It’s Easter weekend as I throw this post together. Saturday afternoon, at the moment. The girls are all up at the Hillerød Påskecup handball tournament. Trine’s up with them being supermom, shuttling girls around between games and activities, and comes home each evening–only to be back on the road at about 7:15 to head back up. Maddie’s team is undefeated (4-0) and will play in the final tomorrow (Easter) at 8:00. Molli’s team is also undefeated (2-0-1, with that tie coming against the other half of her own team: the 14-and-under girls of Furesø were divided so equitably into two separate teams for this tournament that they matched each other perfectly!). They have another game this evening, and if they win that then they, too, will advance to their final.
I don’t think they’re tired of all the winning!
I’ve been enjoying the empty house very much, taking things very slow and easy but getting around to a lot of little things I haven’t had time to tend to. (Hence, for example, this post.) I feel bad missing the games, but I needed some time to myself!
It’s the last day of March, and that’s a good thing. It hasn’t been a bad month for us as a family but the weather has been awful. (Not as awful as it has been in New England, but certainly the worst March weather of my fifteen years in Denmark. Yes, fifteen: March 29 was the anniversary.) The month included the bitterest cold snap and more days of snow than any month I’ve lived here.
But we’ll get to that later (with pictures).
Our big house project for the moment is getting a new full bathroom in what used to be the sauna area. We have a good chunk of money set aside for it in the form of a bank loan earmarked for the project, but it’s not enough to cover the whole project so we’ve been trying to wait until we could save up the difference. That hasn’t worked out too well, and time’s a-wastin’, so with some guidance from a renovation hobbyist of Trine’s acquaintance we finally decided to get the project going ourselves by at least getting the demolition out of the way and making whatever preparations we can afford.
This basically means we’re going to gut the space and put in a new window, then see if we can’t have the plumbing and electrical work done (by pros). From there we’ll very slowly have the bathroom built up by professionals, intervening ourselves for any parts of the project where there’s money to be saved by doing it ourselves, and where there’s little risk of our screwing things up too seriously.
So for the moment, here’s a shot of the east side of the house as it appears now:
And here’s the same shot doctored to show where the new window’s going to be:
(The new window will, like the one in the foreground, be translucent–it is, after all, a bathroom.)
We’re probably going to mate Didi this fall. We’ve been going back and forth on it for a while, but we all seem to feel it’s now or never. We’re going to work with the kennel where we got her to find a suitable mate and get guidance on how to go about everything. (We want the pups to be pedigreed, so there are a lot of formalities we need to see to.)
Here are some action handball shots of Maddie from late February or early March:
She’s getting quite good, and she had better: next season most of her teammates will be advancing to the 12-and-unders, and Maddie will be one of the only (if not the only) starters remaining with the 10-and-unders.
One morning in early March I was lulled into a false sense that spring was approaching. I took this happy picture on my way to work because the early morning lighting just screamed spring to me.
We’ll see very shortly how misguided I was.
Maddie and I continue to play chess now and then. I’m not sure either one of us is getting any better, but we enjoy the time together.
The picture below was taken just a few days after the picture a few frames above:
I’d never seen the waters around Langelinie frozen like this.
Scenes from every day life: Trine’s dining room workstation, with a laptop computer, an iPad, and an iPhone. And, just in case, a notepad and pen. More computing power than existed on the entire planet the year she was born… and yet it’s just a fraction of the computing power in our household.
I don’t include the picture because of its testament to computing power, but because I suspect in five or ten years we’ll look back at this photo and giggle at how primitive this stuff is, and how wildly advanced we considered it. (On account of my recently having giggled my way through a dramatic office scene in some 80s movie where a character was bragging about the awesome power at their disposal — in the form of IBM ATs with monochrome monitors the size of shipping boxes.)
Here’s a funny picture:
Okay, it’s not a funny picture. It’s a picture that represents a funny story.
It’s a Saturday night in early March. Late. The girls have gone to bed, and Trine and I are going around the house shutting everything down for the night.
From the living room, I hear Trine calling out to me from the hallway:
“Greg, Greg! Come here! Quickly, right now!”
There’s panic in her voice — or if not panic, certainly urgency. It doesn’t have the tone that betokens something wrong with either of the girls, but it does sound like the next level down: a big leak, a small fire, something terrible. Not only that, but I hear Didi making growly barks.
I rush to the hallway: she’s standing by the bathroom door pointing toward the guest room. Didi is hunched between Trine and the guest room, growling at the guest room door jamb.
“I don’t know how it got in, I don’t know what it is — that hedgehog we had last summer? A big rat? Get it out!”
There was indeed a dark little shape huddled defensively in the doorway, and Didi certainly wasn’t happy about it.
I approached it cautiously, wondering what I could get my hands on in a hurry that might help prod the creature out of the house.
Until I was close enough to see what it was. Not a hedgehog. Not a rat. Not even a big mouse.
It was a slipper.
The very one you see in the photograph above, in the very spot.
In fairness to all of us, it did look suspicious, and Didi was freaking out, and we might have had a little scotch, so we’re to be forgiven for assembling those facts into the conclusion that there was a foreign animal crouching in the guest room doorway.
Still: funny story. Worth recording. Every bit as good as Alvy Singer and Annie Hall’s freakout over the escaped lobster.
Anyway: the cold having clamped down on us, what had been the cold rains of January and February became the snows of March.
Which weren’t entirely unappreciated:
(I should note for the record that they actually tricked Didi into pulling them around the yard in a sled.)
The picture below is my favorite of the whole lot:
I include the below for the historical record.
I don’t understand why 13-year-olds need to Snapchat one another up until well past 11:00 at night, or why anyone on earth needs to Snapchat at five minutes to six in the morning. Future Molli Malou will surely look upon this image and remember what it was all about; those of us further along in years already can only wonder.
In any case: look, more snow.
It may seem pointless, all these shots of snowy Denmark, but it’s important to remember that these weren’t all taken the same day. We were in a cycle where almost every night it would snow and there would be a fresh centimeter or two in the morning, then it would melt almost entirely away by nightfall of the following day.
Only to repeat again.
And speaking of repeats: more Maddie handball action:
The weather was horrible, but the days were at least getting lighter. That inspired some spring cleaning among all of us, and Maddie chose to have her room rearranged.
She was pleased with the results:
Trine and I took another polar dip down at Furesø. It feels much more daring taking a Sunday skinny dip into the lake when it’s mostly frozen!
Here’s the pier we use:
And here’s the spot for winter bathers: someone had actually smashed a hole through the ice for us.
And here’s the view we had as we lowered ourselves into the literally freezing water:
I’m enjoying it more and more, and we’re planning to get much more regular about it in the future. (Obviously winter bathing is losing a lot of its luster now that it’s not technically winter any more. Although I just got an alert from DMI on my phone that Denmark’s about to get socked with another snow storm tonight. Sigh.)
The pattern of snow falling, piling up, and then melting caused us some problems once: we’d gotten more than the usual dusting one night, but the melt off was just as rapid as ever the following day.
As you can see in the photo below, a lot of the runoff dribbled into the stairwell to the garage:
It got so deep that it crossed the threshhold into the garage (under the door), and flooded it.
That wasn’t fun to deal with!
The Ides of March fell on a busy weekday this year, but the girls made it a special night for me.
And even though I’m not on Facebook anymore, Nana was kind enough to post this happy memory of warmer times to commemorate my birthday:
Meanwhile, the Baltic/Øresund waters were neither warm nor calm:
I spent 90 minutes each weekend day literally chiseling away at the old sauna floor. Here’s the before:
And here’s an after:
(I’ve made a little more progress since, but took some time off since we realized it’s going to be a while before we’re ready to knock the hole through the wall for the window, which hole we’ll be using to get the rubble out of the house.)
And yet another snow:
And another:
And a very silly Maddie:
The penultimate weekend of the month–the start of the Easter break–Hannah came out to visit us from Vienna for a few days.
I’d messaged her to ask if there was any particular food she’d like while she was here: she said anything would be fine.
So I said we’d have our house favorite: goat brain stew with bat-tongue crunchies.
And she said: she’d been hoping I’d say that!
So we went to no inconsiderable effort to prepare the goat brain before her arrival:
It may not look entirely goat-brainy, but you have to bear in mind that Hannah was looking at it with special eyes.
Well, a special eye, anyway: it was one Maddie had drawn for her.
It was a wonderful visit: we kept things pretty slow firstly because we understood that coming out of mid-terms, she probably wouldn’t want things too hectic, and secondly because the four of us were all utterly exhausted and needed a break ourselves.
We had to drop Maddie off in Copenhagen right near my workplace on Sunday, so we made that into a kind of Copenhagen day trip. (Maddie was going with a friend to a licorice festival.)
Since I work so close to the lille havfrue, we decided to pay her a visit.
…Afterwards we still had some time to kill, so we drove into Østerport and had some cake (and in my case coffee) at a nice bakery.
The girls had a good time playing Let’s Dance on the Playstation:
One afternoon was nice enough (and dry enough) that I walked Didi down by the lake, when we came across this:
Can’t make it out? Here’s a zoom:
Weirdly, Didi had stopped and sniffed the air, which is what had got me looking for something: the stupid dog herself never seemed to see the deer, only to smell it. I was literally pointing at it, going, “See, Didi, look, a deer, look!” — but the dog was more interested in sniffing at the roots of some tree.
So maybe a good thing we didn’t make her a hunting dog after all.
We had a nice dinner at the Chinese buffet, and then the girls went amok on the Bymidten playground.
That’s right, Hannah, you’re never too old for a slide!
(I should have taken a ride down it myself!)
Hannah and Maddie’s bond was still in full force.
The last full day of her visit, we drove town to Mormor & Jørgen’s and then took the Metro and S-Train in to Vesterport to see Coco at Paladsen.
What a great movie! Made all of us cry. (Almost all of us: Molli said she didn’t cry, but did “tear up a little,” which is in itself an astonishing testament to the movie’s power.)
Afterwards we had a delicious Danish dinner at Mormor & Vibeke’s, from which I unfortunately have no pictures.
And of course, it was snowing again on the drive home.
Hannah spoiled Maddie rotten by giving her piggy-backs to bed every night. Given how light it is in the photo below, I’m not sure this was a bedtime piggy-back, but we’ll just take it as representative.
And here are Hannah and Kaylee on their way to the Berlin bus.
It was a wonderful visit! I only regret that I had to work Monday through Wednesday while she was with us, but at least I was able to work from home.
After dropping Hannah and Kaylee off downtown, I came home to this:
The garbage collectors are the worst ever. If you so much as infringe upon a single regulation, they won’t pick up your trash or recyclables. And yet, as you can see in the photo above, they’re perfectly content to leave your trash bin in the middle of the sidewalk after emptying it.
Our tax kroner at work… and I’m furious about it. So this is my way of letting off that stupid steam.
Since the girls would be gone from Good Friday through Easter, we had to do our Easter Egg prep on Thursday night.
Instead of dyeing, we drew.
Trine’s still getting used to the fact that she needs to wear glasses once in a while. I think she wears them, like everything else, spectacularly.
Morfar passed through for a day or two the week before the Easter Break, and then again for the two nights after Hannah left us. I don’t have any pictures, but we enjoyed having him here.
And that’s it! Only six hours left in March — thank God!
Final update: Molli’s team has also qualified for the finals, so both girls’ teams have a chance to win the tournament in their respective brackets. So I’ll be getting up at six Easter morning not to make sure the Easter Bunny hid our seven Easter Eggs around the property, but to shower and head up to Hillerød to root the girls on!
Happy Easter!
Great blog. Good photos and all the updates.