God knows when anyone’s going to be able to see this: earlier this fall I made some adjustments to the privacy settings of the blog, which made it inaccessible to Google and search engines (as I’d hoped)—but also made it inaccessible to everyone else.
Which is fine, for the time being. One day I’ll have the time to sit and tinker around until I figure out how to put the blog out there where you can all get at it (a point I’ve obviously have reached if you’re reading this)… until then, I’ll just keep maintaining the blog toward that happy day when I can publish it safely.
We can start with a couple of pictures that have come into our possession since the last post was published, but were in fact taken much earlier this fall: Maddie’s 7th grade school pictures.
Such a beauty!
And in black and white:
I’m editing this post in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, but we pick things up all the way back in October.
I was pretty proud of the goofy pumpkin I carved this year:
But it was shamed by Maddie, who hasn’t yet found a medium she can’t work in:
There’s nothing special about the following photograph: I just love the way Didi will sit and watch us from the living room whenever one of us has to go get something from the garage.
I don’t remember whether I mentioned in the previous post that I’d purchased a rifle on auction (a Parker Hale .30-06) earlier this fall: I had to wait for the police to approve my permit to own this particular weapon before I could finally pick it up from the auction house in Næstved, and that approval came in early November.
It’s nothing special, just a workaday rifle for me to learn with… assuming I can ever get some ammo. Still haven’t fired a single shot from the sucker yet, but looking forward to some fun target shooting next year.
(And of course it means our house is just that much better prepared for the forthcoming zombie apocalypse… )
The only mammal I would really want to kill for its meat is the one animal that isn’t hunted anywhere in the world: bos Taurus Linnaeus, or the common beef cow.
We bought another quarter cow this year, and with its arrival right around the corner we had to finish off what was left of last year’s cow. So Trine pulled a big cut of prime rib out of the freezer, we sous-vided and then seared it, and it may have been the best beef I’ve ever tasted.
It just melted in our mouths. Molli said it was so delicious it didn’t even need bernaise sauce—higher praise has never been uttered in our house for any meat of any kind.
Maddie’s painting continues apace:
That’s not her best painting of the period—she also did a very good one of Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma, and a whole bunch of landscapes and still lifes that I find kind of remarkable for a 12 year old. (Of course, now she’s 13, so they’re no longer quite as impressive. Heh.)
Didi remains convinced that any food on any table is hers by right:
It was our turn to host Thanksgiving this year, so I ordered a big old “free range” organic turkey from a poultry farm just a half-hour drive from our house—I don’t often go west of Værløse and was surprised to find myself driving through a twisting landscape of hills like I’d nothing known could be found within hundreds of miles of our house, much less fifteen minutes. I knew things got rural to our west, but it felt like a whole nother world once I got outside the radius of my normal travels. I was never more than a half hour drive from Copenhagen or Roskilde, but it really felt like the exact geographic center of nowhere.
Anyway, here’s the Thanksgiving bird we got:
Unfortunately the arrival of our new cow (technically our new quarter cow) was delayed one week, so we ended up receiving 70 kilos (150+ pounds) of cow just a few hours before we would be hosting Thanksgiving Dinner.
The pictures above are of the cuts we were able to toss into the downstairs fridge over night.
The next picture shows the 30 kilos (roughly 70 pounds) of ground beef that Trine and I had to bag and seal into about 50 individual packs of 600 grams… all in the two hours before our guests were due to arrive and our table would have to be set.
Amazingly enough we made it, and we even managed to have the table set before our guests arrived. (Not too extravagantly, but at least set.)
The next pictures are just various shots of our 2021 Thanksgiving. It was a rough one for all of us: we’d lost Nana and Pop Pop, of course, but Steve had lost his father and Elisabeth her mother this year. Most of our gratitude was therefore directed to the fact that 2021 was finally drawing to a close.
But it was a wonderful Thanksgiving for all that.
(That’s their dog, Barley. You may also have noted that Maddie’s friend Josephine was with us.)
I began my new job at AP Pension on November 1, and logged my 6000th kilometer on the el bike—my 4000th mile—not long after:
I also continued to enjoy weekend walks with Didi out in the woods:
They have to be weekend walks by the time we get into late November, because by the time I get home from work (or wrap things up working form home), it’s already too dark to take her into the woods.
(And not long after the walk during which that picture was taken, the temperatures plummeted and all the waters of the woods were iced over.)
It’s still a little surreal to be riding shotgun beside Molli Malou.
She’s driving us down to Mormor’s for a birthday dinner.
A birthday dinner preceded by roasted chestnuts…
It was also the first Advent Sunday of the season.
And it was a bad season for appliances.
The first week of December we sprang a leak here:
That’s the water feed to the clothes washer.
(This was only a few weeks after a pipe in the boiler room had sprung a hissing leak that required emergency replacement.)
As we struggled through the washless week awaiting our plumber appointment, the bidet sprang a leak. Not a leak, really: the pipe to the drain had simply become disconnected from the drain itself, so water going down the drain just poured through to the floor below, then seeped—rushed!—out from under the base of the bidet.
And still later in the month we would go through seven weeks’ worth of water in a single week as our decalcifier went on the fritz.
And remember: our refrigerator had sprung a leak back in August.
None of these problems were related. They were entirely coincidental.
Or so the plumbers union would like us to believe…
Just kidding. This was a carefully coordinated attack on us by our own house, which can always sense when we’re getting a little too comfy. (Remember a few years ago when the dishwasher and the clothes dryer both died within a week or two of one another, in the same season in which we had to replace our stove because of a lightning strike?)
Well played, house.
Didi, feeling neglected and looking for love:
The transition from November to December means not just Thanksgiving, Mormor’s birthday, and first Advent, but Maddie’s birthday.
And the one gift Maddie wants for her birthday every year is a White Birthday.
This year: wish granted.
Those pictures are from the first of December. So is this one:
That’s the title screen for Kometernes Jul, this year’s Christmas calendar program. We would spend half an hour of every evening for the next 23 days snuggled on the sofas watching the adventures of a bunch of bright kids and hapless adults trying to solve the problems created by a quantum portal to a distant planet in our own solar system.
Because nothing says Christmas! like quantum portals, alien worlds, and primitive Chewbacca-wannabes.
By the time of Maddie’s birthday proper, even more snow had accumulated.
Her requested dinner: French onion soup with crusty bread and a side of roasted garlic. And I think I finally got it right.
And even if I didn’t, the birthday girl’s smiles told me I got it close enough.
Believe it or not, this next picture understates her excitement for this particular gift:
No birthday cake: instead, birthday make-your-own-sundaes:
Note for the permanent record: it was about this point that one of the wires got yanked out of our stereo system accidentally and we learned that one does not simply connect stereo wires into our stereo system.
One needs wires that end with stupid little plastic connectors:
…and such plastic connectors can only be purchased already connected to long lengths of speaker wire.
Our sound system was apparently designed by the speaker wire sales association.
(In all fairness, we’ve been using this system since 2008 without a single problem, so I shouldn’t complain.)
A long deferred night out with Mads and David gave me a chance to see Strøget in its Christmas glory.
Unfortunately the bar we’d always met at in the past, the Dubliner Downtown, had gone out of business, replaced with some kind of chi-chi French “flower bar.” (It doesn’t make any more sense in Danish or French than it does in English.)
So we ended up at an even nicer place, the Library Bar right beside the main train station. It is now officially my favorite bar in the world.
…Although it was a little discomfiting to sit beneath an upside-down Christmas tree:
But for a drink menu like this, I’ll sit under worse than an upside-down tree:
(Absent from menu: Caol Ila. But the Aberlours papered over that one otherwise unforgivable omission.)
A jazz quartet was playing old standards from the American songbook all evening.
So the place just oozed class and refinement, right? Except they very clearly used the same IKEA scotch glasses we have at home.
The following Saturday was “Maddie’s Birthday, Observed.”
She’d gone back and forth on whether it should be dinner at Hai Long or brunch downtown at Dalle Valle, followed by a Tivoli visit.
Fortunately she finally settled on the latter—not because the meal was any better, but because it would end up being our only Christmas visit to Tivoli this season: the garden would be shut down very shortly after our visit thanks to another holiday lockdown as the Omikron wave swept over Denmark.
It was Maddie’s first visit to Tivoli as a teenager.
Gastronomically, this was a wonderful period for our family: Trine’s curiosity had been piqued by some Chinese-American girl’s website or YouTube channel on how to make delicious versions of the kinds of dishes served in America’s Chinese restaurants. (Most of the dishes we enjoy in America are utterly unavailable in Denmark.) We got to savor the results of Trine’s experiments with this new recipe source, and they were outstanding: just like you’d get at your favorite Chinese restaurant in America, only just a little bit better.
These may have been the only dishes in family history where the leftovers from weeknight dinners were gobbled up greedily by the girls the next day.
Oh… and we got more snow.
I love these pics of Didi reminiscing wistfully over her glorious adventures in the snow:
Maddie and a friend put this gingerbread house together from a kit:
That also relates back to Didi: on Christmas Eve we left the gingerbread house on the living room coffee table, where we’d set it out while unwrapping presents. We’d all picked off the candies, and had shared one of the roof panels, but the house was otherwise intact when we went to bed.
And entirely gone on Christmas morning.
We all blamed Didi but it just dawns on me now: we didn’t leave any milk or cookies for Santa this year, so just maybe… ?
Anyway, that all lay in the future: by now it was still about ten days to Christmas, and time to choose our tree.
It was the easiest choice we ever made.
We drove up to the place in the woods on Ballerupvej, parked, got out of the car, and Molli or Maddie (or both) said of the very first tree, the tree standing closest to the parking lot: “Hey, nice tree.”
And it was.
So we bought it.
It all happened so fast I didn’t have a chance to get the usual pictures of us all inspecting various trees and arguing about which one was best.
So I just shot a few pics after the fact to chronicle all the things.
Not much more than 30 minutes from our having piled into the car to go find a tree, it was standing in our living room:
At about the same time, we got exciting news from Chelmsford: George Bailey had arrived on Maple Road!
In the background of all this, of course, as I’ve already mentioned off-handedly, Denmark was being swamped with Omikron.
Once again I was sent home in early December to work from home until (at least) January 17.
Once again the girls were sent home in early December for online instruction through (at least) January 5.
Once again Trine would have to continue work as usual.
And the mask mandates came back, and Tivoli and movie theatres andnight clubs were shut down, and the “corona passport” came back into force, and the government went bananas trying to get the entire population a third vaccine shot before the end of the month.
The virus was much, much more contagious with this wave. It was in fact the first Danish wave where friends and coworkers were getting hit with the virus left and right. Three of my new co-workers were already working from home in the days before the new lockdown kicked in because of children who’d tested positive (but all of whom were asymptomatic).
No one of my acquaintance experienced much more than a nasty cold: there were no stories this time around of lost smell and taste, or difficult bouts with “the worst flu ever,” or weird lingering after-effects. People who caught it and developed symptoms were describing what amounted to a mild cold that came and went in a couple of days.
People were now testing positive who had fully expected to be negative because they were not only asymptomatic, but hadn’t had any extensive contact with anyone outside their immediate circles. People who swore the only other people they’d been around were the other people in line at the test centers were catching it.
And, as was true with our own family this horrible summer, there were many stories of one or several members of a household testing positive and the rest completely avoiding the virus. And vaccination status didn’t seem to make any difference at all in terms of who caught the virus—although the statistics make it clear that, statistically speaking, the virus still represented a much more significant threat to the unvaccinated who caught it.
In any case, it’s so pervasive that as I write this I’ve got a sinking feeling someone in our own household, or Steve & Elisabeth’s, is going to test positive on Thursday and ruin our New Year’s Eve plans.
So here we are, in the middle of that glorious relaxed week between Christmas and New Year’s, looking forward to saying goodbye to this dogshit dumpsterfire train wreck of a year, but not entirely sure 2022 is going to be any great shakes itself.
We’re the crew of the USS Caine, glad to see the last of De Vriess, but wondering how this Queeg guy is going to work out.
It’s not cautious optimism so much has hopeful wariness.
So that’ll be a wrap for 2021, the absolute worst year in Nagan family history.
…Except for one last thing.
In the run up to our local elections this fall, there was a candidate in the Emdrup neighorhood of Copenhagen with a very familiar name, whose posters always caught my eye on my bike rides to and from work:
Yes, Trine Schaltz.
I kept meaning to swipe one of the posters, throw a U over the A, and plaster a picture of Trine Schultz Kammer over Fru Schaltz’s mug, but I never got around to it.
Schaltz didn’t make it into parliament, alas, so I’ll probably never get another chance.
