Back to the Grind

The previous post saw us through our summer vacation in France.  I put it together — the blog post, not the vacation — over the course of the nine-day “staycation” that followed our 12 day idyll in southern France.

We had agreed long beforehand that although there were a lot of household projects to tend to, we would try to limit our exertions and enjoy the time off as much as possible.

We wanted, for example, time to torture Didi with the hose in the back yard.

Unfortunately, the south-facing roof siding boards didn’t seem prepared to make it a whole nother year without some serious TLC.

I therefore accepted cleaning and painting the whole damn trim, all the way around the house, as the one bit of nastiness I would have to take care of during staycation.

I felt about it very much the way Didi seemed to feel about playing “water fetch” one morning at Puppy Lake:

“Seriously?  You expect me to swim?”

But before I go further, I want to reiterate my commitments to (1) continue keeping the focus of this blog on its proper subjects: Molli Malou and Maddie, and (2) avoiding too many pictures without people in them.  But I also want to remind everyone that this blog — this history of our family, really, — has in fact become the “permanent record” that I used to jokingly refer to it as.  When did Molli Malou get chicken pox?  Did we build the swingset in ’09 or ’10?  What did the bedrooms look like before we moved the wall?  When’s the last time we stained the deck?  What color was the big room before we whitewashed it?  When did Maddie lose her first tooth?  It is wonderful to have this blog as an arbiter of all such questions, which is why I’m going to continue using it that way.  Which means, alas, there will sometimes be boring descriptions and pictures of household and property maintenance, and (suitably vague) mentions of the girls’ medical and scholastic issues that would never be appropriate in a more public forum.

I’m happy to report, however, that although it was awful, gruelling, and sometimes terrifying work, simply cleaning the trim revealed that it could indeed wait another few seasons before getting the full treatment. Look at the next picture: prior to my hard work, the left side of the trim looked like the right:

It took about 15-minutes per meter:

I wasn’t exaggerating when I included “terrifying” as an adjective to describe the task: the roof slopes a little toward the evening terrace, and is a good 25-30 feet up.

But look at the difference a little elbow grease (and some seriously vicious chemicals) can make:

I had drinks with a few former colleagues in town one night, and noticed this: is this a thing in the states, too?

We’ve never really optimized our use of the evening terrace (the sunken little nook outside the basement), even though it’s a wonderful and very private space.  It’s in the corner of the property where Hybenvej intersects with Enebærvej, but the shrubbery does a pretty good job of blocking visibility from passers-by; the fact that it’s about three meters below street-level also helps.

I’m determined to make it an oasis so fantastic we’ll want to spend more time down there: I had hoped this summer to trim the overgrowth away to allow more light, clear all the weeds from the “shelf” garden and fill it with white stones and some nicely-spaced horta plants.  And eventually, as our budget allows, replace the ancient deck table and plastic chairs with something nicer.

Target met: it’s got more light now.

Unfortunately I cut so much away that it is now a kind of goldfish bowl: passers-by can see straight down into the terrace, which robs it of a lot of its charm.  (Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: how much foot traffic is there at the corner of Hybenvej and Enebærvej in little Værløse?  And the answer is: not much.  But if it’s no more private than our backyward, which is visible through the hedgerow fronting the street, then there’s no real advantage to having a second terrace, is there?)

Speaking of Værløses cosmpolitan nature, here’s a little shot I took while walking Didi about 10 minutes away from our house.

(You can actually buy a share of those critters, and take that share home at the end of the season.  We keep meaning to do that, although none of us have never eaten a steak we’d had the pleasure of meeting socially beforehand, so I’m not sure how that would go over.)

Oh, cosmopolitan Værløse!  You bustle with life all over!

(Yes, another hare.)

If I had to characterize this period of staycation and back-to-school and back-to-work in a single phrase, I’d be tempted to include the word “Pokèmon.”

It had launched while we were in France, so at Maddie’s prompting we downloaded it right away when we got back to Denmark.  We’ve had a great time with it.  I now have company when I walk Didi much more frequently than I used to, for example.

Maddie and I play as a team on my phone.  Molli Malou feigned indifference for a while, then loaded it onto her own phone and is catching up quickly.  I don’t have pictures of our many Pokèmon hunts and adventures because, of course, the phone on which we play it also happens to be my camera.  But it’s great to know that all that elephant hunting with my nieces has finally paid off.

Ex-step-cousin Joachim married his long-time girlfriend Bibi this month, and the wedding was of course preceded by a bachelor party.

It was a very athletic day followed by a very carnivorous dinner, all of it washed down with a very liberal wash of alcohol.  (Of the roughly 10-12 guests, fully half of us experienced knee injuries that persisted for several days.)

Here’s the groom:

We began with “bungee tag:”

Followed by “human foosball:”

Then changed clothes for a couple of hours of paintball. . .

. . .in a really cool environment.

We were all exhausted and injured after all that, and following the mixed grill (being prepared here by ex-step-cousin Nicolai), we decided there was no need to finish the day rocking around the city: we could just sit around the table and drink too much without getting up from our seats.

The following Monday was the first day of school.  That’s sixth grade for Molli Malou:

And second grade for Maddie:

I’d like to mention for the permanent record that we were very concerned about Maddie’s second grade experience.  First grade had been very difficult for her in many ways (partly because it had been very easy for her in many others), and her experience at FFO prior to the start of school had not been promising.  Additionally, the Friday before school started we were informed by the school that their first-grade teacher, Susanne, who ought to have been following them through second and third grades, had quit on very short notice, and they had just the day before hired her replacement, Charlotte (now known to us only as Lotte).

We knew Maddie desperately needed stability and a teacher who knew and understood her particular ways, so this turmoil kind of freaked us out.

After the first day of school, Maddie was practically dancing on air.  “Best day ever!” she said.

After the second day of school, we learned she had been mistaken the day before: this had been the best day ever.  Ever!

And so it went, each day better than the day that preceded it.  And so it continues to go.  And we had a meeting with her teachers and administrators the other day (it had been scheduled months before) and they are just as surprised and amazed (and glad!) as we are.

Lotte appears to have been just what Maddie needed.  Let’s hope she sticks around!

(Molli Malou continues to simply glide through school with an ease and pleasure I find entirely alien.)

Oh: also for the permanent record, in early August I finally got confirmation from Immigration that my application for citizenship had been accepted — and that I could expect an answer sometime around August to October of 2017.

I love going to work early because I get to come home early, which means I get to do little fun things like surprise the hell out of Maddie when she’s out grocery shopping with Trine.

I’m going to allow myself the occassional wild digression: my personal selection for quote of the year came from this year’s Olympics:

“Chemistry’s not an exact science.”  Good point!  So why not fill the pool with some H30, or H02? Close enough, right?

As the weather began its slow change, the morning walks with Didi were sometimes quite beautiful even without leaving the neighborhood.

Nice shot of PensionDanmark to compensate for what I now realize were crappy ones last month, or the month before.

And a shot of a very confused ship sailing by: I would love to see this thing with its sails up:

Might be hard to make out at this resolution: but one day I spent five minutes trying to unlock my bike before I realized it wasn’t actually my bike.  Someone not only had the exact same make and model, but had parked it next to mine.

One of Maddie’s assignments in school was the traditional “What I did on summer vacation” type thing.

Translation: “I have been on the beach with my father’s friends Stefan, Zoevy, Zoey, and Wivien [Stéphane, Sovi, Zoé, and Vivien] I have bathed like a lunatic, I splashed around.  I would SO like to have bathed a little longer before we had to go home.  I also rode on my father’s back.  I played he was my seahorse.”

So obviously the cultural experience was a big success.

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: Allison snapped a shot of my book keeping some pretty good company at a theatre box office in Chicago.  And who’s on top?  Take that, Shakespeare!  Eat my fumes, Sophocles!

The bachelor party mentioned before was obviously, as foretold, a prelude to a wedding.  On the day of the event the girls played around with some party hair:

And Molli Malou thought we looked so fine there should be a picture of us.

Joachim and Bibi’s wedding was held in Roskilde.  The invitation had just told us to show up at the train station where a bus would take us to the wedding location.  Which remained unspecified.  Which was kind of exciting.  (The reception would follow at another location, also unspecified.)

On top of this uncertainty, we had another: on Friday night we learned our plans for the girls (who were not invited) had fallen through.  We tried desperately to find a replacement plan, but could find absolutely no one able to have them over, babysit them, or even check in on them sporadically.  So we made a radical decision: we’d abandon them.

Well, no, that wasn’t quite the decision.  The actual decision (rationalization?) was that since Molli Malou was now 12, and Maddie was a manageable seven, and since we’d be available by phone all night and could make it from Roskilde to Værløse in about 20 minutes, in an emergency, we’d let them take care of themselves until we got home.  (This was a Danish wedding, so that obviously meant the very wee hours of Sunday morning.)

We prepared them prodigiously: we left notes on how to handle every emergency, on what would and would not be allowed.  We made them swear oaths of fidelity and allegiance to our instructions.  We bought them a frozen lasagne and left explicit instructions on how to prepare it in the toaster oven (no oven or stove use allowed!)  And eventually. . .  we left.

So we made it on time to the bus.

And enjoyed the ceremony (which turned out to be at a public house out in Boserup Skov).

And we made it to the reception, and a former industrial park being retooled as a kind of innovation lab called INSP!  (I’m calm, I’m calm: the exclamation point is part of the name.)

The contrast of the guests in their formal (and semi-formal, and business casual) attire against the ragged ruins of industry was a lot of fun in black and white.  Here’s the groom.

And not long after we sat down to dinner, still exchanging nervous glances and wondering whether we had once again qualified ourselves for Worst Parents of the Year nominations, I got the following photo via SMS from Molli Malou:

Holy crap: can you see the pride radiating out of Maddie?  Here, I’ll blow it up for you:

We responded with a picture of our own: can you see our relief?!

Knowing the girls were happy and proud, and had made dinner without burning the house down or slicing into any arteries, Trine and I felt it was okay to begin enjoying the reception in earnest.  I couldn’t help myself from taking pictures, I love ruins in black and white.

And two lovely ladies all dressed up amid the ruins (that’s Kirsten with Trine, for those who don’t remember):

It was interesting in color, too, but doesn’t quite have the same gritty chic:

I had forgotten that ex-step-cousin Marie was pregnant: she’s actually due today, I think, as I write this — but we haven’t heard anything yet.

The next day we slept late, took care of our chores, and settled in as a family to watch Denmark’s men’s handball team compete against France for Olympic gold.  It was a nerve-wracking game mainly because Denmark kept having the lead, and even widening it, but France always looked like they were just about to mount a huge and rapid comeback.  With just minutes to go in the game, Denmark was only ahead by two points.

Watch Trine’s hair graying:

Watch Molli Malou exhorting the players to put this sucker away:

Watch Trine and Maddie realizing there’s probably not enough time left for France to come back.

And… Olympic Gold!

(Remember we’re a little country over here — each gold medal for us is the per capita equivalent of about sixty American gold medals — and we are a hardcore handball house.  So these photos are as much for future Molli Malou and Maddie as they are for all of you.)

At work that Monday I was starting to realize I might have a problem.

But Maddie was so thrilled with the progess “MadMaddieMadder” was making that she couldn’t wait to go on one of our Pokèmon hunts that evening.  I was very gratified to find our next door neighbor making his way, with his sons, on a hunt of their own.  He actually gave me a tip that there were some rare Pokémons sighted on the school playground.  Whew: I wasn’t the only father getting sucked into all that!

Bymidten had another of their “open late Thursdays,” and the weather was perfect.  We had dinner there and cut Molli Malou loose to wander up and down the arcade with her tweener and young teenage friends: Maddie and a friend stood in line for half an hour to climb the climbing wall.  Trine and I were able to enjoy an al fresco dinner and a couple of beers with the parents of Maddie’s friend.

Not long after that — the next night? — it was the annual “Sensommerfest” for Søndersøskolens indskoling classes (grades 1-3).

The second graders put on a dance number and although I took about fifteen pictures, this is about as good as they get — so I’ll spare you the others.  (That’s Maddie in the foreground.)

Note for the permanent record: when the hell did the spiders here get so huge?

We took a weekend bike ride with Maddie out to the Strawberry farm and stopped to visit the sheep along the way.

I wasn’t home the last few days of the month.  My job at PensionDanmark isn’t going to give me the kind of travel I’d grown used to, but there is a big annual Dialog Conference in Sweden that I’ll probably get to attend each year.  It’s up in Strömstad, a little harbor town just about an hour east of Oslo.

We took a bus up, and the bus took the ferry, so I was once again reminded how cool it is to live somewhere that brings me in contact at least once a year with Hamlet’s castle.

I took the uncharacteristic step of taking a selfie to send the girls just to show them I was alive and well and floating around the Swedish fjords.

This was the view from our hotel in the evening.  It obviously felt very familiar.

I actually have a lot of nice pictures from the conference, but they’re not relevant here.  So I’ve just chosen a couple.

First, the conference was divided between two hotels.  The geography meant that it was about a 10-15 minute drive from one to the other — but also a 10-15 minute walk, because walkers could take advantage of a little mini-ferry that was not available to cars.

The ferry is the white-sided, white-arch-roofed thing at the end of the pier on the left.  You got a key card from the hotel desk that would first open the gate to either of the two piers, then allow you to summon the ferry if it wasn’t already on your side, then let you operate the ferry yourself from one pier to the other.  It was a lot of fun.  For I am very young, and I am very merry, and I rode back and forth all day upon the ferry.  (Apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay, and I’m not even going to begin to get into why that little poem is stuck in my craw some 30 years after I first read it.)

As with most conferences, the panels and keynotes were mostly boring boilerplate presentations heavy on platitudes and clichés and light on actual actionable wisdom, but it was a great social and networking event and the dining and entertainment were great.  (So great that I have basically been sick ever since I got back: turns out three nights in a row of 4-5 hours of sleep after Way Too Much to Drink, while horsing around outside dressed for summer in late autumn temperatures is not conducive to one’s health.  Go figure.)

On our last night, we 545 participants had a big dinner out on one of the Koster islands.  These are about a 20-minute boat ride from Strömstad and are the westernmost populated islands of Sweden.  (If you draw a straight line from Skagen to Oslo on a map, it will go right through these two islands.)

I don’t know why I thought that was so cool (“Oh my god, you guys, we’re on the westernmost islands of Sweden!  Populated islands, anyway.  Isn’t that cool?”).  But I did.

Also, holy hell, did they make an incredible seafood bisque:

# # #

That was August.  Now it’s September.  School is still going very well for both girls.  Molli Malou is still fully engaged (and then some) in handball; Maddie gave it up and is now dividing her time between swim, choir, and dance.

We’re at level 19 in Pokèmon Go.

As most (all?) of you know, I set Maddie up with a Gmail account last weekend.  She’s absolutely loving it, but she was a little stressed by all the great emails she got within hours of her account being created.  We applaud her commitment always to write back to everyone who writes her, but are trying to teach her it’s okay to wait a couple of days before replying to an email unless the sender requests a more immediate reply.  We’ll see if the novelty wears off, but in her case I don’t think it will.  Besides email, she’s also suddenly obsessed with writing stories on the computer.  I’ve promised to show her how to mail them to people, but Americans may have to wait a little longer than Danes because she’s now stressing about translating her stories.

We’re finally cashing in Santa’s DFDS mini-cruise to Oslo this weekend, so we’ll be sailing off from Nordhavn at about 16:30 Friday and will be on the boat (or wandering around odious Oslo) until we get back to Copenhagen late Sunday morning.  We’re excited and scared at the prospect of a whole weekend together, offline, in a confined space, but I think it’s going to be great.

And then the weekend after that, Molli Malou has a handball tournament way down in Rødby (at the very bottom of Sjælland), and Trine and Maddie are going to spend the weekend down there as well.

And the weekend after that is, amazingly enough, autumn.

Damn.

It gets faster every year, doesn’t it?