Holiday Prep

The holidays are coming and our house is about to get ripped to shreds, and it’s been about six weeks since the last update, so it seems like a good time to get caught up.

We’ll start back in the earliest days of autumn, one crisp Sunday morning when we took the girls up country for a long-promised hour of horseback riding.

Apparently I took about one picture every thirty seconds (for every picture you see here, there are about five more), so I’m going to let the pictures tell the most of the story.

What exactly do I mean by “up country?”  I mean about twenty-five minutes north.  I don’t remember how Trine found these stables, but there was some kind of kismet involved: the ranch property (I don’t know if it was a ranch, but I don’t know what else to call dozens of acres of sprawling land covered with horses and cows) abutted the property of this house:

Which had once been Morfar’s (from when he was married to Lise Lotte).  The woman who rented us the horses, in fact, remembered Gert and Lise Lotte very well and inquired about them — and about Lise Lotte’s son Uffe in particular, since her “little boy” had been friends with “little Uffe.”  (We later met her little boy, and he was a middle-aged guy with thinning hair.)

The girls were having a hard time imagining Morfar living there.

End of the horse riding!

Not long afterward I had my 5 days in Chicago.   This is the Molli Malou & Maddie Blog, not my own personal scrapbook, so I’ll go very light on pictures from the trip, but of at least some relevance to the girls: the only American friend who attended our wedding, Geoff Brooksher (his hat says “Keep Austin Weird,” which is a sort of unofficial slogan for that Texas town, but his wife is named Austin so it’s also an inside joke):

 It was actually Allison who welcomed me and my Danish colleagues to Chicago: she and her awesome husband Manny Tamayo served us some drinks and fed us some food within hours of our arrival, and for some reason we ended up at this weird neighborhood bar that she thought would be “authentically Chicago enough” for my colleagues.

And maybe it was the jetlag, but she seemed to persuade them they were having an authentic Chicago experience and they were happy.  (Mads in the middle is my boss, Christoffer on the right is a colleague.)

So, yeah, we had fun.

Here’s the view from my hotel room at the Radisson Blu Aqua (that’s Navy Pier out on the lake):

Sunday morning I had one of the best brunch dishes I’ve ever had:

It was an egg, bacon, cheese, mushroom, and spinach casserole with some kind of chipotle sauce or something, and it was one of the greatest things I’ve ever eaten.  It was followed up with a variation on eggs benedict that was so good that… well, it’s why I can only say the casserole had been one of the greatest things I’ve ever eaten.  But maybe that’s just because I was so hungover and hungry and the company was so good.

It was among old theatre friends at Johnny Casserole’s, a restaurant started by an old theatre friend, David Bryson — some of you might remember him as Howie from Tiny Harvest, or Bob Crotchitch, the Innkeeper, and one of the stoner shepherds from the Fathomless Christmas Show.

Here are Rich Cotovsky and Pauly Peditto:

Those old theatre vets are like icons of Chicago theatre now — in fact, Rich just got a lifetime achievement award at the 2013 Jeff Awards (Chicago’s Tony’s), and Pauly is now a playwriting professor at Columbia College Chicago.  When your scruffy old partners in crime are suddenly the Establishment, you’re old.

The inimitable Steve Walker (the one Aunt Deb used to find so perplexing whenever she’d call the old Chicago apartment and someone would pick up the phone and say, “Walker”) was also in attendance.  He wouldn’t smile while Allison fiddled with the camera, so I tried to be as serious and grim as he was being.  Then of course he turns on the wry smile just as the camera clicks, and I’m stuck looking like the idiot.  Typical Walker.

And Matt O’Neill and his daughter Nina:

And a shot of the restaurant itself.

After the very long, even languid meal everyone had to go their separate ways (except for Bryson, of course), so Allison and I walked over to a nearby German bar — she thought it would make me feel at home! — to have a few beers and watch final three quarters of the Patriots-Saints game.  Geoff met us in time for the fourth quarter, and it was probably the best fourth quarter of football I’ve ever seen (maybe the Pats first Super Bowl win beats it out, but only because it was a Super Bowl).

After the game and some more beer, and a giant pretzel that served as an appetizer for all three of us, we went out for a nice dinner, then Geoff had to go home and Allison and I made our way to Simon’s, passing a storefront along the way that offered this view:

After a couple of drinks at Simon’s, when it became clear my old unreliable friends hadn’t become any more reliable over the years, we called it a night.  That was the end of the social part of my visit.

By the way, the Radisson Blu Aqua is really a pretty cool piece of architecture:

The rest of the trip was all business — a lot of it liquor-soaked, late-night business, but business all the same — and the only pictures I took were so touristy in nature that they’re basically just updates of pictures I took five years ago, when they had the advantage of including Molli Malou in the scenery.  So no point in posting them here.

Exactly one week after my return from Chicago — that is, on October 24 — I was up late finishing a bunch of work on the computer and finally decided to call it a night.  As part of the usual end-of-night drill I went into Maddie’s bedroom to get the cat out of Maddie’s bed and close her bedroom door (she likes to fall asleep with Emma curled up beside her and her door wide open, but prefers to sleep and wake up with no cat in her bed and her bedroom door closed).  I scooped Emma off the bed, kissed Maddie’s little forhead, — and stubbed my toe something awful on my way out of the room.

Wondering what stupid toy had proved so immoveable, I crouched down on the floor and, given the limited light spilling in from the hall, tried to find  it with my hands.  But my brain couldn’t make sense of what my hands were reporting: wavy bumps in the floor!

Here’s  a picture, taken the next morning in daylight, of what I was feeling:

Trine was not fully asleep yet, so I asked if she’d noticed the weird bump in Maddie’s floor.  She said she had been wondering about it and meaning to ask me… but in her answer it sounded as though she were describing a different bump than the one I’d felt.  I went back to Maddie’s room and felt around the floor more extensively and did indeed detect another couple of bumps, and noticed they seemed even more severe underneath the pile of princess dresses in the corner behind the door.

Getting scared — it really was starting to feel like a horror movie — I turned on the light, brushed the princess dresses out of the way, and beheld a true horror.  I got Trine out of bed to look and confirm I wasn’t hallucinating.

Once again from pictures taken the next morning, behold what was under the dresses!

Worst of all, prying up one of the loose parquet tiles we found that underneath it was dripping wet.  And so began a saga that will surely provide a lot of  fodder for these electric pages!

I spent most of that Friday trying to get a plumber aligned with an insurance claim, and we were lucky enough to have our case officially opened that Friday — because the following Monday, Denmark experienced its most violent windstorm in recorded history, absolutely overwhelming the homeowners’ insurance carriers.

They called it en orkan, which means a hurricane, but actually it was just a gale with hurricane-force gusts.  It was, in any case, an ungodly windy afternoon.  I left work a little earlier than usual for reasons unrelated to the storm, and it turned out to be very serendipitous: my train was shaking from the wind, the conductor informed us twice during the ride that our delay was due to his being requested by control to test the brakes.  Leaves, twigs, and whole branches were blowing against the train as it made its way through the woods, and we passengers glanced at one another nervously wondering whether we ought to be concerned.  By the time we got to Værløse it was blowing so powerfully I saw a huge piece of roof tile soar through the air across the street as though it were a frisbee — a frisbee that could easily have decapitated anyone it struck.  All train service in Denmark was shut down within moments of my arrival in Værløse, and several of my colleagues ended up spending the night at the office.

Trine was having a hard time getting Maddie home and asked me to bike over to school to get Molli Malou.  On the short one-kilometer bike ride to her school I counted four downed trees.  The walk home was exciting instead of dull: I actually gave Molli Malou lessons in ducking-and-covering before we even stepped out of the school.

The air was full of flying things — the leaves of autumn, normally dropping leisurely over a period of weeks, were all being torn from their homes and scattered to the wild winds.  Little twigs, papers, plastic bags, and other bits of littler were swirling around us.

At home Trine had already cleared most of the yard, and said that the wind already blown open one of the big glass doors to the terrace — a door we almost never use.  The wind had blown down half of the big metal guard that protects our terrace awning when its furled, and we quickly noticed our cherry blossom had been blown down:

Molli Malou cried at the sight, literally.  She said she had so many happy memories of that tree that we had to save it.

In the midst of the peak of the storm, there was a very surprising ring at our doorbell.  It was Maddie’s friend Astrid’s father: he had been biking home and realized he could no longer bike against the wind and wanted to know if he could just leave his bike at our house and walk the remaining 2-3 miles home.

That seemed dangerous so I drove him — carefully and more than a little nervously.  All along the sidewalks were abandoned kids’ bicycles.  It was creepy.

But just a couple of hours later it had settled back down to a merely windy evening.

The next day, Molli Malou’s tears not forgotten, I did what I could in the short term to try and save the fallen cherry blossom:

Meanwhile, of course, life was continuing along as always.  We got Maddie’s børnehaven photo from this fall:

Halloween came and went without a single picture appearing on my camera — I will have to unload the iPhone and post those pictures, and some others that the camera didn’t catch, later.

Meanwhile, we had a visit from the plumbers.  They noticed some moisture in the back of the sauna.

…so they dug a little to see what was going on.

…but the floor wasn’t enough, they had to dig into the wall itself.

…and had to see what was going on under Maddie’s floor…

Now I sit and finish off this post while the microbiologist pokes around (and drills around, and saws around) trying to find the extent of the mold/mildew/fungus damage, which is the final step before having the claims adjuster confirm the findings of the plumbers, moisture inspectors, remediators, and microbiologist and authorize actual repairs to begin.

It’s going to be a messy winter.

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A couple of anecdotes I already shared with immediate family via email but deserve permanence on these pages:

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I wrote all that a few days ago but did not post it because I thought I might want to add a few notes in prose.

Maddie is very amped up for her forthcoming birthday and both girls are starting to get excited about the holidays.  We’re all a little weirded out at the increasingly likely (almost inevitable after Trine’s conversation with Recover Nordic earlier today) possibility of our not living in our own home for the holidays, but we’re doing our best to think of it as a big adventure, after which our house will be better than ever, with lots of new floors, newly painted walls, better closets, a new bathroom or a brand new sauna, and so on.  But mostly we’re weirded out at the possibility of being homeless for the holidays.

Last Friday, the 22nd, we had our Christmas lunch at work, and as I noted on Facebook: it was highly unusual that we had an Italian menu for the dinner, but not really that unusual in that we were dining in Rome.  I have never before in my life flown to another country for a single meal, but it’s an experience I strongly recommend everyone try at least once, on someone else’s dime!  Pictures will follow in the next update.

Molli Malou has had her first couple of rehearsals for Evita and is loving it, as well she should.  It feels bizarre to Trine and me, who have both been out of the biz for lo these many years, to be dropping our 9-year-old daughter off for rehearsals at (and picking her up from) such a big professional theatre.

Molli Malou desperately wants her ears pierced.  Maddie desperately wants to be a real princess, or to sprout fairy wings.  I desperately want a man-cave.

That’s basically where we are for now, so I will very happily publish this post and throw myself once more into the breach, here at the outset of a week where we have three birthday celebrations, a julefrokost, a Thanksgiving meal with nine guests, and the first Sunday of Advent.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and catch you sometime in December!