Enter Roaring

As usual, we start a new year — a new decade — by finishing off the old.

The last post left off on a Sunday, the 8th of December, and we resume about week later: Friday the 13th.

We’d agreed long in advance that we would have a hyggelig family night of getting our Christmas tree and decorating the house that evening.  As we ought therefore to have expected, in the event we were required to exert every art of persuasion short of physical compulsion to get the girls to join us for the drive out to Vangehus Brænde to choose our tree.

(Maddie even brought legal counsel in the form of her old friend Astrid.)

In the end, we managed to choose our tree fairly swiftly.

…but the “hyggelig family night of Christmas decoration” was of course postponed, and postponed, and postponed.

Meanwhile, Maddie developed what I have to think of as the Google-whack of Danish sandwiches.  (A Google-whack is a Google search that returns no results.)  It is pictured below: the world’s first mortadella-and-caviar on Danish rye.

Beneath it you will behold a mortadella-and-grated-emmentaler, which although unusual is still a mere combination of meat and cheese and therefore unlikely never to have been replicated before.  (Although this may have been its world premiere on Danish rye.)

The next day — Sunday — I made yet another foray down to Puttgarden, Germany, with Mads.  We drove right by the new Skovtårnet (Forest Tower) and I tried taking a bunch of pictures: this was the best of the lot.  You can just see it on the horizon.  We’ll get there one day this spring or summer and you can see it up close.

It was a very blustery day: I’m not sure it plays in the photo below, but that flagpole was taking a beating from the gale force winds.  We were told by one of the employees that they were recording winds up to 35 meters per second (“80 miles per hour”) out on Bornholm, but that our crossing wouldn’t encounter much more than 20 meters per second (“very windy”).

The Baltic was unusually choppy — which also doesn’t really play very well in this photo.

Nor in this one, which I took from our table in the café overlooking the bow.  You can see how high we were off the deck: nevertheless, the ship dropped so violently from some of the swells that the window you see here was regularly awash in foam.

About nine hours from Mads picking me up, I was back home with my goodies.  (The Famous Grouse box contains only candy, nuts, and dried fruit.)

Fortunately I’d made it home just in time for Third Advent.

The following Friday was the girls’ last day of school before Christmas, and the date of the PensionDanmark Julefrokost.

It was also the date on which we received our company Christmas present.  Our director is obsessively green, so this year’s gift was a kitchen “composter.”  I use scare quotes because it’s actually a kitchen fermenter: the idea is you throw your greens and leftover non-meat foods into it, and you siphon off the juices that accumulate for use as a fertilizer — and then you add the solids to your regular compost pile.

It was a big old thing — it’s wrapped in its gift bag in the photo below, and you’ve got my filing cabinet and briefcase in there for a sense of proportion — and the general feeling among our 200-ish employees was that it wasn’t even regiftable.  The local classified websites were overrun with a glut of kitchen “composters” coming into the New Year.

Mine is still in the office, awaiting its as-yet undetermined destiny.  Probably I’ll just weight until housekeeping takes it away.  Or bring it home and use it to build my own still.

Once again, it would not be a white Christmas in Denmark: by late afternoon of December 20, it was looking decidedly gray.

I’m not going to waste time with a lot of pictures from our Julefrokost, but I thought I’d share this one picture from our group’s pre-party, where my colleagues are puzzling over my Christmas Kahoot.

You may ask yourself, why share that one?  And why circle that one guy?

I’ll tell you: it’s the only photograph I have a guy whom, just three weeks later, I would literally save the life of.  His name is Morten, he’s a great guy, we get along very well, but at a work outing in January I ended up saving his life with a Heimlich maneuver.

I have never saved a life before and hope never to have to do so again… I have never been so terrified in my life (the difference between saving a life and having tried to save a life is significant), and I am now even more astonished and awed that Hannah was working summers deliberately seeking out such situations. 


Anyway, I consider that my good deed for the year — the year 2020 — and therefore declare all my karma debits paid off in advance this year.

Our Julefrokost was for the second year in a row held in the basement.  It was fun, but I was at last sensible enough to leave before things (or I) got too crazy: the forthcoming weekend was going to be a busy one and I wanted to be able to enjoy it.

We had postponed our hyggelig family night of Christmas decorating so long by this point that Trine had simply done it all herself.

The next morning, the first day of the girls’ Christmas vacation, there were two wrapped boxes beneath the tree, and we told them they could open them.  They had been grouchy and grumpy, but that quickly changed when they opened their gifts to find annual Wildcard passes to Tivoli… and the happiness turned to genuine excitement when we told them to get dressed, because we were going in as soon as they could get ready.

Okay, so the excitement doesn’t really play.  But really, they were excited.

It was festive in the main train station — the big tree and the carolers were a welcome distraction from the usual anarchic hell of Hovedbanegaard.

And Tivoli was adorned in its Christmas finest.

There was a new thing this year: the big Christmas tree in the center of the main picnic ground was surrounded with toy train tracks, with dozens of toy trains running around an impossibly complex layout.

I guess it wasn’t for everyone…

The warmth of the burning coals, on the other hand, was well received.

To my everlasting shame, I can’t remember why Molli was so happy in the next photograph.  But who really cares?

We were all happy, because our sadness at having learned last year that the beloved Odin Express roller coaster was being removed had been wiped away by our discovery of the new roller coaster replacing it: and we were in line for it, and it was a short line.

Here are Maddie and Trine disembarking:

For what’s worth, the new roller coaster isn’t really any different than the old one.  Same basic route, same thrills and chills, probably just a safety upgrade: I think the poor old Odin Express was getting a little long in the tooth.

It was as always very crowded, and also unusually cold.

After long and complex negotiations in the train on our way to Tivoli, we had ultimately agreed that Molli and I would ride on the crazy airplanes that I’d sworn off since nearly blacking out on them a few years ago, and then Molli, Maddie, and I would ride the Dæmon together.

It would be Maddie’s first time on the Dæmon, and as we stood in the half-hour line her courage began to waver.

Meanwhile, the sky was darkening…

Molli wasn’t remotely nervous, and was in fact doing her best to help assuage Maddie’s nerves.  (I love both of these pictures and couldn’t decide which to use until I remembered I’m not charged by the photo for these posts.)

Still nervous…

After thirty minutes in line, we finally boarded the roller coaster.  Maddie was very nervous but determined to see it through.  I held her hand the whole way.  No sooner had the coaster slowed to a stop than Maddie shrieked the inevitable, “That’s it?!”

Have a look at what Pride looks like as Maddie descends from her first ever ride on the Dæmon…

Thanks to Tivoli’s own camera, you can also enjoy a shot of her in the moment, coming out of the first loop of the ride:

Am I a terrible parent for loving the look of absolute terror on her face, especially juxtaposed against the obvious delight on Molli’s and my own?

Aw, you don’t have to answer: I’m a terrible parent for hundreds of reasons!

We went home after that ride and treated the girls to a dinner at Hai Long, and everyone was happy and merry.  Molli even thanked me for the lovely day.

That was December 21st.  The next few days were a blur (Trine and I both had to work that Monday), and the next photographs I have are from Christmas Eve.

The house was at long last ready… and so were we!  (Mostly.)

Once again I had a hard time choosing which photos to use, so in several sequences below you will notice I very obviously opted not to choose.

Curiously, by the way, one of the ways we know that Christmas Eve is actually beginning in earnest is that DR airs a half-hour Disney Christmas special.  Trine recalls it as one of the high points of her own childhood Christmases: our girls have only taken note of it, I believe, as the television program that prompts their mother to wax nostalgic about the Christmases of yore.

Is the nostalgia not palpable?

I took a selfie as a hedge against the contingency — the inevitability, really, of there probably not being any pictures of me by the end of the night.

I’m glad I did, because, as I’d suspected, that is the only picture of me from Christmas (Eve).

While our guests had arrived and Trine and Mormor were preparing things in the kitchen and I was running around tending to last-minute gift things, I peeked into Molli’s room at one point and froze in my tracks.  Because I saw this:

With sisterly affection like that, you just know it’s Christmas!

And when the makeup was done, they willingly allowed themselves to be photographed!

As did Jørgen!

And I’d like to thank Jørgen for allowing me to photograph him without making a stink like certain other members of the–

…never mind.

We were in the home stretch at last!

Moster Mette had been working, but was able to join us toward the end of the meal — in time for the dancing around the fire-behazarded Christmas tree.

I’m sad to say the dancing around the tree was only captured on video this year, and is therefore not included here.  (2020 resolution: there will be more videos, dammit!)

At last it was time to open gifts.  We began by giving the girls some Christmas magic in the form of a light show I’d designed with all the Phillips Hue lighting we’d installed without their knowledge — including in their rooms.  We may be moving away from Santa Claus, but there was a definite whiff of wonder as all the lights in the front of the house suddenly went from their usual sickly yellow glow to bright green and red Christmas colors.  And there were shrieks of delight as the girls found their own bedrooms awash in a purple glow.

From there, it was a more traditional evening of gift openings.

And here is Maddie opening and reacting to her certificate for a shopping spree with Mor…

…while Molli discovers her certificate for a one-day ticket to Roskilde this summer.

And not only am I a life-saving hero: I am also the funniest dad in the world!  Take that, Homer!

Now all of you will be the beneficiaries of Trine’s Christmas present to me this year: a new Olympus camera.  An actual camera with a real lens and everything!

Henceforth there will be photos taken with camera and with iPhone.

Here are some of the first from the former, taken at the end of Christmas Eve, where really I’m just trying to get the hang of the thing.

(No effects were applied, by the way: we were just playing a lot with our Hue lighting.)

I loved that one so much for some reason that I converted it to black and white.

That’s it for Christmas Eve: now we move on to Christmas Day, which is hardly a holiday here except insofar as we get to share American Christmas with our American family.

On Second Christmas Day we went down to Mormor’s for a Julefrokost.  Besides Vibeke and Jørgen, and Mette, Jørgen’s two sons (Thomas and Jesper) were also there.  Thomas’s girlfriend had also come.

Yeah, I’m playing with my new toy.

A little too much, probably.

I think this may be the best shot I’ve taken of Jørgen in recent years (although the one from Christmas Eve is a lot of fun):

And behold the first picture I ever took with the new camera in natural outdoor lighting… on December 27th!

The girls spent most of the next few days in handball tournaments — Molli at Lund in Sweden, and Maddie at the AB Cup a few towns over from Værløse.  I buckled down on some freelance work and household projects.

On the Saturday after Christmas Trine went to a chicksene Julefrokost.  They were all to come dressed up as characters from some Danish reality tv show that I don’t know anything about.  Trine didn’t know the show, either, but did a little internet research and gave it her best shot.

And fresh from Lund, Molli began work on her tan-from-a-bottle.

…so she could be nice and tan for a New Year’s Eve dinner with her friends at our house, part of a progressive evening that would keep her out until about six in the morning.

Trine, Maddie, and I celebrated at David and Bente’s.

And… BOOM!  It’s the twenties!

(That adorable little girl’s going to be 21 when we enter the 30s!)

And so we came galloping into the new year with new lighting, a new camera to capture it with, and a whole new look for Trine.

Yeah, those aren’t reading glasses.  After two years of my suggesting she get her eyes tested, she finally relented after two weeks of brain-splitting headaches only to be told that, surprisingly enough, she needed glasses.

Behold the new look.

You may not recall it, but Maddie had a bowling birthday with a friend in January 2019.  For having their party at the bowling lane, she and her friend were each given gift certificates for an hour’s free bowling.  It hung on our refrigerator for exactly one year, because we finally used it on the date of its expiration — January 5, 2020.

Apart from the indignity of bowling as “Bgreg,” I also endured the worst bowling since I was younger than Maddie.  I wasn’t trying to let anyone win, I just sucked.

Afterwards we dined out at a nearby restaurant offering good meat-and-potatoes kind of dishes.

And a shout out to my own cousin Salli for sharing some great pictures, circa 1972 or ’73, of a Bland and Nagan get together on Locust Avenue.

(…it was especially ironic to see those pictures within a day of our being told by Molli’s teacher that she needs to stop wearing tops exposing her belly to school.  Way to set an example, Nana!)

And now it’s time once again to catch up on our puppies with some December updates.

Vega/Crimson:

Arthur/Green (with Anton):

Arthur again:

Hollie:

Otto/Blue:

Otto again:

Vega again:

And let’s not forget poor Teddy, who had a rough holiday season — we all love Teddy and have been thinking of him very much!

Next post, by the way, I’ll be sharing pictures from our recent puppy reunion, where Didi got to meet up with Arthur, Otto, and Vega — and some chickens and a rabbit.

# # #

It’s the middle of January as I write this, and it’s been the usual Chinese fire drill of a month so far.  Things got especially nasty this weekend when I got downed by [reader’s choice: food poisoning or stomach flu, take your pick] on what was supposed to have been an especially busy couple of days.  We’re up to our eyeballs in handball, and as hinted in the previous post, Molli is indeed already in the thick of gymnasium open house days.  At this writing, Gladsaxe is still in the lead but the music school Skt. Annæs is a strong second and gaining.

Mercifully there’s plenty of time to sleep on Sunday nights, however, and will be all January, thanks to the Pats collapsing out of the playoffs.  The girls are shocked: they really do seem to have come to think of the Super Bowl as the last Patriots game of the season.  We’re less than a month away from our very highly anticipated visit to Florida, and that’s a great comfort in the dreary dark of a Denmark January.  At least it hasn’t been too cold so far — and we haven’t had any snow.

In any case, with the vacation coming up so soon, I’m not sure whether the next post will be very soon, to clear the buffers before the trip, or sometime after we get back from Florida.