So here we are in the middle of June.
The girls are wrapping up their school years and things are busy all around… but not very interesting.
I mean, life is always interesting, but it doesn’t always cough up a lot of photo ops and anecdotes.
Let’s start where we left off in the last post: the Kolding tournament.
Here are the results I got on my phone:
Maddie’s on the second team with Ydun, which is a new thing for her, but the Ydun second team was still better than every other team at the tournament (in their age bracket)—except the Ydun first team. And that included teams from Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
And how contagious is Maddie’s excitement in the photo she texted me to show off her medal?
Don’t let the deliberately flat affect fool you: Maddie is still her usual enthusiastic self.
(That’s a shot she sent me from a day when their school was on a field trip downtown.)
Molli is still her stylish self.
The overarching themes of this spring have been Maddie acclimatizing herself to her new team and Molli hunkering down for her finals. Both have mostly gone quite well. It’s the 17th of June as I write this, a Friday evening: Molli is sacked out in her room, exhausted from her “final final” today, which she completely aced after a week of study and preparation that were astonishing to behold. Maddie and Trine are retiring early to set out for a beach handball tournament early tomorrow morning.
We’ve also been focused on lining things up for all the home renovations heading our way.
The overarching themes of this spring outside of our happy little household were the defense-agreement referendum here in Denmark, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the ongoing economic one-two punch of inflation on top of an energy crisis on top of a recession. For the permanent record: it now costs 800 kroner to fill our Kia Ceed’s 11-gallon (44 liter) gas tank. For the Americans out there: that is $10.26 per gallon.
The grocery staples we get delivered every week have cost 8-900 kroner for as long as we’ve been ordering groceries online (which predates covid by years): the same set of groceries now costs 11-1200 kroner per week.
Weren’t we smart to take out a big home equity loan to upgrade our house this year?
Sigh.
I think in the past I posted some pictures of the lovely outdoor dining we often enjoyed at lunch over at PensionDanmark, surrounded by the glittering waves of the Baltic. Well, there’s outdoor seating at AP Pension, too, but the view leaves a little to be desired.
Meanwhile, back at home, how Didi lets you know that is one damn fine looking hamburger you’re enjoying:
…and how Molli lets you know your little afternoon nap did not go unnoticed:
(By very quietly laying out her laundry to dry at the foot of your bed.)
We’re going to have a lot of “for the permanent record” pics as the renovations get underway. This next pic is a shot I took by cutting a hole in a kitchen shelf and shoving my phone into the hole to show me what was under there: the hoped-for thing was parquet flooring. Instead: concrete.
That’ll complicate things.
Quick digression into the irony department: AP Pension, like PensionDanmark, prides itself (and markets itself) as a “green investor,” a “responsible investor,” etc. To commemorate a new campaign we’ve launched (overskud til alle, which is “profit for everyone”), all employees received a bunch of swag including the nifty thermos and travel mug you see here:
They’re actually quite good and use them every day.
But “for the ironic record:” :
Surely hand made from organic raw materials… by Uighurs.
Didi with her panda:
Spring having sprung in Hareskov:
Maddie and her good friend Freja wanted to see one of their classmates playing as part of an R&B band on the Tivoli mainstage one afternoon (Tivoli had dedicated an entire day to school and youth orchestras and bands):
I had promised to go on the Golden Tower with Maddie, but had stupidly gone in to meet them wearing shorts. By the time their friend was done playing, it was too cold for me, so that had to be a pleasure deferred. (She had done it once already, however, during an earlier visit with a friend, so put that into the permanent record: Maddie’s first golden tower ride, spring 2022.)
I love the minty green of the forest when the leaves are first budding:
I only took the next picture because it was easy to imagine the cloud was a snow-capped mountain and I’d taken the picture at Yellowstone National Park instead of Hareskov:
For the permanent record: I finally faced up to reality and got a new mower. Hopefully it’s the last human-operated power we’ll ever need: once our landscaping is done, robot mowers can handle it from there.
Also for the permanent record: our new kitchen cabinets arrived in May.
That’s not where they’re stashed right now, but they’re going to be stashed until their August installation: one big pile of boxes in our bedroom, and one in the dining room.
Not long after that we had our new roofing paper plopped down in the back yard (where it remains: work will hopefully begin next week).
Apparently one of the nice plants in Molli’s room died, so she did the logical thing: she exchanged it with a healthy plant in the solarium.
Without telling anyone.
So that one afternoon I found Trine staring down at this sad, dead plant—and laughing hysterically as she tried to imagine the thought process behind the swap.
Toward the end of May we had a private memorial for Nana and Pop-Pop out at Vedbæk Strand. Nothing fancy or formal, although I did try to follow a format. We just sat under a tree by the water and gave ourselves some time to talk about and remember them. We brought pictures to look over while we talked, we shared our favorite and silliest memories, we tried burning a candle (I’d brought a hurricane-lantern style candleholder that I thought would be adequate against the wind: it was not), we read Crossing the Bar, and we ended by just being quiet and listening to Barry Manilow’s Can’t Smile Without You.
This was the spot:
Afterwards we had a brunch at Rosenhuset, which wasn’t more than a hundred meters from our spot. (A spot I had chosen because it was close to Rosenhuset: the brunch was actually a gift my old work colleagues had given me last August as a sympathy gift.) Because of the wind we ate indoors (in a table in the far right corner under the roof that ends just left of the big umbrella in the picture). And that’s Molli coming out of the patio:
With spring really upon us as we neared and then entered June, it was time for some property maintenance. Before and after pics for the permanent record! (And hopefully one of the last springs where our frontage looks like this.)
(The work was on the undergrowth; I’ll get to the hedges themselves in July.)
AP Pension put together a special screening of the new Top Gun movie for employees, each of us permitted one guest, so Trine was able to join me. I got into the city before her and went into Tivoli to have a cup of coffee and pass the time. It’s so nice in there when it’s not overflowing with people…
Spring also means the new cows arrive: I had to do our first cow-tending solo and was a little discomfited by this year’s calves, who were just a little more interested in me than I would have like them to be.
Anyway, they look delicious, and that’s the main thing.
By now it was June—May really wasn’t a very eventful month, as the foregoing lack of real events should make pretty clear—and it was time for the Kammer family Pinse/Whitsunday/Pentecost picnic, this year up in Dyrehaven instead of down in Frederiksberg garden.
I felt pretty crappy that Sunday morning—not too crappy, but bad enough that I visited an old friend:
Confident I posed no risk to any of the more senior relations who’d be attending, we all set off. (Three of us, anyway: Molli couldn’t make it.)
Lots of pictures from that lovely day follow: I took pics with my phone and the Olympus, and I was sent pics by Trine and Mormor. (I can’t remember who took which, so apologies to Trine and Mormor for not crediting them appropriately.) In any case, they need no more textual enhancement than I’ve already provided, so here they are.
Unfortunately the cold I’d awakened with only worsened over the course of the day—I would end up spending most of the next 72 hours in bed. First actual illness I’ve experienced since the fall of 2019.
Also unfortunately, at one point I managed to walk through some tall growth that turned out to be “burning elder,” a plant whose poisons create a horrible itching and burning sensation on the skin. The worst of it only lasted about half an hour, but my right calf was still burning slightly the following morning when I woke up.
So it was a very nice day with very nice company, but kind of a personal disaster for me.
Which brings us more or less up to date for the family on Hybenvej, but I thought I should include a picture Mormor sent earlier this week while she and Mette were on vacation at a popular and familiar spot:
See how nicely painted? Just the sight of the picture makes me pine to get back down there… which I will, but not for another month.
There was a milestone in May: Maddie got to attend her first concert without adult supervision. She sent me some videos from the concert and I tried to post one, but something went wrong. (I’ll get my shit together on finding a secure way to share family videos before the girls move out, I swear.) She got to see Aqua performing at Tivoli, and she loved it.
And my favorite netsam (you know, like jetsam or flotsam, but from the net) of the period was a screenshot of someone saying the following in a chat group: “New neighbor moved in, a lady in her 80s. Met her two sweet dogs this morning, named…. Houston and Houston. One pronounced like the city in Texas, one like the street in New York. Asker her why and she said, deadpan, ‘to stir shit up.’ “
I should add for the permanent record, since it’s not something I’ve ever mentioned before but is clearly an important autobiographical fact, back in 1985 when I lived in an apartment with Chris Metzger, a friend’s cat had kittens and we adopted one: we named in Whatcat, so that whenever people came over and asked the name of our cat we could say, “What cat?” Stirring shit up in the 80s. Good times.
The next update will probably be posted at the end of July, and will be much more eventful: the house will have been reroofed, Sophie and Liam will have come and gone, Molli will have attended her first Roskilde festival, we’ll have celebrated Molli’s 18th birthday, and we’ll have had our summer vacation (including our own week in the Algarve).
And so far, so good on the privacy of this blog: as far as I can tell, Google is no longer indexing and sharing its pictures.
See you on the other side of July…
