Actual Summer

In calling this post “actual summer” I don’t mean to imply that it covers the actual astronomical season in its entirety: in fact it’s only going to extend about two weeks into official summer. What I’m referring to in the title is that for the first time since my very first summer here (that sweltering hothouse summer of 2003 that most readers of this blog remember from our wedding) the weather from late April through the beginning of July has felt like summer ought to feel: dry, hot, and rainless.

Naturally we can’t just enjoy it: it has to come in the form of a drought that’s challenging Denmark’s agriculture and killing our lawns and forcing restrictions on outdoor fires (buh-bye, Sankt Hans bonfires!) and water waste (good thing I seeded the lawn in April and May so it could grow back good and strong in time to wither and die again in June!).

Here’s an early June screenshot of the kommunes subjected to the “fire ban” already in early June: by the time midsummer’s eve rolled around, it applied to virtually the entire country:

So.

I’ll start things off with a photo I don’t know where else to place: having decided to mate Didi this fall, we had to find her a stud.  And we did.  So ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to Max, the intended sire of Didi’s puppies:

And in the “curiosities mixed up with the photos on my phone” category, I also have this iconic photograph of Winston Churchill:

Most of you probably already know the story of Churchill’s expression in this well-known photo: how the photographer, frustrated at his subject’s awkwardness in posing, finally reached out and snatched the cigar out of his mouth.

Anyway, I stumbled across a fascinating article about the entire photo session, and it included a photo of the aformentioned photographer taken during that session:

As well as a photo that both photographer and subject actually preferred, taken after Churchill had warmed up a little and overcome the shock of having his cigar yanked out of his mouth:

I include them here in a blog about my daughters mainly as a teaser.  Dear future Molli and Maddie: please read anything (if not everything) that man ever wrote.

Also, as a newly minted Dane, I’d like to comment on something you may have come across in the English language news:

While that article was based on some actual Danish laws, it presented things wildly out of context.  For example, the article gives the impression that immigrant children in the “ghettos” (communities of unassimilated migrants from primarily North African and Middle Eastern countries) are to be taken away from their families children for forced indoctrination into Danish culture from the of 12 or 18 months.

What they’re actually saying is that for these households, vuggestue is mandatory rather than optional.  That is, their children must attend vuggestue and then børnehaven — just like everyone else’s children.  The problem the government is trying to address here is that virtually everyone in Denmark sends their children to vuggestue and børnehaven, but many of the families in these “ghetto” communities do not, which retards their children’s ability to integrate into Danish culture as well as they might.

But if you read the Times article, you could be forgiven for thinking that Denmark first forces Muslim immigrants into ghettoes, then steals their children away from them for some cultural brainwashing.  This is not just nonsense, it’s harmful nonsense, and I just wanted to be sure you all recognized that.

This is especially disappointing because I am ordinarily very pleased with the Time’s coverage of Denmark, since it has featured so prominently in our own family story.

June began on a very exciting note for me, as parliament finally gave “my” legislation its third and final hearing, and voted to pass it:

Note that its 79 votes in favor came from every party but DF — while every single voting member of DF (the Danish People’s Party) voted against it.

Can you guess which party will never, ever, ever get my vote?  Under any circumstances?

The legislation having passed, it was just a matter of time before the queen and a minister would sign it into law, making me a Danish citizen.  (I realize the previous post is kind a spoiler, but bear with me.)

We got into a lot of spring cleaning as summer approached, outdoor and in.  Even Maddie got into the act, digging through her wardrobe and drawers and getting rid of old clothes, old toys, and even the old digital camera she’d inherited from her sister.  Its memory card was pretty much wrecked and it no longer took decent pictures, but she did manage to squeeze one last selfie out of it:

(The date, you will note, is a little off….)

One lucky mouse managed to escape Emma and retreat under the refrigerator, leading Didi to spend more or less an entire day like this (and that’s not an exaggeration):

She may not be the world’s brightest dog, but man is she patient!

You may recall the x-ray of Maddie’s teeth from the May post.  Here she is on the morning where those two troublesome baby teeth were scheduled to be removed:

And here she is after (the photo is a selfie she texted me):

Now, only one tooth ended up being removed that day, because it was so big and so firmly rooted that getting it out became too strenuous an ordeal for the dentists to wish to repeat.  They were awed by the size and strength of the tooth they removed: so big!  So strong!  Such massive roots!

And it really was the most impressive baby tooth I’ve ever seen:

By coincidence that was also the date of a big celebration in Bymidten, so Trine and I brought Maddie there to spoil her a little by way of compensation for the agony she’d been through.

We came home to a sizzling house:

That’s over 86 degrees Fahrenheit!  (Remember: no air conditioning.)

The next day there was a party for the families of all the girls on Molli’s handball team.  After lots of pizza and wine (for the adults) we played a parents-versus-kids round of kongespil:

One of the mothers, I forget her name, played “water girl,” making sure that all of the adults on the parent team were regularly refreshed . . . with wine.  (She gave us each a straw and then ran from one to another of us with a bottle of wine between rounds.)

The tooth fairy did reward Maddie very amply for her Biggest Baby Tooth of All Time, and a day or two later I found a note that the fairy had apparently chosen not to take with her:

On June 8th, PensionDanmark had its 25th anniversary party at Tivoli.  It was a massive affair, and very enjoyable, all the moreso in that we were actually allowed to bring our significant others.

There were oysters on the half shell among the offerings of the buffet dinner.  Only a very small subset of my colleagues seemed interested in them.

I made myself a plate of six, to begin with, and they were so delicious I went up and asked the servers if I could have more.

“Hardly anyone’s taking them,” I was told, “and there are lots, so take all you want!”

I’d never in my life been in an “all you can eat” situation with respect to oysters.  My friend and colleague David (a Belgian) took them up on that, and we calculate that between us we must have gone through 70-80 oysters.

And we’d do it again.

We also got a private performance from an iconic Danish rockstar from the 80s.  I wasn’t familiar with her, but Trine was agog: especially because just as this woman began performing, and thereby delivering the soundtrack of Trine’s teenage years, Trine suddenly bumped into someone who figured very prominently in her life at that time — a guy who happened to be married to a woman who works on the same floor as me, yet whom I had never before met.

If I’m remembering correctly, he was the brother of one of her best friends’ boyfriends, and was often hanging with their crowd.

And if that wasn’t enough of a time warp, we were then treated to a performance by Alice Cooper, Joe Perry, and (a little more weirdly) Johnny Depp, who apparently go around touring as “The Hollywood Vampires.”

I actually got to see a live performance of “School’s Out for Summer,” by the original artist, just one week before my own daughters would be out of school for the summer.  That song had been blaring through the loudspeakers of Marblehead High School one June afternoon 35 years ago!

The most remarkable thing about the evening, however, was what happened on the train ride home: it was about quarter past midnight, and I remembered that that was the time at which the national law database was usually updated with any legislation signed by the queen that day.  So I checked.  And there it was:

It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized the law wasn’t in effect until the following Monday.

And look what we came home to:

In Denmark it’s traditional that you bring candy, cake, cookies, or other treats into the workplace to celebrate a birthday, anniversary, or other big event.

So the following Monday, June 11, I announced at work that to commemorate my Danish citizenship (and by way of compensation for my deleterious impact on various national averages), I had candy galore to share.

I received such a flood of warmhearted emails!

And I came home to find Trine with a welcome of her own.

A few nights later, I overheard Trine taking a call from Molli Malou.

What I heard was something like this (although in Danish):

“Hi, honey!  You’re where?  … What are you doing downtown, I thought you were in Lyngby?  …  That’s fine, but you need to tell us — you what?  … a tattoo parlor?  …  Where?  … What kind of — what?! …”

It went on from there, but the gist was simply that Molli had found her way to a tattoo and piercing parlor downtown and wanted to get an additional piercing in her ear.

We quickly researched the place online, and eventually consented.  It was, after all, just an ear piercing.

I was very relieved when, while walking Didi not long afterwards, I got a call from a guy at the place saying that our daughter wanted to have her ear pierced and that they didn’t do any piercings or tatoos of any kind on anyone fifteen or under without obtaining parental consent.  “It’s not the law,” he explained, “but it’s our law.”

That just reinforced my confidence that Molli had found her way to the right place.

So here’s the new ear piercing:

I should mention that Molli has money to do things these days because she’s taking on a lot of jobs around the house (and yard).

As the school year wound down, we went through the usual cycle of class parties.  First their was the SOL (afterschool program) summer party for upcoming fourth-graders.

Not many more pictures from that evening, which was actually pretty uneventful.

Meanwhile, our stovetop fan chose this moment to die.

Obviously you can’t tell it’s dead in the photo: I mainly include the photo because it’s the last one, and possibly the only one, that we have of the old fan as it existed in our daily life for a decade.

We’re thinking ahead to the Didi puppy thing, and part of the preparation is to get pictures that show her off favorably.  So we’re taking a lot of Didi pictures lately.

June also saw Denmark surge into (and ultimately sputter out of) the world cup.  Here’s a horrible photo of Maddie and me enjoying one of the early games.

As I observed previously, work on the new bathroom continues, but although I’m taking a ridiculous amount of pictures to document the project, I’m trying to keep them to a minimum in here.

So here’s a quick look at some of June’s activity:

And here’s Maddie as her “living history” subject: Crown Princess Mary.

And here’s a picture she asked Trine to send me after she had her second tooth pulled — she’d been dreading it after the awful experience of the first:

Apparently it came out quickly, easily, and painlessly.

PensionDanmark, like most of Denmark, pretty much shut down when Denmark had a world cup game at two in the afternoon: our big auditorium was converted into a sports bar, and anyone without a pressing deadline was welcome to go down and watch.  (I say sports bar, but there was no alcohol involved: just soda and popcorn.)

By now it was June 20, the longest day of the year, and I took this picture not long before midnight.

That’s about the look of things at three in the afternoon, come December.

Here are before and after pictures of the stovetop fan replacement.

The weather had been so warm for so long that we’d been eating lunch outside every day at work, and David and I had been casting envious eyes at that water around us.  Finally one Friday after work we took the very literal plunge.

(No, David’s not mentally challenged or anything: he’s literally a nuclear physicist.  He also does triathlons, so he takes swimming in open waters very seriously.  Hence the bright orange stuff, the crazy swimsuit, and the orange float to let approaching boaters know we’re out there.)

Another big project this season: finalizing the evening terrace work I began last summer.  It took 220 kilos of white stone, but I think it was worth it.

One of the “surprise” projects this year has been digging us out of the growth that was almost consuming the house, particularly its northwest corner.  You’ll notice in the photo below that you can actually see some of our roof: this photo was taken within a few hours of that having become possible for the first time since we’ve lived there.

The trimming is still underway, and it’s amazing how much more light and air we’re getting in the house.

I never got the full story on this, but it’s a Maddie-built diorama so I feel compelled to include it.

I ought to mention that from the time the queen signed “my” bill into law on the 8th, rendering it effective the 11th, I had been just as feverish about checking my citizenship status as I had previously been about checking the progress of the law.  I checked the mailbox every day; I logged into borger.dk to see if my citizenship status had changed; I checked my digital mailbox (it’s a Scandinavian thing) several times a day.  Nothing.

By June 21 I’d more or less given up… except I hadn’t, entirely: I’d been sick and out of it for a couple of days, so had fallen out of my routine.  Feeling better, I checked borger.dk — and my citizenship had suddenly been changed from USA to Danmark!

This was very exciting, so I immediately checked online to see whether I could now apply for a passport.  I could.  I could even schedule an appointment the citizen services desk of our local library to do so, and would only need to bring my birth certificate and a photo ID.  Not only that, they had an open appointment available in just thirty minutes!

So I booked the appointment, gathered my things, and biked to the library.

The clerk was a little confused that I had no proof of citizenship.  She had to go and talk to a supervisor.  There was about five minutes of uncertainty where I thought, Dear god, here we go again. . . 

But finally she told me she would allow me to apply, because she could see on “the system” that I was indeed a citizen, but that I really ought to have a certificate saying so.

“I’ve checked mail every day,” I said.  “I’ve checked e-Boks.  Email.  Mobile messages.  Nothing.”

She shrugged.

“It’s just odd,” she said, “because the system says you were sent a certificate on the 12th.”

That was odd.

In any case, she accepted my application.  I biked home.  As an afterthought, I checked the mailbox.  And there it was (I’ve redacted my Danish social security number):

 

It’s interesting that the certificate says my citizenship is effective the 15th, when the law signed by the queen and the Integration minister says it’s to be effective the first weekday after being signed, which would have been the 11th.  If there had been an election on the 13th, and I’d voted, would my vote have been legal?

As a citizen, my visa and immigration and residency papers are now utterly useless historical curiosities.  Did you see that little piece of paper above, with its single sentence of text?

It replaces all this:

I should throw it all on a bonfire and burn it, but as a lawful new Dane I suppose I better wait until they lift the ban on bonfires…

And so that chapter is finally and permanently closed.  I am now an American-Danish dual national, like my daughters.  Next stop: making their mother an American!

And speaking of next stops, here’s the next one in the cycle of end-of-the-school-year festivities: the 3.b. class party held on the last day of classes (Friday, June 22):

I don’t know why Maddie is suddenly giving the peace sign in so many pictures.  I’ll have to ask.

The next two pictures are from the bike ride home.  You’d think it was pretty early, but remember where we are and what day it is — I don’t remember exactly, but I’d guess it was about 10:30 pm.

Great drama at home that night: first, it turned out that Molli had spent the day at Bellevue Strand and had developed heat poisoning, if not heat stroke.  Chills, sweats, feverishness, and vomiting kept things interesting pretty late into the evening.

And just as Molli was finally recovered enough to safely tuck into bed, the canine and feline wings of the Hybenvej Mouse Attack Squad launched a surprise joint operation.

You can see the mouse, barely, in the corner behind the bidet.  It didn’t last long from the moment this photo was taken: we whisked Emma out of the room and Didi had the mouse in her jaws within seconds; she then trotted out into the yard with it, tortured it for about twenty minutes, and ate it.

She had a slightly bad stomach for a couple of days afterwards, but only slightly.  Frogs seem to be a little harder on her.

The next day we made our way up to Espergærde for an afternoon and evening with Steve, Elizabeth, Becca, and Sebastian.  Naturally enough, Maddie and Becca jumped right into slime production mode.

But they also spent some time playing with Sebastian until a friend of his own came over.

(Molli didn’t join us because there’s no one there for her: the grown ups are too old, and the kids are too young.)

I include the following before and after pictures of the yardwork I did the next day less as a note for the permanent record than as a reminder to myself that I am possibly the world’s worst landscaping photographer.

There is actually an enormous difference in the landscaping between those photos, but I’m such a terrible photographer you can’t even tell.

A couple of days later and it was Molli’s birthday.  At her request, we kept things simple and just had a little family barbecue of dried aged beef hamburgers with french fries.

She’s fourteen, now, which is staggering, because it was literally just a couple of weeks ago she was toddling around our apartment in Frederiksberg with a mixing bowl on her head and a wooden spoon in her hand

Behold Molli at fourteen:

Maddie’s card to her sister was very sweet:

“To the world’s best big sister: you are so pretty with your lovely golden locks.  Your eyes are blue and when one looks in them they shine, so here comes a little song.  From Molli’s (sweetest) little sister.”

The idea was that Maddie would then sing to her the song she had composed and written at songwriter camp over the preceding couple of days, and although Maddie struggled a little under the pressure of the event, the beauty of the gesture truly touched her big sister.

Also, the burgers were delicious.

Afterwards we took Didi down to Puppy Lake for a romp. . .

. . . then swung into town just to stroll around a little, which is what the birthday girl had requested.

The birthday girl is not fond of being photographed by her father, but her little sister begs for it:

That’s the main reason so many of my “out and about” pictures are taken from behind, with a “three shades of blonde” motif.  If I try to get one of their faces, Molli looks away or makes an annoyed face.

“Molli, it’s your birthday and you still haven’t let me take a single picture of you.  (The silly ones at home where you’re trying on new clothes and reading Maddie’s card don’t count.)  You have to let me take at least one picture of you as you are on your birthday.  You’ll be happy to have it one day.”

“Oh, god, fine.  Go ahead and take a picture, Daddy.  Right now.  Just one.”

“Thank you!”

Click:

Gert flew in from Ukraine in time to wish Molli a happy birthday on the day itself, and we were all up much later than we ought to have been considering it was a work night for everyone in the house over the age of fourteen.

The following morning Maddie came into work with me, and she stayed the whole day.  Here you can see her hard at work on pressing pension business beside my friend and colleague David (the immigrant Belgian scum who simply will not assimilate into our fine Danish culture):

And that’s it.  Our Fourth of July was distinctly muted this year: we had the usual barbecue (ribs and corn on the cob and cole slaw), but we passed on the usual Budweiser because we’d had some up at Steve and Elizabeth’s.  No fireworks of any kind, obviously, because forbudt.  Also all the grown ups were exhausted.

It’s not a holiday here anyway, obviously.  The sixth of July was our holiday this year, because it was the day our vacation began.  And it’s vacation now — so enough with the blogging!