Short Month, Short Blog

February was, as usual, the shortest month of the year, even though this year it was a little longer than usual.

For the first time in a decade, we didn’t participate in any Fastelavn celebrations outside of school: this is therefore the first year of this blog in which February doesn’t include any pictures of the girls dressed up and whacking a barrel.  Maddie got to whack the cat from the barrel in school; I don’t think Molli Malou had any Fastelavn celebration at all.  Sniff.  (For an American equivalent, imagine a year without Halloween pictures.)

Things were quite busy for Trine and myself at work — especially for me, as I was surprised to find myself following up on a referral for a possible new job, applying for it, testing for it, interviewing twice, accepting it, and resigning from Responsive all within the last two weeks of the month.  I start my new job at PensionDanmark on April 1, so March will be a transitional month for us.

So: with the Patriots out of the Super Bowl and Fastelavn out of the equation and Trine and I very focused on our jobs, there were not a lot of big photo ops in the course of the month: this is therefore very much a “scenes from everyday life” kind of blog.

One scene from everyday life that will probably be hilariously anachronistic within a few short years is this shot of Trine aligning her life at the dining room table.  She’s using her iPad, her Samsung Galaxy phone, and her Leonovo Yoga 3 laptop/tablet simultaneously… with the television, cable, and sound system remotes close at hand.  Ah, the joys of modern life!

We had a nice family dinner with Frederik, Kirsten, Julius, Linus, and Johannes, and we got the kids to make the fruit salad for dessert.  Here are Molli and Linus…

… and Trine and Julius and Molli…

…and Kirsten and Linus…

…and these three again…

…and Molli and Linus again…

Look at Julius’s concentration!

And the next two shots are a little blurry, but I include them because they are a testament to the fact that despite the remarkable changes in technology over the last half-century, some things never, ever change (I guess the gin bottle and cocktail shaker in the photo above convey more or less the same message).

And I like that Julius refused to concede that really, there was simply not another drop of whipped cream to be found…

The weather was horrible, but spring was announcing itself all around us.  This picture is from the little garden behind the kitchen — in very early February:

If the little spring flowers are starting to pop-up, then surely it’s time to start putting make-up on out in the back yard!

(Since you’re all language buffs, I assume you noticed I used four consecutive prepositions in the previous sentence.)

As the month progressed, the earth erupted more and more with spring’s little harbingers.  Her’s a picture from the side of one of the paths from the lake up to our neighborhood:

And from the same walk with Didi, this great shot of the swimhall.  (It’s spectacular in full size and resolution.)

Scenes from everyday life: the “black playground:”

I think it’s called the black playground because originally all the play equipment was black-stained wood.  Some of it still is, but as you can see there’s now also a lot of brown.  But as with the “old golf course” that was never in human history anything remotely resembling a golf course, historical reality has little to do with present nomenclature.

March of 2015 marked the 30th anniversary of my co-founding igLoo ttg with Chris Peditto, Maria Tirabassi, and Dan Piburn.  In true igLoo style, the 30th reunion was therefore held in February 2016.  I had arranged to Skype in to the reunion, which began midnight Copenhagen time on Friday the 12th.

Here’s me posting a selfie on the reunion Facebook group to communicate that it was fricking midnight and there was no damn Skype yet.

But very quickly there I was: talking to the whole igLoo crew from 5000 miles away over Skype. That’s Pauly Peditto, below, in the only viable picture I got of my Skyping, but I also got to talk to Chris, Moose Piburn and his college-aged son Coleman (whom I mistook for Dan’s younger brother Doug), Maria, Allison, David Grieco, Rich Cotovsky, Val Olney, Gina McLaughlin, and many other old, old friends who were veterans of the igLoo years.

A propos of nothing, and entirely out of the blue, Molli Malou went and made a huge batch of meringues:

Maddie got to spend a weekday with Mormor and got a little ice-skating in!

Scenes from everyday life: Maddie entertaining herself to sleep on a Friday night:

And of course, the Didi romps are becoming more and more pleasant as the weather gets less and less bad.

MGP stands for “Melody Grand Prix” (even in Danish), and it’s the national, junior version of the Eurovision song contest that I blog excessively every spring.   It’s a big deal for the girls, so here are Maddie and Molli Malou and Molli’s friend and classmate Louise getting all excited about — oh, god, who knows.  Something.

And here is who they made me download the app to vote for:

Trine was as excited about the event as I was:

(Sorry, but to be honest I can’t remember or even be bothered to look up which obnoxious child band won the event.)

A friend of a friend posted this on Facebook: Marblehead from the sky one February day in 2016:

Sticking with the Facebook theme for a moment, the next two photos are screenshots from my phone of Facebook posts that appeared one on top of the other one morning.

First, Lynn Miller Dean, an old Wexler colleague, posted a shot of the Potomac while on her morning walk.

And directly beneath her post, this one from Scott Michaud — Marblehead classmate and neighbor — from somewhere in Marblehead (I deliberately kept the bottom of Lynn’s post to prove they were right on top of each other).

It was astonishing to me that Lynn’s shot and Scott’s shots all sort of “rhymed” visually.  They looked kind of the same.  Right?  Totally different subjects, totally different locations, but they were both enamored enough of the views to take those pictures and post them, with very similar texts, and it was remarkable to think that two people I’d known who have absolutely nothing in common except for the fact that they both know me, were posting compositionally similar pictures with similar texts at virtually the same time on the same day.

But maybe no one else finds that interesting.  I know what you’ll find interesting: another one of Maddie’s soon-to-be hit songs:

I’m curious about these walks to the park — what park, and when was the last time we walked as a family thither?  And what struggle are we engaged in that makes it so phenomenal that we never give up?  Ah, but I love the sentiment of the song — I love that she loves who we are as a family — and I love her lyrical enthusiasm.

And I love the way she injects these parenthetical clap!s into every song she writes.

I include the following photgraph (stolen from someone on Facebook) of Marry-Arrchie Theatre.  It’s on the second floor (first floor for those of you reading this in Danish).  You go in that little brown door on the left and up a flight of stairs.  It’s a hideous, hideous location in Chicago’s hideous Uptown neighborhood, and right around the corner from the old igLoo.  (Which was itself above a Vienna Beef joint and Mitchell’s Diner, across the street from the fabulous Hotel Chateau — vagrants welcome!)

It’s closing its door at the end of their current production, after thirty years of spectacular work.  A significant milestone for Mor and Daddy.

You know it’s a cold day when it’s as beautiful as this and Didi and I are the only souls in Hareskov:

You know that empty old overgrown lot a few doors down from us?  One morning we all noticed a bunch of wooden markers planted all over it.  The next morning Didi and I walked by and saw this:

And the very next morning:

And the next:

And the next:

And the next:

(I’m still taking a picture a day, but the pics for this blog actually end on Sunday, February 28, so the series will resume when I publish the March blog.)

A few silly shots to end this short month that’s been low on Molli and Maddie pictures and not going to get any more of them: first, the beauty of Hareskov:

Next, another Facebook steal: a flashback of Adam, Mike, one of their legion drummers, and Bill Hall back in the late 80s.

One of Maddie’s DIY projects was melting plastic beads into flowers: the black-irised, white-petaled ones made excellent eyes:

And a final shot from everyday life: what we come home too whenever we come home:

(Of course, normally she’s hopping around and whining with joy and waving one of her stuffed toys around, so this is actually more likely a picture of what we see whenever we’re leaving home…)

Sorry for the dearth of Molli and Maddie photos… but there will be plenty in the March blog, so stay tuned!