Didi and Snowman

Freeze Frames

As noted in the previous post, we got hit with some snow in January, and it never really went away. Once in a while we’d have a sunny day that melted most of it away: then it would snow that night and we’d wake up to a fresh little coat of snow. Never more than a couple of centimeters, but there was enough of this snowing-then-melting-then-freezing-then-snowing cycle that gradually all the less-traveled paths for walking and biking were covered with a sheen of ice that made walking and biking precarious business.

Fortunately (?), of course, very few of us ever had to go anywhere, except for Trine’s drives to and from work, so our risk exposure was minimized. But toward the end of January and into the beginning of February, things were so icy, and temperatures were so frigid, that I had to take a couple of weeks off from my morning bike rides.

But that’s just weather. Let’s get into actual stuff.

For one thing, the tear-down of the lovely property down on Søndergårdsvej continued.

It’s maybe not so interesting for the rest of you, but I like having pictures of our changing neighborhood in the permanent record.

It was fairly late in January that one of Maddie’s Christmas presents finally arrived: 5 meters of colored strip lights that we mounted around two sides of her room.

Her favorite light setting is a program called “Gorgeous” that cycles through all the colors slowly and smoothly. I think I’d lose my mind, but she seems to like it.

The deer were popping up on almost very stroll Didi and I took down along the lakefront: I suppose the freezing weather and regular snow cover meant that they had to take their risks and forage as much as possible whenever the snow melted away:

(The deer are dead center in that photo.)

For Pop-Pop’s birthday there was a lovely steak dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. We were, alas, unable to attend, but were grateful to get a picture of the event! Just knowing that somewhere in the world we had relations who could eat in restaurants was a hopeful development.

As January became February, the temperatures really dropped. (This is all on the Danish scale, remember: I’ve lived in Chicago and know what “dropped temperatures” can really mean, and I’m sure from Hannah’s point of view our weather puts us just a peg or two below Estero.) We went about two weeks without seeing a temperature above freezing. That bodes well for our summer (fewer bugs!), and you’ll see plenty of beautiful pictures of frozen and frosted Denmark in this post, but “beautiful” and “pleasant” are two very different things.

Ah! Now I see it wasn’t yet February, because the World Men’s Handball Championship final was on the 31st of January. Denmark and Sweden were playing for the honor: Denmark was defending its title from two years ago.

And they defended it well.

The last time they’d won the World Championship, the Patriots won the Super Bowl a week later. I made that observation aloud and one of the girls asked if the Pats had a chance this year.

“They didn’t even make the playoffs,” I sighed.

The girls were shocked.

“Tom Brady and his new team did,” I said, “and they’re going to the Super Bowl, but they’re going to get creamed.”

The lockdown that had kept us mostly housebound weekdays since early December, coupled with painfully cold temperatures, was getting to all of us. I mean really getting to us. We decided we had to do something if only just to get out of the house. So one evening in the first week of February, the four of us and Kalle piled into the car and drove up to the Bilka in Hillerød. We didn’t buy much, but we browsed for quite a while, enjoying the company of strangers and the novel environment.

We ate at McDonald’s on the way home.

Had it been a normal February, we would have been basking in the sun for a week with Nana and Pop Pop down in tropical Estero. Instead, we had one night out at an oversized grocery store and dinner at McDonald’s.

This really sucks.

But look, that house is now completely gone!

Maddie’s paintings get better and better with every passing day: it’s great she has a hobby she enjoys to help pass the disgusting superfluities of time at her disposal.

Here’s Hermione:

And for scale, here it is without the cropping:

As the deep freeze took hold, Didi was perplexed by the lack of water at all her usual romping venues.

Where had it gone?

I love that one. But the next one is also fun.

The next one is indoors: it’s not ice that’s perplexing her here, but the inaccessibility of the flæskesvære she so desperately wants.

I don’t take many pictures of the cats, but one evening as we were shutting down and getting ready for bed, we found that Emma seemed to be expecting a board meeting.

(I’ll have to keep that one and use it for memes…)

I woke up on Monday, February 8, to discover that Brady, Gronkowski, and the Bucs didn’t get creamed by the Chiefs after all. In fact they’d won, bigly, and Brady had been awarded another Super Bowl MVP trophy.

That man has been in half of all the Super Bowls played since 9/11, and has won seven of them. Staggering.

The girls may no longer think of the Super Bowl as “the Pats’ last game of the season,” but it’s still “Tom Brady’s last game of the season.”

Eventually Didi was permitted to venture out on the ice (by now it was estimated to be at least 13 cm thick, which is what the authorities require before greenlighting people and animals to run around on Denmark’s frozen lakes and ponds).

And the lot is just about empty:

I’ve mentioned Trine’s new private practice startup: she brought me by for a visit one February afternoon.

This is in Lyngby. The “Better Sleep” shop in the building on the left is also the home of Liberty Fysioterapi.

Here are some shots of the office:

Fastelavn (Whitsunday) fell on the 14th this year, the same day as Valentine’s Day.

American relations probably only remember Fastelavn as the midwinter holiday where we’ve always had pictures of the girls dressed up in costumes, whacking at a barrel to try and smash it enough to make it release its abundant candy contents.

The girls are, admittedly, getting a little old for that kind of thing, but Trine thought it would be a good idea to have a Fastelavn party for them anyway, if only to break up the horrible monotony of the lockdown/freezedown.

Maddie chose a character from some Anime series she follows: here she is modeling her costume that morning.

And here are some shots of the world around us at that point.

And now, back to Fastelavn.

We obviously couldn’t have many guests, but we let Maddie invite a friend and Molli brought Kalle.

Trine tried like hell to get a barrel, but by the time we’d decided to have our party, every store within driving distance (that was open) was sold out. So Maddie and Josephine made a barrel from cardboard.

And now, alas, the costume photos. Trine had one off-the-rack:

I had none, and said it was okay, but Trine insisted I dress up as something.

“But we don’t have any other costumes,” I said.

“I have this dress,” she said. “And a big floppy hat. So that’s your costume.”

Lovely.

Here’s Anime Death Princess Maddie, alongside Josephine as Hermione.

And here are the lovely Fastelavn pastries:

And here are Molli (too cool to wear a costume) and Kalle (who was game enough to wear Molli’s old Pikachu onesie). They’ve just entered the room in this picture, and I believe Molli is reacting to her father’s costume.

Here were the costumes eight short years ago:

In any case, it was time for the wild rumpus to begin: time to whack the cat from the barrel!

Pictures are too static to capture the excitement. Here’s Maddie:

Josephine was too quick, by the time I started “filming” she’d already taken her swing and was walking away.

So next up is Molli Malou:

And finally, batting clean-up, it’s Kalle for the win (watch Charlee!):

And that was that: from there it was all about gathering up the candy.

And then eating the pastries, the first food I’ve ever heard both girls say were too sweet.

And then there was more snow.

Enjoy this video of Trine playing with Didi, then I’ll tell you about it:

Didi had so much fun and was so excited she was literally shaking with excitement… we thought. Maybe partially she was. She was also shaking because she was shivering. She’s probably consumed a liter or two of ice, and her body went into overdrive to metabolize it.

I’d been getting ready to take her out for a walk: on the drive to the woods, I popped into the vet on the theory that although I was sure she’d be fine (she wasn’t exhibiting any signs of distress, just shaking like the the proverbial leaf on the proverbial tree), it couldn’t hurt to just say, “Hey, this dog just ate a whole shitload of ice and she’s shivering like a maniac now: is that normal? Is she okay?”

The vet said yes, that’s normal, and yes, she’s okay, and I had nothing to be afraid of.

I hadn’t said I was afraid of anything, but I guess you don’t just “pop in” to the vet’s office if you’re not at least somewhat concerned about something.

Anyway, good tip: don’t feed your dog too many snowballs. (I’m sure that’s very helpful advice for Nana, Pop Pop, and Morfar.)

Because the vet had said I should try to calm Didi down, I took her into the prettier part of Hareskov, where dogs have to be leashed, and we took a slow and leisurely walk.

It was spectacular in the fresh snow.

Funny thing about snow: sooner or later, it melts.

One fine day in the second half of February, the temperatures began to rise above freezing for the first time in a long time.

And the snow began to melt all over Denmark.

Including our back yard. Rapidly.

Too rapidly.

Here’s the garage floor the Wednesday afternoon it began:

See, what happens is our misshapen yard guides all the water to the path to the garage door, which guides it all to the stairwell there, where the water level rises until it seeps under the door, over the jamb, and into the garage.

It was slow at first, but eventually there was more than a liter a minute flowing into the stairwell.

We tried everything, and even bought a pump (using click-and-collect, of course), but the water wasn’t deep enough for the pump’s auto-sensing mechanism to work, even after we pried up a few bricks, meaning we had to jerry-rig the thing to think there was always water to pump, meaning it would be always on, which was overkill.

In the end, there was only one real solution: manually bail out the stairwell at intervals, around the clock, until the meltoff was done.

It took two days.

We’ll have to deal with that one way or other this spring or summer, because I never want to go through that again.

Meanwhile, it was like spring had arrived all at once: suddenly we were getting temperatures of 12, 13, and 14 degrees Celsius. The country became one massive mud pit.

Hareskov was basically unwalkable. I tried a walk there with Did and had to abandon it (the picture above is from “Puppy Lake”). Trine later learned that the very afternoon I’d opted not to press my luck at Hareskov, some unfortunate sould had slipped in its mud, injured themselves, and been unable to get back up: they called 112, and when the ambulance arrived they couldn’t reach the guy due to the mud: they had to send for the fire department.

Thankfully (?) the temperatures have fallen again, hardening the earth with overnight frosts. We’re back to daily highs in the middle single digits, but at least there’s no imminent threat of precipitation.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting for the permanent record that Trine’s been working diligently to master her biofeedback machine. Walking in on scenes like this is not unusual:

And to close on an optimistic note: can you not see spring coming in the final picture?


So here we are: it’s the first of March as I wrap this up, the first day of Danish spring.

It’s still quite cold, but I had an unexpected pleasure on my morning bike ride this morning: daylight. The streetlights even went out just before I got back home. By the end of this week, I may be able make my whole morning ride in daylight.

Not only that, but we’ve reached the point where there’s still light in the sky when we sit down to supper at six o’clock in the evening.

The Prime Minister has already extended most of our lockdown conditions through the first week of April, so there’s not much hope of relief on that front. And in just ten days we’ll mark the one-year anniversary of this hell. The optimist inside me says “and every day that goes by is one day closer to the end of all this,” but it’s hard to hear him because the pessimist inside me keeps trying to straggle him.

So we really haven’t come very far from where we were last month: I’m still working from home, the girls are still schooling from home, and there’s still no handball. Molli’s still working at LIDL and Maddie’s still painting and I’m still freelancing and Trine’s still getting her private practice off the ground. We’re all still muddling along.

There probably won’t be much change in this coming month, either, beyond the fact that I’ll be the first member of the family to have a second pandemic birthday.

Yay!

Author: gftn

1 thought on “Freeze Frames

  1. I really enjoy these. It is almost as good as being there. Although I do not want to deal with snow anymore.

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