Catching Up : 2Q14

You’re thinking, “He said he was gonna catch up, but then he slacked off and now he’s playing catch up on catching up!”

But the truth is — and this sounds like one of my usual lies, but I can actual back it up with documentation — Justmorons.com was hijacked by Chinese hackers starting late last year (that’s what made all those photos disappear so inexplicably) and by early March they had taken the website over completely so that it was advertising shoes. Most of my old content had been overwritten or corrupted and almost all of my images had been deleted.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve spent a lot of time setting up a new site (hosted with a more secure package) and building everything back up from backups. Again, Pop-Pop’s long-ago advice is the only thing that saved me from losing everything: “There are two kinds of people,” he told me, “people who back everything up, and people who’ve never lost any data.” So major props to Pop-Pop for a serious assist on the save!

So: we may now resume our 2014 catch-up blogging in late March or early April of that year.

The picture below isn’t interesting at first glance: it’s Greg and some American dude posing stupidly somewhere in downtown Copenhagen. But it’s interesting because the guy I’m posing with is in fact a kid named Tyler Ackelbein. If the name Ackelbein rings a bell, it’s because Mike Ackelbein is an old friend from Pittsburgh and L.A. and Tyler Ackelbeing is his son and this was the first time I’d ever met him.

But that’s more of a Daddy thing than a Molli-and_maddie kind of thing. Let us, as the French would say, return to our sheep.

We had an extraordinarily temperate spring in 2014. Everything blossomed early. It looks like Maddie is reveling in — and the distant Molli Malou and Sophie are scootering in — a light snow, but it’s actually the wind blowing cherry blossom petals all over the neighborhood. In the picture below, Maddie is chanting, “It’s snowing! It’s snowing!”

And if it’s April, this must be Tivoli!

And just for the permanent record, it’s about this time that Aunt Deb and cousin Hannah make a pit-stop in Chicago on their college tour and have their picture taken with some random chick.

Excuse me: a random broad. Allison always prefers to be called a broad. Astonishing to me that this was the first time Allison and Hannah ever met, considering Allison and I were still married when Hannah was born.

In April of 2014 Maddie was loving gymnastics. (It would turn out to be a short-lived love.) Here she is all prepped and excited for a gymnastics class.

And in the course of our spring cleaning we came across a lot of old stuff we’d been storing for no good reason, so here’s Molli Malou all prepped and excited for a Tai Kwan Do class that dwells entirely in her imagination.

And now it’s a bittersweet moment: the last day of børnehaven for Maddie. Here she is with BFF Astrid on the big day.

And the start of the very next week, ready for her very first day as one of the incoming “0 grade” students at Søndersøskolen! (Preview edition.)

Evita finally has its last performance, and the members of the children’s ensemble have a grand old time at their closing luncheon.

(Siblings of the cast are not having as grand an old time…)

(So their Dads try to cheer them up, with some success…)

It is now obviously May 4: time for candles in the windows.

One thing I’ve glossed over here is my third job change in about two years. I move from Adnuvo to Responsive. My new title is “Senior CRM and Marketing Automation Solution Consultant.” One of our clients is DFDS. As part of our work for them we are required to make one leg of the trip to Oslo for a meeting with them on one of their boats. I find a lot of bad English on their signage and marketing, and am pleasantly surprised to find that the marketing director we’re traveling with actually requests all the pictures I’ve taken of their bad English so she can have it all corrected.

Go ahead, mavens, and count the errors in the next two pictures!

(But don’t lose sight of the fact that the trip can still be beautiful in spite of badly mangled language!)

I return from Oslo, and lo! our things return from storage!

It’s a lot to deal with, especially with Melodi Grand Prix (the Eurovision song contest) premiering that same weekend! Here’s Maddie dancing to the Danish number.

And Molli Malou just loving the spectacle…

And here’s Molli Malou’s score sheet, where she tallied our own ratings of each country’s number:

In spite of Eurovision, we managed to get the house put back together looking better than before. The decision to keep the office downstairs and let the big room be a gym and music/dance/tumbling studio was the right one!

(Although the weather was so nice we took some time out now and then to play Kub.)

The weather was so nice, in fact, we even made an early trip to Bakken — mostly because Trine was attending a bachelorette party and the bachelor on his way to marrying said bachelorette insisted on not having a bachelor party, preferring instead to take our kids to Bakken for the day.)

(The bachelor and bachelorette, by the way, were Steve and Elisabeth: that’s their son Sebastian between the girls in the picture above.)

Now, one thing that happened in early May was that in a little town called Juelsminde, way out in Jylland, a golden retriever bitch named Inna birthed a litter of beautiful pups. We had a claim staked on that litter, and a few weeks after their birth we had a chance to visit them.

And after meeting the pups there was time to enjoy the lovely little harbor town of Juelsminde itself before driving back home.

Meanwhile, the school year was nearing its end and Trine and I had pledged to host a “film evening” for the outgoing third-graders of Molli Malou’s class. It was left to Daniel (the father of Louis, Molli’s on-and-off “boyfriend,” and my own sailing mate) and me to pull the event together, and I think we did a pretty good job. We presented “Despicable Me 2” on a smartboard for them along with tons of popcorn, pretzels, and candy.

Oh… also, it was about this time Maddie read her first non-Dick-and-Jane book from cover to cover without any help.

Now we’re up to Steve & Elisabeth’s wedding. Here they are about two hours after tying the knot. (While we were sitting at the table with them my phone vibrated, and it was a Facebook notification that my friend Steve’s relationship status had changed to Married. Ah, modern life!)

The wedding took place in this little baby castle in northern Sjælland.

It was uncharacteristically warm out for June!

Did I say June? Then it must have been about time for the annual Kammer family picnic. This year it was held at Klaus’s house instead of Fredriksberg Garden, and it was even weirder than usual.

Life is funny: after years of underpaying my Danish taxes and owing a big chunk of money each April, I had finally decided enough was enough and wildly overestimated my income so that the authorities would wildly overtax my paychecks. As a result, I was informed I would be receiving a very big tax refund. Finally!

We enjoyed speculating what to spend the money on until our boiler made the decision for us.

Dead boiler (the white box on the right):

New boiler:

Cost of new boiler? Do I really need to tell you? It was the amount of my tax refund, almost down to the øre.

On the plus side, the house was really starting to look finished! Or maybe these are older pictures (older by weeks, not months or years). Once again I seem to have done something wrong and scrambled the sort order of the picture and in the far future I don’t suppose it truly matters: after all, looking back from 2025 it won’t really matter whether something happened in April or May or even June of 2014. Right?

Yes, the timing is certainly off, because here are Molli, Sofie, and Maggie in the snowy blossoms again.

Maddie looking very sharp in her fine coat and carefully braided hair!

…and at some point during this period, Trine and I finally get our own bed back:

And Molli gets hers (although clearly her desk hasn’t yet been reinstated).

Spring also means it’s time to get to Tivoli again!

And I think we had an Easter lunch with Trine, Fabricio, and Matteo.

Trine had given me a 2-minute “body flight” at Copenhagen Air Experience for my birthday, and I took advantage of it later in the spring. Here’s a shot of the test chamber.

And here’s Maddie trying on a helmet.

And here’s Maddie’s first day back in her “new” room…

…and a few days later.

This was the last spring of her gymnastics classes, so things wrapped up with a big jamboree.

And at some point in the spring I got this picture of her climbing the walnut tree by the garage. “Instant classic,” I declared on Facebook, and I stand by that judgment.

It was also by now finally time for Maddie’s first “trial days” of 0th grade at school.

She was so proud!

Meanwhile I had changed jobs once again, and in May or June we had “Responsive Camp” at one of the signature restaurants of one of Denmark’s leading chefs (Claus Meyer). As a team-building exercise we had to make our own dinner, including the prepwork of 50-some gorgeous steaks.

The spring of 2014 was also the last spring of our trampoline. One of the girls hurt her neck badly enough upon it that we had to take them to the doctor; I dismantled the thing while the girls were getting medical attention and had dropped it at the dump before they got back.

Once again we had a DIY Skt. Hans Aften, but this year we burned the witch down at Sofie’s house.

(The pictures above were taken around ten or ten-thirty in the evening, remember. The morning after Skt. Hans always starts a little slow…)

We’re into late June, now. Another visit to Juelminde, this time with all the other families that would be adopting from the littler. The kennel owner hands each family a little length of colored yarn: the color of the yarn corresponds to the color of the pup we will be getting.