May Flowers & Edinburgh

The weather in May was just freakish: we had a couple of weeks of intensely summer-like weather followed by a fortnight of frigid days, blustering winds, and rain… then resumed the summery weather again.

Here’s Maddie actually sticking to the shade in early May.  In Denmark.

After our meteorologically miserable April, the foliage was behind schedule, but the sudden burst of warmth brought it all blooming out.

As always we lit our candles on Remembrance Day (eve), but that tradition — whose decline I’ve observed in previous May blog posts — really seems to be bottoming out.

It’s interesting how the woods enter spring, because they seem to start from the ground up: first a layer of green creeps across the earth, covering everything, and only then do the trees begin to bud:

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: cleaning Maddie’s drawers I came across a drawer of nothing but these socks:

I copy-and-paste directly from Facebook:

Me: What are these?
Maddie: Fluffy socks.
Me: Why aren’t they with your other socks?
Maddie: They’re fluffy.
Me: So?
Maddie: I don’t wear them.
Me: Then why do you keep them?
Maddie: It’s a collection.

First sprinkler festivities of the season came very early this year!

Here’s Maddie reacting very sportingly to having landed on Daddy’s Baltic Avenue… with a hotel on it this early in the game because someone sold it to him for five-hundred backs when he already had Mediterranean.  Also in frame: the someone who made that deal and is beginning to realize it might not have been the best idea…

Didi’s best friend is Laura, an almost-identical Nordic Golden who we meet all the time up at the  Old Golf Course (I don’t have to keep saying it was never really a golf course at this point, do I?).  Laura is a year older, but they have loved each other since Didi was a puppy.  They play together fiendishly; neither of them is as exuberant or reckless with any other dog.  It’s a joy to watch them together.

So imagine Didi’s delight when we uncharacteristically ran into Laura in the forest!

The weather was so great we were even eating outdoors already in May!

Judging from the shadows this photo must have been taken at about nine o’clock in the evening.  Summer was truly upon us!

For Didi’s second birthday (on May 11), she got the biggest real animal bone I’ve ever seen outside of a museum.  (She’s still working on it as I write this, and it’s nearly a month later!)

Maddie is experimenting a lot with makeup these days.  Most often she ends up looking bruised or ill.   Adorably bruised or ill, but nevertheless…

In the heat of the moment I never manage to get a good picture before the situation I want to capture collapses into anarchy, but this one comes pretty close: Molli Malou has taken CharLee into her lap for some affection.  Didi, ever jealous of the girls’ affections, trots over to make the case that cats are not worthy.  Maddie ambles over to reassure Didi:

It’s astonishing I managed to take that picture, because nanoseconds later CharLee had leaped off of Molli, terrified by Didi’s menacing sounds of jealousy, and Didi herself had bowled Maddie over in her mad rush to chase CharLee into the kitchen and out of the house.

Summer project: I have got to do something about that damn swingset!  (Not an optical illusion.  And really, the poles are about 80cm down into the earth!  Moster Mette can back me up, she watched me dig the holes!)

Sometimes I spy on the girls.  I like to see what they’re up to when they don’t think they’re under parental observation.  Based on my most recent findings: Molli does flips and makes Maddie photograph them, then they discuss the quality of the photographs.

Didi and I had finally become blasé about all the damn deer we kept bumping into in April, but May brought a whole new experience:

(It was a hare-raising experience!)

I kept torturing Trine by emailing her our lunch menus from work, and sometimes sending her photographs of the plates I’d made for myself.  It wasn’t really nice of me, since poor Trine has to bag her own lunches and we rarely stock calamari or pan-seared tuna with wasabi sauce (for example) at home.  But I love her so I felt I must share my happiness with her.

We’re training Maddie to go to school on her own.  No, strike that.  We’re training ourselves to allow Maddie to go to school on her own.  She’s been ready for months, if not years: it’s only her parents holding her back.

So here I am one day taking her just a little bit of the way toward school, then sending her off on her own to ride the long way (through the tunnel that passes beneath the main road, Kirkeværløsevej, because we will still only let her pass over that road with one of us accompanying her).

There she goes!  I watched her go and although I was in a rush to get to work, I waited so I’d still be there when she turned around to give me one last wave.

…and waited…

Yeah, well, fine.  If you’re so fricking independent, then Mor and I have every right to dash off to Edinburgh for the weekend with a clean conscience!

I love this picture of Trine because we’re actually both sixteen in this picture:

What she’s smiling and looking all sneaky about is that we bought our own little mini-bottles of scotch in duty-free for the flight, but you’re not allowed to consume your own alcoholic beverages on RyanAir flights.  (Otherwise how can they recoup the money they lost on the cut-rate price of your ticket?)  So the picture above is Trine seconds after she has scrunched herself down in her seat to take a surreptitious little sip of her unauthorized whiskey.  (I simply poured my own whiskey into the empty bottle of Coke Zero I’d polished off and had no need for such theatrics, because I am a Superior Sneaky Planner.)

I have a lot of pictures of our trip from the airport to Jane/Janne’s apartment (I’m sticking with Jane because that’s who she is to me, because that’s what I was told to call her when I first met her), but I’m skipping all of them because (a) they’re lousy, (b) I ended up having better pictures of all the same things in daylight over the course of the weekend, and (c) most of them had no people in them and this is supposed to be a blog about our family.

So my first picture is from Saturday morning in Jane’s apartment.  The very sight of Trine looking so relaxed helped me relax.

And it was good we relaxed a little, because Jane’s plan for the day turned out to be: walking the feet right off of us.

We began by stepping out of her apartment and aiming directly for Arthur’s Seat.

The gorse, the gorse!

Sniffing is fine — that sweet, vanilla-esque scent is captivating — but when you get real close, you realize you don’t want to get real real close…

It doesn’t really play at this small resolution, but it’s just astonishing in full-resolution to see how high up one can get in the middle of a major modern metropolis.  And that was the stunning thing: I’ve been to Boulder and Denver, I know big cities can be butt-up against tall mountains, — and the Hollywood hills are in the middle of the big sprawling mass of Metro L.A. — but there’s something very different about the way Arthur’s seat thrusts up all raw and bare and craggy (and Gorsey) out of the very middle of a city.

We had to scurry down off Arthur’s Seat pretty quickly because we’d spotted and even begun to feel a little rain rolling in.  Fortunately, on what was to us to the far side of the volcano (did you know it was a dead prehistoric volcano? I didn’t!), it was a much shorter descent down into the city.

And the rain never really materialized as much more than a faint drizzle.

We went into a Swedish restaurant, of all things, for brunch.  The rain had seemed to let up while we were settling in at our table, then while we were eating the sky simply unloosed itself: it rained so hard it sent pedestrians reeling and knocked over outdoor furniture.  It was very amusing to watch from inside.

It ended after about ten minutes, the sun came out, and by the time we had finished our brunch the city was dry again.  I won’t bother mentioning it again, but that was the pattern all Saturday and Sunday: gorgeous warmth and sunshine, sudden torrential downpour, repeat.

The Scottish Parliament (which is not the picture above; that’s the Queen’s This or the King’s That or something) sits at one end of the main drag through town — King’s Road or Royal Mile or whatever they call it — (yes, Royal Mile, I think), at the very bottom of it, if I recall — and the street-level wall is of some kind of stucco with famous Scottish quotes engraved on many of the stones embossed into the stucco.  There were a lot of blank stones, suggesting optimism for the future of Scottish literary culture, but of those that were not blank, this was my favorite:

…although I liked this one too:

Never in my life have I come so close to buying myself a skirt.

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen:

Now some touristy shots without (familiar) people in them.  Sorry.

Suddenly it was raining again.  (Yes, moments after the picture taken above.)  We stepped into a little café for some coffee, and I backed up my coffee with a wee dram, inspiring Jane and Trine to have drinks of their own.  (These “drinks” were all just 25 cl, so they were more like samplers than actual drinks, but I didn’t mind — with drinks that size I was able to drink whiskey all day and night, awed at my own capacity.)

While we were in the café they had a soccer game on the little television mounted over the door.  There was a back room, too, and from the sound of it there was another television in there on which people were watching the same game.

All of a sudden at one point there was a great hurrah not just from the back room, not just from the very few strangers seated near us in the front, but also from the streets, from the whole city, a great crying out of joy.

On the screen one of the guys in green was celebrating and being hugged by his teammates.

“What’s going on,” we asked one of our fellow patrons.

“It’s a long time since we won,” he answered.

And that was that.

The rain was letting up, so we headed back up the Ryal Mile.

Okay, the two blonde heads in the bottom left of the shot above are familiar, obviously.  “The World’s End,” I learned, took it’s name from the fact that at some point in Scottish history its location was up against the city walls, so as far as everyone who lived in Edinburgh was concerned, the location of this pub — which was ever a pub — was indeed at the World’s End.

Trine was very enthusiastic about the “Closes.”

In Chicago they’re not such a big deal: they’re called alleys, and they’re anonymous.  In Scotland they’re called Closes, they’re Medieval, and they’ve all got names.  Dozens of them — scores of them — run off the Ryal Mile (that’s how they spell it), and each of them twists off into some insane world of its own.  They were kind of cool, and it was interesting to think of the families from a hundred or two hundred, or three or four hundred years ago who lived their whole lives in the narrow parameters of a single close…  but still: they’re alleys.

Note to Rahm Emanuel: decree that all of Chicago’s alleys must henceforth be called Closes.  Name them.  Make the naming process a bidding thing.  Fund municipal projects with the revenue raised.  Problems solved.

And if problems are solved, that’s a good time for some whiskey…  Good whiskey.  So good I will probably never manage to taste it:

I just love a city where whiskey isn’t something offered on a few shelves in one section of a liquor store, but rather something that entire stores exist to offer.

I talked to the clerk at whatever store we were in for the photos above about my personal taste in whiskey (and my budget) and he strongly recommended this one:

I never saw the label again on our trip, but I do hope to someday taste it.  I would love for my favorite scotch to be something that would give me the third rhyme I so badly need for the Limerick about Nagan of Copenhagen…  (no, it didn’t rhyme with toboggan, or baggin’: it rhymed with Nagan).

Onward up the Ryal Mile…

At its peak — its summit — at the top of the Ryal Mile is, unsurprisingly, the main castle.  Heavily fortified.  I would have liked to have seen it, but just as we arrived they were closing not just for the day, but for the week: they were preparing for a big music festival starting the following weekend.  So all we got to see were the lucky bastards who’d made it in before closing coming out.

At “The Scotch Whiskey Experience” they had a flavor wheel that I’m only including here for future reference.  (And for anyone ever contemplating buying me a bottle of whiskey as a gift, anything in the upper right will do!)

Jane had told us there was one whiskey whose description had always enthralled her, until she’d actually tasted it.  Oddly enough, she disliked it — had to spit it out! (which is, I think, a misdemeanor in Scotland) — because it tasted exactly as its description had said it would.

The bar of the Scotch Whisky Experience had, hands-down, the best-stocked shelves of any bar I’ve ever set foot in, anywhere in this big wide world of ours.

Strangely enough, in the photo below the “strength” of the whiskeys descends from left to right.  The stronger tasting whiskeys seem to be the weaker colored whiskeys.

A few months ago Trine appalled me by describing my old friend Adam to one of our local friends as a musician who worked a day job as a fishmonger.

I laughed my ass off because that’s just not a word we use in English any more.

Trine insisted we did.

I told her we used it only ironically these days, or in a historical context.  No one monged anything anymore. We no longer had mongers of any sort.

She insisted we did.

In Edinburgh I had to eat my words.

(I still clung to one defense: “They could be using it ironically,” I said.  “A lot of these big supermarkets do that kind of thing to seem hip.”)

She wasn’t buying it.

But wait!

The shots of the Stockbridge Tap, and the view looking out from the Stockbridge Tap, were pretty much the end of our Saturday.  The grocery store picture of the Fishmonger sign was Sunday morning.

What was going on back in Copenhagen?

Thanks to Mormor, we have at least one clue: Maddie was preparing herself for a good night’s sleep.

Back to Edinburgh: here’s a shot of Trine at Jane’s door as we make our way back Sunday morning with our breakfasty purchases from the grocery monger.

After breakfast Sunday morning we set out for Leith, the harborside district.  Along the way I took these pictures providing some official guidance and context on a lot of the other pictures in this post.  I’m not sure they’re legible at this resolution, but I include them just in case.

The original plan, as I said, had been to head into Leith.  It was a fun and lively area, Jane had assured us, and it had been her plan all along that Saturday would be downtown and Sunday would be Leith.  But the streets were awfully crowded.

That’s when we began to divine the truth.  The game that had been playing in the café the day before had been the Scottish Cup — the championship of the Scottish League.  The local Edinburgh Hibernians, or Hibs, had indeed not won it “for a long time,” — their last victory had been in 1902.

If the Cubs win the world series in this year, — hell, if they don’t win until 2020 — their drought will not have been as long.

There had been a parade — in Leith.  There were over 100,000 fans on the streets (of Leith) to cheer their heroes.  There were helicopters hovering over Leith.

We did not do Leith.

We decided to turn around and find some quiet place where no self-respecting Hibs fan would ever set foot.

We were lucky enough to find a quiet place.  I have no idea whether Hibs fans would or would not set foot in it, but we managed to secure ourselves a table after just stopping in for a wee dram, and once we settled into our seats and got a glance at the whiskey menu (they say whisky, should I? it feels wrong), and saw haggis balls on their food menu, we realized there was no need to walk another step.

Here’s the view across the street from the restaurant where we spent our Sunday afternoon and evening.

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: the infamous Haggis Balls.

The waitress who served them to us laid them on the table as you see them above.

“Thar yi goo,” she said, “haggis bolls en yair brain souce.”

“Brain sauce?” Trine repeated incredulously.

The waitress nodded: “Jes’ a nairmal brain souce.”

She left us.

“Okay,” Trine said.  I could see her flinch and steel herself.  She had that look of a child trying to be brave while the doctor preps the syringe.

I don’t know what “brain sauce” would actually be (“after boiling, blend the brain to a smooth, gray consistency.  Add one cup stock or bouillon and the seasonings and bring to boil in a small sauce pan…”), still less do I know what Trine imagined it to be, but she was ready to taste it.

“What is brain sauce?” she asked Jane.

“Brain sauce?  God, I have no idea.”

“She said it was brain sauce.”

Jane exploded into laughter.

“She said brown sauce!  It’s just regular HP brown sauce.

We all laughed, and Trine was visibly relieved.  But I absolutely love that she really did appear ready to dip her haggis balls in brain sauce, whatever that was.

As for the haggis balls, we enjoyed them very much.

And we’d do it again.

# # #

After our dinner we stayed a while and sampled some of the bars many whiskies.  I kept to my Islays; Trine and Jane were more adventurous.  But ultimately we learned that Caol Ila was the only whiskey we were all three enthusiastic about.  (I still like Tallisker Storm and Ardbeg a little better, but they’re too smoky for Trine; the Caol Ila has a nice peppery effect that kind of breaks up the smokiness.)

We might have had a little more whiskey than we actually needed, so that was how we wrapped up our Saturday.  But we hadn’t had so much that we could return to Jane’s and sit and talk for a couple of hours over another wee dram or two.

Monday morning Jane had to go to work.  As I sipped my coffee I glanced out her window and beheld a sight that was a kind of revelation: as hard as your life may be, it’s not as hard as this guy’s.  It’s tough to make out at this resolution, but he’s got a baby strapped to his back and he’s walking three dogs.

After a little domestic breakfast we set out on our own to take a last stroll through Edinburgh, meet Jane for lunch, then swing by the apartment one last time to pick up our bags on the way to the airport.  So in the interest of getting through this blog before my next birthday, I’ll keep the comments to a minimum.

Another monger!  I had to concede utter defeat:

In the next picture I was just going for “Pretty Trine in Grass Market,” and didn’t notice the hilarious “Husband Day Care Centre” pub sign in the background.   (Hard to read, but they offer regular and deluxe packages for taking care of your husband while you take care of your shopping: the regular package includes a pint; the deluxe includes a pint and a whiskey (or whisky).)  Now it’s my favorite part of the picture.

The view of the castle from Grass Market:

It’s so forbidding and gothic in black and white.  In color it’s just… picturesque.

Grass market selfie!

Meanwhile, back on Hybenvej, the girls were at school, so Mormor could relax and send us a selfie:

The office of Black and White Publishing, where Jane works:

(We got there too early for lunch, so had a little time to tour the harborfront, or whatever it’s called: I just wanted to be sure we had pictures of us with the Firth of Forth because that’s always been my favorite name of any body of water anywhere.)

Had to include the shots of the whaling harpoon because it turned out to be Danish.

Our farewell lunch and goodbyes:

A final shot from the airport shuttle:

A “note to self” photo from duty free:

…and we’re already on our way back home.

The big brown blob in the upper right is Arthur’s seat.  At high resolution, this is a remarkable photograph to zoom in on, because it makes visible what you can never really fully get your head around while in the city itself: there is a prehistoric goddam volcano in the very center of this city!

We got in late at night.  Summer was surging in Denmark, so by the next afternoon Maddie was already begging to join me on Didi’s afternoon walk, as long as we could swim in the lake.

I don’t think it was the same night, but one evening that week as I took Didi for her night-time walk, the last of the day, she suddenly got agitated and started barking wildly at the sky.  It was like she was having a psychotic episode — until I looked up.

Yeah: balloon.  Much closer than it looks in the photo.  They probably even heard poor Didi’s hysterical yelps.

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: Molli’s note warning off the notorious 5.b food thief:

“This is Molli’s lunch pack and no one but Molli may touch it.  So you who keep stealing my food, hands off.  YOU THIEF!  I have set up secret cameras.”

Turns out she lost her nerve and removed the note when she got to school, but I’m happy to report there’ve been no further food thefts since anyway.

A walk in the woods around the old golf course with Trine and Didi:

The plants Peter and Lotte (next door) added to the fence between our properties not only give more privacy, but they’re actually lovely in the spring.

It was also time for the hedge haircut:

One night Trine was off with Molli on some handball-related thing, so I had Maddie to myself.  We decided to have a Maddie-Daddy night and go out to dinner, just the two of us.  We’d never done it before.  I took her to the selfsame restaurant where I had taken Molli Malou the day Maddie was born — which had been the first time I’d ever taken Molli Malou to a restaurant, just the two of us.

Maddie loved the historical ramifications.

Even more she loved her Fanta and her pizza.

Thanks to this blog, I was able to look up the picture I’d posted of Molli Malou on that evening some 7½ years ago, and Maddie suggested we try to recreate it.  We failed miserably.

Maddie had her last swim training of the year, with Mormor, who has been taking her to her lessons every Monday after cooking all of us dinner!  (We never could have made it through those Mondays without mormor’s help.)

Here they are playing pool handball — they’re not on defense, they’re just very opportunistically waiting for the ball right in front of the opponents’ goal.

This is how Didi says “Feed me” and “Take me out right now.”

The summer weather came back, with a vengeance, so there were a lot of evenings with sprinkler play (made easier by dint of our having finally repaired the faucet on the garage and having a retractable hose installed alongside it):

The most liked post I ever posted on Facebook was the note Molli Malou wrote to Trine in her lunchbox complaining about her lunches a few years ago.  (It’s posted somewhere on this blog.)

Molli Malou is now making Maddie’s lunch every day and learned this month that karma’s a bitch:

(“I DO NOT like ham, only rolled sausage :)”

# # #

And that’s it for May… but we’ll top things off with some AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK flashbacks.

First, a shot from 1983.  This is Allison and Bridget’s room in Donner Hall.  From left to right, Darren Sean Bevill, Wendy Woods, Joe the Boyfriend of Wendy Woods, Allison, and me.

Presumably (hopefully!) Halloween 1983: back row is me, Allison, and Josh Pollack; on the floor is Darren.
And strangely enough, at some point in May there was a Mental Floss article about “Countries with Weird Naming Laws” that got a lot of social media traction.  They apparently researched their article (as they often do) with a twenty-minute survey of the internet, so once again the name “Molli Malou” (or half of it, anyway) was trending on the internet for a few days.
The actual Danish laws have liberalized a lot since 2004.  And there are now (I just checked) 19 girls named Molli in Denmark.  (The eldest of them is coming up on her 12th birthday.)
On July 2, 2004, there were none — and it was an illegal name.
Trailblazers!
Author: This Moron

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