Endless Summer

We left off with our return to Denmark after our vacation in Turkey.  I’m not sure I mentioned it in the last post, but the high temperature in Belek our last day there was 31C, or a little over 90F.  That was one of the cooler temperatures we’d had on our visit, but it was still hot.  And the temperature in Denmark the day we arrived was 31 Celsius.

So we were out of the frying pan and. . . into the frying pan.

Denmark had remained hot and dry during our absence, and would continue to be so through most of August: it was only the second half of the month when rains finally returned.  But it’s remained uncharacteristically warm, and even here in mid-September (as I write this) are we starting to experience daytime temperatures under 20 Celsius.

I won’t talk (too much) more about the weather, but our first picture does relate to the Great Danish Drought of 2018.  There was a Kammer family party to celebrate Trine’s cousin Josephine, who had just earned an advanced degree.  The party was held at Uncle Klaus’s, that cabin in the woods with which all readers of this blog should be familiar.

A standard photo whenever we visit Klaus’s is a shot of the two stars of this blog standing in front of the little pond in his back yard.  It’s as standard a pose as the shots by the canal in Frederiksberg Garden at the annual family picnic.

But thanks to the drought, this year’s picture is a little different.

Yes, the whole pond had been reduced to a big muddy puddle.

Matteo had visited the week before, Klaus being his grandfather, and had built a sort of tepee out of tree branches that he was very eager to show off.

He’s growing up very rapidly and was fun to talk to.  Almost every declarative sentence he spoke was delivered in wonder, and followed up with, “er det ikke mærkeligt?”  Isn’t it weird?

I feel badly not to have more (and better) pictures from the event, but what you’ve seen is what I’ve got.

Meanwhile, back home, we’d been having a hard time catching up on all our laundry: the dryer was taking hours upon hours to dry clothes.  A wet batch of towels that used to take 2½ hours was suddenly taking the better part of a day. . .  and might not even be entirely dry even after all that.

This was similar to the behavior we’d seen with the dryer that had died just a couple of years ago, so we feared the worst.  Optimistically, I decided to give the dryer a thorough cleaning on the off chance that it might help.  Following the manual religiously, I eventually got to the part where I was supposed to open the air filter and vacuum out the dusty lint that often accumulates.

Instead of a dustbunny of dry lint, I encountered gobs of wet lint… and a sock.

The sock had been blocking the air and accumulating moisture.  Removing it and drying off the air filter had our dryer working like new again right away.

So file that away under notes for future reference, with a footnote under, maybe nine is too young to do your own laundry after all.

The following photographs are for future Molli Malou and Maddie, who may in later life forget about the elves and gnomes with whom we shared our house.  These are various shots I took around the house one day when I got home from work, and no one else was home.  (I had left a very tidy house in the morning.)

The elves seem particularly enamored of Maddie’s room.

Er det ikke mærkeligt?

Romping Didi out in Hareskov, the streams were dry all summer and even the normally muddy paths that had already been reduced to dusty trails before our vacation were now actually cracking from the relentless dry heat.

Also, the Queen Elizabeth made a stop at Langelinie. 

We get all kinds of ships, as you know, but I was impressed and disappointed by this one, because I remember as a child that whenever you wanted to say a boat was big, you’d say “it was like the freaking QE2!”  Possibly what I saw here was the QE3 or 4, and it’s just a miniaturized version of the grand old Queen Elizabeth 2 — but I’ve seen many larger cruise ships, so I have to admit that yet another titan from my youth has been brought down to size.

We took a bike ride around Søndersø one evening.

I was bringing Didi down to the lake a lot this summer, partly to check on the girls who were so often swimming down there.  Here’s a fun shot of Didi’s continuing obsession with the buoy off the little swimming area behind Dalsø Park:

But stepping back, the photograph below shows just how much the lake had dropped this summer (it’s still nowhere near it’s usual level as I write this).  Ordinarily, there’s only about a meter of dry land leading into the lake.  Here, as you can see, it’s another two meters in.

The ninth of August was our 15th anniversary, so Trine and I dropped everything and had dinner out at Mediterraneo, a little Italian restaurant over on Ballerupvej.

It was a beautiful night and a wonderful meal, except the statuary mooned us through the entire dinner.

I find a lot of pictures like this on my phone each month, and only rarely share them.  But sometimes the sky is just so interesting!

Skipping ahead to mid-September in my narrative, I can proudly announce that Didi is in heat and we expect to mate her on the 22nd or 23rd of this month, with puppies most likely arriving on the 17th of November.  Since puppies can’t be taken away for eight weeks, we’ll have a house full of puppies throuh the middle of January.  So we need to get some good promotional shots of the bitch for marketing purposes.

So, back to mid-August, here are a few I’m fond of.

Besides our anniversary, the other big event of mid-August was, of course, the first day of school.

Behold the new fourth-grader!

Modeling her new backpack:

And behold the new eighth-grader:

We knew better than to look in on Molli’s class the first day of school, but we expected to have a brief introduction to Maddie’s new teacher.

All the parents were gathered around the door to the classroom when the teacher showed up right about 8:00 on the dot — then told us all we could leave.

So all I have to show for Maddie’s first day of fourth grade is this sort of spastic shot:

I think everyone who reads this blog has, at one point or other, gone down to what we used to call “the old swimming hole” with us, and waded at least knee-deep into the chilly waters of Søndersø.

I’d estimate that as a family, we’ve averaged 4-5 trips down to the lake per year for the ten years we’ve lived here.

Thanks to the new swimming pier and the spectacular weather of this summer, we were there almost every single day of summer vacation, and even many evenings and weekends before and after.  Maddie in particular kept track of her “days in a row” swimming, and made it 25 consecutive days (including Turkey, where of course she swam every day) before a play date on the other side of town eventually broke her streak.

These pictures were taken toward the end of that admirable streak.

Maddie hit another milestone on August 18, when for the first time ever she took the train from Værløse to Copenhagen alone to see the Pride Parade with Mormor & Jørgen.

Unfortunately the train arrived just as we got to the station, so by the time I got my phone out and my camera app up, this was the only shot I could get:

I was much better prepared for her safe return that evening:

That same day was also a milestone for Molli, who was permitted to attend a party “behind the school” with a bunch of 8th and 9th graders, and was also permitted to have two alcoholic beverages.

She was very responsible and handled herself quite well, although not everybody at the party did.  She even went over the next day to finish cleaning up.

Nature and Didi shots follow:

The one below is from Farum Sø, not Søndersø.

Trine decided to make madder for us for dinner one night, and they were so beautifully prepared I had to take a picture.

How summery and delicious a plate is that?

At work we had our “team day” on August 23.  It was just our little team of four — Louise, David, Cindie and myself.  We started the day with a little businessy stuff on land, then went canoeing.

After which we went climbing:

It wasn’t really “climbing” so much as following wire paths across treetops.

It was actually a lot of fun.  I did all three trails, the last of which was 17 meters high.  That pretty much finished me off: it’s been a long time since I’ve felt as exhausted as I did after that trail.

Meanwhile, at about this time Nana and Pop-Pop were relocating themselves:

I’d been keeping tabs on the weather in Estero just out of curiosity, and was surprised to see there were thunderstorms in the forecast every single day.  And from what we now know, that appears to be true.  Can’t wait to visit!

The last week of August I was once again off to the “Dialog Konferans” in central Sweden.  I’ve written a lot about it in the past, so no point getting into much detail here, except to note that this was the first year I presented at the conference, and it was also the first year I participated (with Mads) in the costume party theme.  (The theme this year was just “Cuba.”)

So like all trips to the hellhole of Sweden, we begin with a farewell shot of Kronborg Slot:

And a reminder that Strömstad, Sweden, is actually just a town from down east Maine that got really, really misplaced.

Even the food up there is familiar:

Meanwhile, back in Værløse. . .

Mads was also presenting at the conference, and we chose to go as drug trade lowlifes.

He went all in, and even got special dental paint to give himself a couple of gold teeth.

Above shot is with Jennifer something, an American from L.A. who was presenting on using “compassion” in social media.

There should be more silly joy in life.  I think last year or the year before I raved about the little unmanned ferry that shortens the trip between the two hotels involved in the event, and enthused about the joy of piloting it.  In the pictures below, you see Louise and Jennifer having their go at playing captain.

Literally the only thing you have to do is push a little lever in the direction you want to go, but look at the joy everyone feels when they get to be the one pushing the lever.  (And for what it’s worth, I was asked to take both pictures and send them to the subjects.  That’s how excited they were.)

I include this picture of Mads giving his presentation on Copenhagen Suborbitals partly to let him be represented in a more respectable light, and partly because I loved his slide illustrating why astronatus have to sit the way they do in space capsules.

Louise and I had a good crowd for our presentation, about 60-70 as near as I can tell, and it went quite well.

Below are the “official” pictures taken by the event photographer (whose firm is apparently called “Squid Flick”).

(Louise did a great job, considering she’s very insecure about her English.  I wouldn’t have enjoyed doing a presentation in Danish!)

Oh… and just for amusement’s sake, I noticed that the free candy they were serving in the lobby bore an uncanny resemblance to the urinal fresheners, so I had to have my little joke.

Mm… minty!

And of course, the glorious Swedish mussel chowder, absolutely a legitimate alternative to New England Clam Chowder.

The party on Koster Island:

When we were seated at our table out there on Koster, the DJ was still doing a sound check, playing a few seconds of first this song and then that one.  I made up a game on the spot: I started the stopwatch on my phone and asked everyone, “How long until Abba starts blaring out of the speakers?”

I made an opening guess of two hours, because I incorrectly remembered the dinners running long and the music starting late.  Most everyone else was guessing 45 minutes, 35 minutes, 62 minutes.

Jennifer the American, who’d never been to Sweden before, said, “Well, Jesus, it’s Sweden, right?  Five minutes.”

The correct answer was three minutes and thirty-eight seconds.  The song was Mama Mia.  It was just a brief sample, part of the sound check, but for the third year in a row, when the song came on for real about an hour later, the place just went berserk.

The last Saturday in August Trine and I attended a 50th birthday (Lone’s Morten, I suppose I should note for the historical record).  I only have one picture from the event, and I’m including it despite its silliness, because I still marvel at it.

One of the dishes — possibly the dessert, although I no longer remember — had come with a garnish of little tiny melon balls.  About the size of peas.  There were probably 40 guests, and each of us had dozens of these little tiny melon balls on our plate.  I wondered aloud what sort of tool one used to mass-produce little tiny melon balls such as these.  It was a curious crowd, and speculation ran rampant.  At last I finally had to go into the kitchen and ask the chef, because half the guests wanted to own whatever tool had been used.

The chef showed me:

She also explained that it had taken her hours to produce all those little tiny melon balls.

What we assumed was a technological marvel turns out to have been sheer dogged persistence.

The next day was fantasy football draft day, and Pop-Pop was kind enough to send me this photo of the AFL draft board from 1998, which we managed from the Deep River Basement.  Not sure if you can zoom in and see the names at this resolution, but I thought it was a great historical artifact worth making part of the historical record.

The following weekend — and yes, by now we’re into September — Maddie’s class had a two-night retreat out at a cottage in Smørum.  We just dropped her off on Friday evening and picked her up again Sunday morning, so I have no pictures other than a couple I talk as she horsed around with Esther right after we dropped her off.

And since that’s September, we’re up to date.

But once again, I can end the photos on a totally unrelated not of humor.  I don’t know why, but it makes me laugh every time I look at it — it’s almost as good as the penguin pushing the other penguin into the water:

# # #

Ordinary Danish weather did return around the same time school started, alas, so it’s been cooler and rainier.  We’re not particularly happy about it, but the lawn certainly is.

That’s it for now.  By the time I post the October blog, Didi will be pregnant, the girls will have had their first handball tournaments of the season, I will have had my first visit to Lithuania, and Moster Mette will be joining us as the fifth human resident of Hybenvej 1 — so plenty to look forward to!