2013 Wrapup

I realize now that I’m taking more pictures with my iPhone than our actual camera, which is nice for sharing things on Facebook but not so nice for anything else — my computer crashes every time I try to upload the photos off the phone.  This will eventually be solved by a new computer, but since all available liquidity right now is being targeted toward the renovation of our house, that might be a while.  So, future Molli Malou and Maddie, these aren’t really sparse photograph times: it’s just that a lot of your development is showing up on the Facebook family group page.  (Which I don’t like, because that’s not really ours and could disappear at any moment.)

In any case, I have to go back to mid-November, about a week after the Great Leak was discovered.  Maddie had already been relocated from her room to the guest room:

But now we were told we had to get Molli Malou out of her room.  The only available spaces were the office and the basement.  She opted for the office.

For the permanent records, some “farewell” shots of their rooms before the Great Destruction (partly to have them easy for me to access when it’s time for the Great Reconstruction).  Remember Maddie’s room was already mostly relocated to the guest room at this point:

And then the move of Molli Malou into the office began:

And we had our visit from the microbiologist, who made a lot of new holes in our floors.

And oddly enough, at this point Adnuvo’s annual Christmas lunch took place, and we were all surprised to have that holiday meal in Rome.  It was dark and rainy most of the time I was there, and all 15 of us were pretty liquored up within about three hours of our arrival, and there are more pictures on my phone than there were on the camera, but here are some highlights.

First, why was this in a bar in the middle of Rome?  Not even a touristy bar, just a local club.

Amazing how many pictures like the two below we all found in our phones and cameras the next day: dark, blurry pictures of one another navigating the cobblestone streets.

Scattered among those pictures, every once in a while — blam!  Something magnificent, something of obvious historical, artistic, or cultural significance — that none of us could identify.  Like this:

And pictures of us all doing weird things and taking pictures of each other (everyone in this picture is an Adnuvo employee):

…then, Wham!, another badly taken picture of something that looks really cool but might not be.

I have dozens of pictures like the above.  I deleted dozens more.  I’ve wanted to see Rome for so long — and that’s what I have to show for my first and only visit there: blurry, dark pictures of my Danish colleagues lumbering around in the rain, punctuated by a few pictures of Interesting But Possibly Insignificant Things.

Sigh.

At least I got a few pictures in daylight before we flew off the next morning.  This is the hotel where we stayed:

This is the only picture I have from the whole trip of the Tiber River.  (So sad, right?)

Within a few days of my return home, it was simultaneously time to get the Christmas decorations out and time to clear out half the house.

The following picture is for the historical record, since I’d like to hang the pictures pretty much where they were.  (Note to self: I have 5-6 other pictures showing the below one section of wall at a time.)

Okay, so Molli Malou’s got to get out of the office now:

We’ll move her into our bedroom, and Trine and I will sleep in the basement.  Not a problem, right?  We’ll just have to turn the heat on again down there, no big deal.

Meanwhile, the final pre-shipout pictures of her original room:

But wait!  It’s not only Thanksgiving weekend and first Advent Sunday, but mormor’s 70th birthday!  I have plenty of pictures on the phone, and a video of Trine and the girls singing to mormor (as pictured here), but I don’t have them at my disposal right now…

Jørgen’s speech celebrating the birthday girl:

Maddie and Mateo:

And the picture of Maddie I shared on her actual birthday:

First Advent!  Christmas calendar time!

And finally, the Monday after all that, Maddie’s fifth birthday!

She’s so stoic and aloof… it’s hard to know what she’s feeling.

Her choice of meal for her birthday: the buffet at the local Chinese restaurant.  Of course, one must dress appropriately…

She insisted on bringing a flag so everyone would know it was her birthday.

The buffet has everything — a whole Mongolian barbecue section, french fries, fried calamari, spring rolls, chicken wings, spare ribs, fried rice, wontons, a great spicy soup, a half-dozen Chinese dishes, meatballs in curry, — all kinds of delicious, unhealthy stuff.  What does Molli Malou go for?

Fruit on a stick.  (She raided the fruit bar and used the leftover stick from my chicken-on-a-stick as the skewer.)  She shames us, that one.

But both girls are softies when it comes to dessert.

Maddie’s birthday behind us, it’s all about getting through the month of December with our house in a state of gradual disassembly.

Ew, look at the mold before they got rid of it:

They pulled up enough floor to fill two huge containers.

Meanwhile Christmas activities continue apace.  Molli’s choir group concludes its fall season with a performance at Hareskov Kirke.

With everything laid bare back home, we’re finding things like: the hot water pipes under the girls’ floors weren’t insulated.

By now the sauna is gone, but the sons of guns have determined the double shower with its 70s tiles doesn’t need to come down.  Our hopes are momentarily elevated by the finding of mystery moisture in the shower, but the plumber assigned to investigate concludes its just seepage coming out of the concrete.  He says showers are no longer built like this and we ought to redo the showers without any exposed concrete.  Also, he says, the drain is a disaster waiting to happen, we should fix that too.

Maddie does interpretive dance to communicate how she feels about all this disruption:

(Just kidding.  She’s just dancing for fun.  And the creepy makeup is because she’s convinced her lipsticks can also be used as rouge.  And eyeshadow.  And mascara.  And probably floor wax and dessert topping.)

Finally the house is emptied, shorn of all floors, and cleansed of all mold.  As if on cue, a second huge windstorm blows through and knocks down our cherry blossom again.

By now, all though none of these pictures reflect it, Morfar has joined us.  It is his longest visit since we bought the house from him — and the only visit where we have no guest room for him.  The guest room is Maddie’s room now.  And Molli has been in Trine’s and my bedroom.  And Trine and I have been in the basement, the heater of which still hasn’t started working, forcing us to use electric spaceheaters.  So now we’ve moved Morfar into Trine’s and my room and relocated Molli Malou onto a mattress on the floor in the guest room.  It is the first time she and Maddie have shared a room in our own home for more than a lark, ever, and they’re surprisingly good about it.  There are still zippered doors at each end of the hall.  Meanwhile, we do our best to keep the Christmas thing happy and normal for them.

(I have no camera pictures of Morfar, and no camera pictures at all of Christmas itself — they’re all on the phone.  Argh.)

I cherish moments like the one Trine tried to capture below.  They actually do happen from time to time, but since I’m the most camera-crazy member of the family, there’s not much evidence of them happening.  So even though it’s a horrible picture, I’m keeping this one.

Now we’re finally into the drying process — everything has been stripped to hell and there’s just a giant dryer running around the clock to suck every last bit of moisture out of the rooms between the zippered doors.

In the process of packing everything up for storage while the house was renovated, we tried to perform triage on our belongings: keep, contribute to charity, or condemn to the dump.  I was proud to find we had three huge garbage bags of things we had up until then thought important enough to fill our closets, cuboards, and shelves — but was disappointed to learn the idiot moves had loaded them into storage with the rest of the two truckloads of stuff.  God, I hope we didn’t throw any leftover pizza or kitchen refuse into those garbage bags!

Among the many things we tossed were some things of no objective value but worth recording for family posterity.  Like this gift Molli Malou had once made for me:

Now, I’m not fond of owls.  I’m not hostile to them, either, I just have no real interest in them.  I’ve never talked to Molli Malou about owls.  And yet this was one of her first real hand-made gifts to me that wasn’t something pre-ordained by a pedagog, teacher, or relative.  This owl.  (I think it’s maybe two years old at this point.)  Which I find touching because the very first gift I ever got from Trine was a little 3D owl puzzle… it was just a silly gift she gave for me one birthday while I was still married to Allison, but given the flow of later events it became retroactively significant to me.  So I was very touched to receive this owl as one of the first-ever gifts from Molli Malou… so touched that I had to take a picture of it before throwing it out.

Then this year she made me a Christmas ornament: a kind of stained-glass owl thing.  Even though I still hadn’t told her about the whole owl thing.

So: this owl thing.  Is there something I don’t know about myself?  Do I exude owl interest?  What?

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Our camera-unphotographed Christmas Eve was celebrated with Mormor, Jørgen, and Morfar at the house, and the girls both declared it the best Christmas ever.  Our camera-unphotographed New Year’s Eve was celebrated just the four of us, and was also declared to have been the best ever by those two independent observers.  So in the end, despite the many obstacles, we succeeded in keeping the target market satisfied over the holidays.

A guy is coming Friday to measure the moisture in the house: if it’s low enough, we can finally say goodbye to the zippered doors that are driving us all bananas and have caused several minor injuries and strings of expletives that, if sewn together, would reach half-way to the moon.  But we won’t get the verdict until Monday at the earliest.

If it is dry enough, though, that also means we leave the drying phase and move into the talk-with-the-contractors phase.  Which is kind of exciting.

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Speaking of exciting, it’s also now just three weeks until the premiere of Evita!  And just four months until Maddie moves from børnehaven to school!  (They have a couple of months at school pre-summer to help them be ready and adjusted come the first day of school in late summer.)

For the time being, though, we are back in the daily grind of børnehaven, school, and work; swimming lessons, gymnastics classes, piano and choir, and rehearsals.  And me sneaking in a few minutes to edit this blog at work… which sneaking must now come to a close.