Vacationland

Summer was a long time coming to Denmark this year, but with the onset of July it finally arrived.

The warmer temperatures and bluer skies helped lighten all our moods, but having dodged the computer bullet once in June I ran out of luck in July:

What that is is my computer telling me, “I am hopelessly messed up.  Just shoot me.”

With nothing to lose, I reset the computer back to its factory-installed settings.  That procedure had been less traumatic than I’d expected when I did it the first time a few years ago (when it later turned out all I’d needed to do was vaccum the damn thing), and this time it was almost completely painless.  When you have all your data in the cloud (redundantly, across multiple storage units in multiple locations), and when virtually all the software you use is cloud-based freeware, zapping your computer back to its original state is actually kind of refreshing.  You get rid of a lot of clutter.  And if you’re using Google as heavily as I am, you don’t even lose your internet history, passwords, bookmarks, favorites, or any of that stuff.  So I was very quickly back in business after nuking my hard drive.  I have now implemented a policy of storing nothing on my laptop — not even temporarily — so that even were my Dell Inspiron to spontaneously combust right now, I would lose absolutely nothing.  Not even this post.

We can all bitch and moan about the shortcomings of our technologies, but once in a while we owe it to ourselves, and the people who’ve given us these gifts, to acknowledge that we live in a pretty cool world.

Speaking of nuking things back to their original settings, the interior of our car had gotten so bad that Trine insisted we take the expensive step of having it thoroughly and professionally cleaned.  She texted me from the cleaning place to let me know that although they had told her the appointment should take “just a couple of hours,” when they had a good look at our car they “gulped and said it would take most of the day.”

But what a car we got back!  It even had new car smell!

As you look at these pictures, keep in mind this car is almost exactly as old as Maddie.  It has endured babies, toddlers, children, cats, and dogs.

Yeah, yeah, it’s the Molli and Maddie blog.  I know.  But getting a new computer and a new car within a week of each other seemed pretty cool.

Didi pulled a muscle or something in one of her hind legs this month, so we haven’t been taking her on many romps lately, but one romp early in the month did allow me this picture from Hareskov: the little pond is coated with a thin layer of algae so fine and smooth it almost looked like you could walk across it.

For the first time ever this year Trine and I allowed ourselves to hold off on decorating the living room the night before one of the girls’ birthdays.  “Molli never gets up before nine or ten on weekends and vacations,” we assured ourselves.  “We can get up at 7:30 or 8:00 and still have time to decorate well before she’s awake.”

That’s what experts call a massive parenting fail.

The girl was apparently up at 5:00 or so.  She knew the living room wasn’t decorated.  By the time we got up at a more reasonable hour (6:30?), we had to basically confine her to quarters while we hurriedly decorated and prepped the pancakes.

When we finally released her into the festivities, she was in no mood to be photographed.

But Maddie was game!

And we did do a bang-up job of it, if I do say so myself:

And yes, of course Molli Malou came around and eventually let me get the annual, “How old are you now?” picture.

(Oddly, I posted the wrong one on Facebook: in the one I posted, taken a split-second after this one, it looks like she’s saying she’s seven plus a toe or something.)

As always — and this was something we all remarked upon — Molli’s birthday was a hot, sunny, almost cloudless day.  We were able to enjoy her birthday dinner on the terrace with Mormor and Jørgen (and Sofie).  Her requested menu was grilled rib-eye steaks with bernaise sauce, steak fries, and artichokes with drawn butter.  (Apple.  Tree.  Minimal distance.)

There were birthday greetings from Chicago, Deep River, and Ukraine thanks to Skype.

Her big gift this year was a new television.  Unfortunately, although I had ordered it online for delivery to the post office, the damn thing arrived at our door one day while I was at work, Trine was in bed, and Molli Malou was home on vacation.

She’d rushed in to Trine:

“There’s a man here with a big tv for Daddy!”

“Oh,” Trine stammered, “yeah, great, right — er… that’s the new tv for the exercise room.  Daddy will be so glad.”

Molli appeared to take it at face value.

So while everyone was finishing their dinner, I made sure the wrapped tv was set up where the old exercise tv had been:

I then moved the crappy old tv from the exercise room into Molli’s bedroom, and the crappier old tube tv — well, I just tucked it away somewhere, since to put it into Maddie’s room was going to require moving her furniture around.

Meanwhile, dinner progressed apace, and soon it was time to open the gifts.

Here’s Molli opening what we assured her was the coolest present of all:

Yes, it’s a Google Chromecast!  But it won’t work on that old tv you have, so Mor and Daddy have decided: you get to have the old tv from the exercise room!

What do you think of that!

She’s a very good actress, so I have no idea whether she saw through the stupid charade (future Molli: did you?), but she seemed very excited.  Not as excited as she was when we did our big reveal and let her know that she was actually getting the new tv, but still.

At her request we got her an “Othello” cake.  It’s a particular variety of Danish lagkage (layer cake).  No idea why it’s called Othello, but it kind of looks like one of the Othello board game chips — a black layer on top of a white layer — so that may be it, except in Danish the game Othello is called Reversi or something.  So I don’t know.  As I told Molli Malou, maybe it’s just called Othello because after you eat it you want to strangle the people you love.

Thrilled as Molli Malou was to get her new television, Maddie matched her in excitement over getting the clunky old vacuum-tube tv in her own room.

Completely on her own, Molli Malou invented a Sacred Handing Over of the Remote ceremony.

She is just so grown up all of a sudden.

But let’s move on from her birthday — how about a quick Didi digression?  Her’s a series of pictures that I would have made into a GIF if I weren’t too lazy to reinstall the GIF-making software I’ve used in the past.

Sometimes I feel bad for Maddie because she has so many hand-me-downs: she has my old iPad, she has a crummy old computer I bought on the cheap from work and whose graphics card can’t even handle the newest versions of Minecraft, now she gets this prehistoric television that gets like eight channels, most of them all staticky and awful… but then I think: when I was 6, what kind of iPad, computer, and television did I have in my room?

Six years old… that’d be Locust avenue, I think, where my most thrilling birthday present memory is of a digital clock-radio (the surprise of which was ruined not by the stupidity of my parents but the loquacious zeal of my sister).  So I think Maddie is doing just fine technologically.  And she seems to get the most out of even a primitive version of Minecraft: she writes “books” in there!

Boom yeah!

It’s “funky-looking” with a hyphen, dear, but since you’re six I’ll cut you some slack.

Speaking of slack: one nice thing about a golden retriever is that you are never in any doubt how deep is the mud in the woods: she’s like an organic measuring stick.

My last week of work before vacation, the girls spent Sunday through Thursday with Mormor up in Tisvilde at a “summer-house” cottage park (I don’t know how else to describe it).  They were thrilled when we dropped them off Sunday afternoon.

Of course we weren’t there most of the week, but Mormor came through and let us know the water was not too cold!

Meanwhile, at work, I had a full-day meeting with one of our new clients, Den Blå Planet — the Copenhagen aquarium.

Here I am doing some field research on-site.  (Seriously.  I really do love my job.)

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: While I’m doing field research at Den Blå Planet, Molli Malou and Maddie are posing for Mormor, who is assuredly telling them: Act warm!  Act warm!

The last week before vacation is always hell.  The penultimate day of that week, I had yet another full-day meeting off-site with an altogether different client.  Mormor and the girls had been rained out of Tisvilde, and it just so happened that I was able to meet them at Nørreport on my own way home and escort the poor bedraggled creatures back to Værløse.  I had to work a little from home, then it was just a matter of driving up to Tisvilde to pick up all the luggage (and bicycles) that had been left behind in the rush to evade the Deluge.

Traffic was horrible getting up there.  Mounting the bikes on our bike rack was difficult, and being rained on as I struggled did nothing to improve the experience.  Finally, finally I had all the bags loaded and the bikes mounted and was on my way home — so of course I get stopped by “the pig”: the little local train running across northern Sjælland from east to west.

I include this photo as a mnemonic device in case at any time in the next 3½ weeks I begin to feel that I’ve had too much vacation.

But no biggie, right?  Life is a hassle, but when you can come home to a scene like this, it doesn’t seem so bad after all:

The next day was my last day of work before vacation.  It was unbearably stressful right up to the very last minute, but at last it was truly over.  Four weeks of vacation lay before me.  I could relax.  Exhale.  Breathe.  I left the office with joy in my stride… right up until I reached the Metro.

Mnemonic device number two:

I just didn’t care.  It actually made me giggle a little.  I didn’t have to go back to work for a month!  Was a slight delay getting home really such a big deal when I had 31 days to overcome it?

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: Once I did get home, I was in the best of all possible moods and took the girls out to the candy store for their fredagsslik.  Their Friday candy.  Molli Malou chose this:

What they are is jelly beans.  A box of jelly beans that come in a bunch of different colors, but each color may be one of two possible flavors: something delicious like peach, coconut, or blueberry — or something nasty like old socks, toothpaste, rotten eggs, or barf.

Yes, someone has found a way to sell jelly beans flavored like barf.

Hats off, man.  Respect.

Meanwhile, out of the blue, Molli Malou developed signage to help communicate what her mood was.  It’s a kind of psychological doppler radar.

(She helped Maddie make one for herself, as well.)

She really has a lot of fresh design ideas.  Besides the Mood Map, she also invented the…  I don’t know, she hung a bunch of things from her ceiling and was very proud of how cool it looked.

Molli’s design enthusiasm is not limited to decor.  She is also the sole proprietor of Chez Molli, and in the following sequence you can see her creating a romantic dinner for two:

(The boy is Harald, Maddie’s fiancé.)

All you can eat ice-cream at Hai Long!  Whee!

Any possibility there’s a causal relationship between the picture above and the picture below?

The picture above was taken at the emergency dentist’s office just this past Tuesday.  We were supposed to have gone to Tivoli that day, but Maddie had one of her awful earaches (requiring a doctor visit that morning) and Molli had such a horrible cavity we needed this emergency visit and they simply pulled the damn tooth out of her mouth on the spot.

Amazingly, we spent a total of 19 minutes there.  (We timed it because after the experience at Herlev Hospital last month we were both half-expecting to be there at least 8 hours and were curious to see whether we would break the waiting-time record.)  Seriously, though: in a 19-minute period we checked in, filled out the necessary forms, had a tooth pulled, and were dismissed.

The following day Maddie’s antibiotics were making her feel better and Molli’s mouth was no longer in agony, so we were able to visit Tivoli.

On our way in, we had to take a shot of the new Netto in Værløse on the day of their grand opening.

But from there… Tivoli all the way, baby.

After Tivoli, the girls returned to Mormor & Jørgen’s, where they spent the night.

As I’ve already mentioned, Maddie is on antibiotics (her last pill will be taken on the plane to America).  As I have not mentioned, the doctor prescribed pills instead of liquids.

I begged for liquid, because Maddie has inherited my gag reflex and has a horrible time with pills (as I did until about age 20), but the doctor and the pharmacist shot me down.  So I had tried and tried and tried to get Maddie to swallow her pills, but she just couldn’t.  So Trine and I had been crushing her pills and mixing them with Nutella to make them palatable.  It was a lot of work and a big pain in the butt.

Mormor took a different approach: she offered Maddie five kroner (about 80 cents) to swallow the pill with a glass of water.

Advantage Mormor!

(That’s Maddie showing off the pill moments before swallowing it whole.)

And finally, again from Mormor, brunch at Restaurant Lyøvej 14.

We took another trip into Tivoli this morning, well documented on Facebook, but those will have to await a post of their own later this weekend.  Or maybe they’ll be bundled into a blog post in early August along with pictures of our American Adventure 2015!

(I was about to say, “I can’t wait!” — but that makes it sound like I can’t wait to post pictures from a trip that’s in the past. That’s not accurate.  What I can’t wait for is being in America.  Being back in Værløse and back at work and struggling to find the time to post pictures of the trip… for that I feel no special anticipation.)