summer

If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?

Lees!

Three of them, anyway, arriving at Copenhagen airport on a summery May 3 evening.

(I don’t remember the circumstances behind the next picture, but it was too fun to leave out.)

With Trine on sick leave for stress, and the Lees a little stressed from all their urban sightseeing around European capitals, we were all happy to take things nice and easy.  The weather helped that.

The girls spent a great deal of time giving each other makeovers, or doing make-up together, or whatever (this was done behind closed doors), but apparently that wasn’t enough so Uncle Gene was the beneficiary of a full Maddie makeover.

Didi watched with awe, presumably wondering when she would get a makeover.  (Spoiler: never.)

Uncle Gene was understandably thrilled with the results.

We did manage to pop into Copenhagen on Saturday.

That’s Maddie learning the “categories” game from Sophie.  (It was a big hit, and Maddie has now introduced it into the Værløse school system.)

We enjoyed our Joe & the Juice lunches al fresco, in Kultorvet.

Here’s Maddie in the fabulous shades that ended up causing such a (hopefully not serious) ruckus:

If you zoom in on the left lens, you can see what a big part of Maddie and Molli’s lives must feel like.

From Kultorvet we made our leisurely way down Strøget (with a few stops at clothing and accessory shops along the way) until we came to the Scene of the Crime.

Aunt Deb wanted to recreate a picture she has from 2003 of Hannah and Sophie running through the peculiar flying buttresses of Nikolai Kirke.  (Or maybe it was a picture from 2010 of Hannah, Sophie, and Molli running through.)  First the girls came up with their own particular pose:

Then the running shoot was staged.

Unfortunately, there’s an alleyway entering into this path from the right, and no sooner did the girls start running than some poor woman came hurrying out of it, and there was a collision and some confusion.

Most of my own photos came out terribly, but at least this one was tolerable:

The outdoor café was full to capacity, so we couldn’t pose for our usual “look, we’re standing where we exchanged our vows” shot, but we got as close as we could and asked Molli to take the shot for us.

She did:

But when she handed the camera back to me, I had to scroll backward through about five shots like the one below to find the pictures she’d taken of me and Trine:

I think you can actually even see in her smile that she took those selfies just to be funny!

From Nikolai Kirke we made our way to Nyhavn.

Which is really nothing but a photo op.

Apparently Sophie had laid down some ground rules for photography with her parents: she would allow only one family selfie per day.

We felt privileged to be on hand to witness one.

The summer weather was drying us out, so we finally stopped in at a cafe to hydrate.

Danish style.

And that was pretty much it for our excursion to Copenhagen: we made our way back to Vesterport through Rådhusplads…

…and at Vesterport, we learned that Maddie is still young enough to be excited at the sight of herself on a television screen, even if it’s just a security monitor.

On the way home: more categories game:

Eventually (a stop or two later), a girl of about Maddie’s age and her mother occupied the seat that’s behind Gene’s hand in the photo above.  The girl was enchanted by the game.  Maddie offered to explain it to her in Danish, but the girl was too shy.  She just continued staring intensely at this obviously amazing game with awe and reverence.

Back home for dinner!

By the time of this meal, I should point out, we had almost surely had as many meals outdoors in 2018 as we had in all of 2017.  And that was, at this point, almost a full month ago.  We’ve now (May 30) reached the point where sometimes we’re eating inside because it’s too hot outdoors!

You saw the Maddie makeover.  You saw the Uncle Gene makeover.  Now prepare yourself for the Sophie makeover. . .

The beautician at work:

I wanted a picture of myself relaxing, so I took this selfie.

But wait — another Maddie makeover beckons!

(It’s a little creepy how grown-up she looks.  Except how could anyone so adorable, and with such a great smile, be at all creepy?)

In case you haven’t already noticed, spring was exploding into summer all around us even though May was just getting started.

Here’s a representative weather forecast from the period:

On the last night of the Lee visit, we realized we needed some group photos.  As I struggled to set my phone up to take a timed picture that could feature all of us, I accidentally took the shot below — which is so weird I kind of love it.

I think I’d asked Sophie to just stand still so I could have a reference as I balanced the camera, and she looks so uncharacteristically serious! — meanwhile, something clearly transpired between her cousins, and I love the cartoonish image of Molli yelling so fiercely at Maddie that she’s literally knocked her off her feet.  (There were no big fights, and I have no memory of Maddie actually falling flat on her back, so I have no idea what’s actually going on there, but the appearance cracks me up.)  And lastly, the way you can tell I’m sort of stupidly trying to get the camera to use its timing function and obviously failing.  Such a fun photo!

And anyway, I did finally get it work.

The group shots at last behind us, we went for shots of just the girls.

(Aunt Deb’s will invariably be better than mine.)

Yeah, Didi’s looking a little scruffy there.  But not half as scruffy as she did the next day:

So yes, that was it for my pictures of the Lee visit.  It seems like there ought to be more, but the lovely truth is that we really didn’t do very much.  It was a calm and relaxing visit that I think all of us very badly needed.

So. . .  on to the rest of May!

Remember the dogwood tree felled by Bodil (if I remember the name of the storm correctly)?  Bodil knocked the tree over so badly that half its roots were wrenched up out of the ground.  I tried forcing it back down and tying it into place for security, but nothing seemed to work.  So I gave up on it, trimmed all its branches, and fully intended to uproot its desiccated husk the following spring.

Except the following spring I noticed little buds sprouting off the sad and limbless trunk.  Furthermore, the tree seemed to be taking firmer hold of the earth again.

So we’ve let it grow at its own pace for a few years now, and it’s coming back beautifully.

Ready to laugh?

Quick: here’s the first page of the diary I got for Christmas in December of 1979.

It’s good I recorded all those facts, because they’re just the kind of thing I’d be inclined to forget with age.  (“Wait, what were my parents’ names forty years ago?”)  Actually, I shouldn’t be too snarky: it’s interesting to see my height and weight at age 14, and to know our football team actually had a winning record once.  And that I had a “few” zits.  (That’s either masterful understatement, or rookie confidence that if I lied to my diary I might someday believe what I wrote instead of what I remembered.)

And just look at that poor dope:

Why do I include that here, in the M&M blog?

Because of this line: “Some day when I’m older I hope I find this and understand a little more about teenagers.”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. . .!

Yeah, good luck with that kid.  You might have had a lock on it back in ’79, but that was literally four decades ago and trust me: you are clueless, and your old diary ain’t gonna help.

So let’s go ahead and segue right over to a Maddie and Mormor holiday.  (Pictures provided by mormor from her overnight Maddie visit.)

And more outsourced picturess: this time it’s Trine’s photojournalism from her trip around Søndersø with Maddie:

(That’s a cow climbing a tree, in case you missed it.)

Mid-may is always time for the Eurovision Song Contest.  Molli sat it out, surprisingly, but the rest of us were glued to our seats all evening.  (Literally: that’s the only way I can force myself to sit through the thing.)

Israel’s entry won, as you may know, for one of the weirdest, over-the-top, and, frankly, stupidest contributions I’ve ever seen on Eurovision, and this is most definitely saying something.  As a family, here were our rankings (we admit to bias in the number one slot):

In case you’d like to get a sense of how the individual judges perceived things, here are their scoresheets:

Grilled, marinated flank steak and portobello mushrooms equals summer.  (And it’s still freaking May!  In Denmark!)

I think I took this picture because it just felt like July.  It still feels like high summer as I write this.

It’s just staggering to think the March blog post was full of snow and blizzards and frozen harbors!

One evening when Maddie joined me for a Didi walk, we noticed two hot-air balloons in the sky.

It was a still, clear, hot evening, perfect for such sport, and Maddie and I were captivated by the balloons.  (Which you’ll probably figure out on your own when you see how many pictures I took of them.)

Weirdly, they descended so low over the lake that they disappeared from our horizon.  They must have just hovered over the lake!  But what goes down must come up. . .

You can’t really see it in the following picture, but it’s a shot of our new swimming pier take from a few hundred meters down the path.

That’s the kind of picture a good editor would cut in an instant.  Yet I can’t bring myself to delete it, so maybe there’s something of value or merit that’s caught my subconscious attention.

Sure, that’s got to be it.

I took about a million photographs of the window project that was keeping me very busy throughout what I have thus far presented as an almost pastoral month of summery ease.  Although I’ve held on to them separately for a permanent record that will someday appear on this blog in a single post (“how we built our magnificent new bathroom”), I’m going to try and minimize the documentary evidence of the project on this blog.

That much said, here are some treats the mason (who made me sand down an extra 30 bricks in just 36 hours and then only used 17 of them) left behind for us:

It’s not just that he left all that masonry on the inside of the bricks: it’s that he told us the “hole” was ready for the window, then Flemming came by, took one look, and said, “nope, it needs to be completely flush.”

So getting the gas concrete and cementing it in and then making the whole square hole flush and smooth became my next project.

And I did it.

As you’ll see.

Is Didi not a beautiful dog?  Won’t she be a great mother?  All the vets who’ve seen her for the various tests and checkups she’s been having in preparation for being mated say so.

Note to self: the walnut trees have gotten too high.  Trim them to about the level of the lines below.

Another note, this time for permanent medical record: here is Maddie’s dental x-ray from about the middle of this month.  You can see the problem in the upper teeth on the right: the baby teeth are being forced into weird positions by the slow-growing adult teeth under them.

That problem will be solved tomorrow, when the two baby teeth are pulled.

Pinse Sunday — Whitsunday — was of course the annual Kammer family picnic in Frederiksberg Have:

Thanks to this annual picnic, I have a lifetime array of photos of these two girls feeding ducks in more or less the same spot.  (Only recently with Matteo.)  One of these days I’d like to make and even print a collage of them.

And I think this was Didi’s first time joining us for the annual event.

Maddie and I paid a visit to the ole Suttetræ.

Didi flipped out whenever one of our immediate family wasn’t with her, so I remained behind with a few others while the main delegation took the canal tour.

Didi howled at them as they passed!

I took a lot of shots like the two below over the course of the month, just trying to capture how surreally summerish it was.

Trine says I look all 70s in my Didi-walking uniform.  The new glasses may be contributing to that.  Here’s a selfie so you can judge for yourself.

One evening it was so hot that the indoor thermometer registered 29 degrees Celsius.  That’s 84.2 Fahrenheit.  Maddie and I realized that was a record for our house (thank God), so we took a picture.

But it was already fairly late (the clock didn’t spring ahead, so it was actually an hour later than what you see), and just as I snapped the picture, the temperature dropped a tenth of a degree.

28.9?  Who cares about 28.9?!  It was 29 degrees in our living room!

Ironically enough, tonight, May 30, it reached 29.4 degrees, and I did get a picture of that.  I’ll spare you the picture next month.

Exulting in the weather were our purple rhodies:

And finally, on Friday, May 25, our bathroom window was installed at last!

Which brought me straight to my next project: digging out over a ton of sand from the floor.

I did that while the girls were tied up with Furesø Cup handball.  Here’s the one shot Trine sent me from the event.

Just as I was hauling the last bags of sand out to the carport (63 bags at about 40+ pounds per bag = yes, dammit, literally more than a ton), the Danish sky unleashed all the rain we hadn’t been having over the preceding four weeks–and then some.  In about twenty minutes.

A few more minutes of that cloudburst and we would have had the first real test of our new basement sliding doors!

It may be difficult to discern the difference from the photo above, but here’s the former sauna minus that ton (or more) of sand:

And amazingly, here’s the back terrace about forty-five minutes after the picture taken above.

What did I do with all that sand, you ask?

…and only last night — Tuesday, May 29 — did I finally get the last of them delivered to the dump.

Now a few silly screen shots that I felt like including.  First, just for the laugh: why spell check isn’t always enough:

And here’s a book I was about to buy for my Kindle, then didn’t (major new release, major publisher):

Over the course of the month, Maddie became obsessed with French.  She’s been texting me regularly in French.  Here’s my favorite exchange, because it’s a trilingual screwup:

In the top line, she’s trying to say “we’re watching Donald Duck” in French.

And she says, “nous voyons des Donald Et” because (apart from not having a grip on French articles), she is trying to translate “Donald Duck” to French, but is clearly thinking of “Anders And,” which is the Danish name for our favorite pantless mallard (Anders is a name, and and means duck).  So she translates the danish “and” (duck) as if it were the English “and” (the conjunction).  Et voila: Donald Et.  The first Danglish-to-French translation of her little life.

Lastly, GDPR has been making our lives at work hell for almost a year now: we’re ready for it, but clearly not everyone is, and it blew my mind how big some of those “everyones” turned out to be: here’s a screenshot from May 25: