From New Year to Budapest

This has been the longest lapse in the history of the MoMa blog.

(Yes, MoMa. That’s a new thing. Trine and I are tired of trying to figure out how to abbreviate the girls’s names in emails and text messages, since they both have the same initials — either of them can be referred to as M, MM, or MMKN — so we’re going with Mo and Ma from now on, for MOlli Malou and MAddie — which gives us MoMa, which we know the Lees will be happy about.)

I forewarned you all in the last post that it would probably be March before the next one, and so that’s come to pass.  I don’t think it will be another three months before the next post, so let’s just dive into this one and move on.

First, my boy Sherman will crank up the wayback machine and send us to early January, when we finally got the bicycle we had “given” Molli Malou for Christmas.  We picked it up from the store on a weekday evening and I was not allowed to do anything until it was finally assembled.  Molli Malou didn’t care: we let her take it for a spin in the frigid dark even though she was already in her pajamas.

Meanwhile, Molli Malou used one of her Advent presents to knit a hat for her little sister.

…who had also very happily taken her place among the Silky Sisters.

Hard to believe we’ve already reached the point where we’re doing homework around the dining room table.  Molli Malou is very good about doing her homework and even seems to be enjoying it lately — except when she’s not.  But here she and Trine are working out some mathematics problems very happily.

Fastelavn seemed to go on longer than normal this year: there were different Festelavn events at the girls’ institutions and then there was the formal holiday itself and lastly there was the day where Trine and I remembered we had forgotten to give the girls their Fastelavn candy boughs.

We finally had the good sense to make our way to an indoor Fastelavn barrel-whacking this year: we’ve been going to outdoor events every single year since Molli’s birth and even Vikings eventually get tired of outdoor events in February.

So we went to the big celebration at Frederiksberg Rådhus — along with about fifty thousand other parents and their fifty billion children.  You can see how miserable Maddie was:

The next shot is blurry, but it’s the only remotely decent one I got of Maddie whacking the barrel.  (A little boy before her had just smashed the thing open before her — you can see all the candy on the floor beneath the barrel.  It took Maddie and then another dozen kids to finally smash the last of the barrel to bits.)

(No pictures of Molli Malou because there were different barrels for different age groups and I was with Maddie.)

After the cat-whacking we took a little stroll through Frederiksberg Garden on the way to the zoo.  See how the Viking mind works?  We decide we don’t want any more outdoor Fastelavns, so we find an indoor one — then go right ahead and spend an afternoon at the zoo.

It was such a typical Denmark February day.

The Frederiksberg Zoo had just opened their brand new Arctic habitat.  It’s enormous and spectacular.  The same polar bears that Molli Malou used to watch swatting around an old refrigerator in their tiny prison are now enjoying themselves in a massive environment of water, ice, and rocks.  A lot of the viewing is from underwater.

My favorite part was the glass tunnel underwater in the middle of their swimming pool.

Molli Malou is still the Butterfly Whisperer.

Valentine’s Day came and went — and this year the candy from Nana and Pop-Pop wasn’t all squished!

And Molli Malou made Valentine’s Muffins.

Indeed, she has become quite the little baker.  It’s one of her many favorite activities.  She’s always baking stuff, and very often without any recipes: she just makes it up.  Although there have been some tragic failures, there have also been some delicious successes… like her ginormous cinnamon snail!

Believe it or not, those are all the pictures of the girls (and their activities) from January through the present.  We’ve all been very active, so there’s plenty to talk about in terms of what they’ve accomplished and where they are developmentally — and I should point out that I have some great videos of Molli Malou’s first singing solo at her school play in February, despite the lack of actual photos — but first let’s get through the Budapest trip!

In 2003 Trine got me tickets to the Rolling Stones in Prague for my birthday.  In 2005 she took me and infant Molli on a birthday cruise to Norway.  Three or four years ago we snuck off to Malmö in Sweden (which country I hadn’t yet set foot in) — for my birthday.  (And snuck back after a few boring hours to celebrate in Copenhagen.)  This year, as you all know, she whisked me off to Budapest for a weekend.

We stayed at a hotel called the Regnum Residency Hotel.  It looks kind of plain:

But it was ultra-modern, we had a large and comfortable suite, and the service was fantastic.  It was directly across the street from the Canadian embassy, which was just a dull office building with a Canadian flag in front.  We’ll get back to the topic of embassies later.

Things were not so rosy a little down the block:

It was, as you can see in the picture above, just a big and apparently abandoned building with bars over its windows.  There were several plaques on the building at street level, and wreaths placed near them.

Hard to read at this resolution, I know, but the signed seemed to be saying something about the communist Terror having been officially declared over in 1991.  And just a few meters to the right:

…another plaque, commemorating the site as the location of Gestapo horrors until 1945.

Sobering to look at a single building used to inflict terror on a population first by Nazis and then by Communists.

The wreaths, we would later learn, were a consequence of our having arrived on a national holiday, the celebration of the sesquicentennial of the start of the revolution that ultimately led to Hungarian independence: virtually every statue and plaque across the city had wreaths or ribbons around it.

In any case, our first day there we just got some directions from the concierge to Castle Hill.  She gave us simple and straightforward directions that we got all wrong: but she had mentioned something about stairs, so when we found some we followed them.

(Some shots I just took because they were interesting.)

(Especially the juxtaposition between cared-for and neglected buildings, as in the picture below.  Unfortunately Budapest still has many, many more of the neglected variety.)

Yeah, still walkin’… lot of stairs.

Finally a kind of plateau! 

Worth noting: to this point we had hardly seen any other human beings.  We’d covered a little under a mile and had only seen a few people walking their dogs on these spookily quiet, snow-swept streets.  We had seen very few businesses of any kind, and what few we had seen were closed.  We were laughing at the concierge for having told us there were “hundreds” of restaurants on Castle Hill.  As far as we could tell, Castle Hill had rolled up the sidewalks ten years ago.  Or thirty.

See that, the picture above?  That’s a corner of the castle on the hill.  We went around the corner, and that’s about when we realized we had taken the wrong stairs.  We must have taken the servants’ entrance or something.  Suddenly a huge, grand staircase presented itself, crawling with tourists local and international.

A lot of the tourists (whom I carefully screened out of most of my pictures) — maybe most of them — were local.  They were carrying flags and wearing ribbons.  A team of men in jumpsuits were scrambling about the streets “topside,” shoveling and sweeping snow from the sidewalks.

But even with all the tourists, and the much more lively feel of the area, there was still something weirdly desolate about Castle Hill.

…until we found a cafe with sandwiches (we hadn’t eaten a bite in seven hours).  And beer.

Ah, the Paprika mines! …. but I covered those on Facebook.

Below is the street entrance to the Red Devil Wine Cellar.  (The actual name was in German for some reason.  Probably reasons of tourism.)  Like many of the hundreds of restaurants nestled among the private homes of Castle Hill, its street entrance was basically a tunnel leading into a beer garden, whence a door opened into the restaurant itself. 

In the case of the Red Devil Wine Cellar however, that entrance was to a stairway that led down to a 700-year-old cave, which was now a dining room.

We made reservations immediately.  (Everyone had been telling us we had better make reservations: it was a national holiday!  Everyone would be dining out!  Every restaurant in town would be packed!)

We then took a leisurely walk the right way back to our hotel, through much livelier streets and along busy boulevards bustling with shoppers.  We freshened up, Skyped the girls to say goodnight, then took a cab back to the Red Devil.

We made it back to the restaurant just in time for our 8pm reservation.  We were anxious because we were running just a little late — I’d actually thought about calling ahead, since I didn’t want the packed restaurant to give our table to someone else.  But I didn’t.

Luckily, our table was waiting for us.

Our table at the Red Devil.

No, really, enjoy these details.

… and the fact that we were the only patrons in the 20-table dining room.

We had the traditional Hungarian meal, which was instructive in that it turns out neither of us is an especially big fan of traditional Hungarian food.  It wasn’t at all bad, and we like the spiciness, but it was nothing to blog about.

We stopped in at Oscar’s American Bar for a few drinks on the way home.  The eponymous Oscar was the little gold fella made so famous by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, or whatever the hell it’s called.  So it was a movie-themed bar.  The prices were probably expensive by Buda standards, but our scotches cost less than Pepsis would have in Copenhagen, so we were very happy.

We let ourselves sleep in until about 9 the next morning, had a leisurely breakfast at the hotel, and weren’t out the door until about 11:30.

We walked down the Danube to the closest Metro station, enjoying the view of the Parliament across the river.

The train station had a very retro feel.  (The subway is of course underground, and perfectly modern, but the surface suggested something from the 70s… or earlier.)

I already alluded to the fact that a lot of Castle Hill is in, rather than on, that hill: the Red Devil was itself a vast cave, and our waiter informed us that there had been an opening from the cave into a larger series of tunnels that were a kind of underground warren, connecting the famous “Hospital in the Cave” to the “Church in the Cave” to the hidden war-time bunkers and depots, to the Red Devil itself — as well as many other ancient caves.

But this obsession with tunnels and caves — understandable in a nation like Hungary, so regularly assaulted by hostile armies from every direction — went beyond Castle Hill.  The metro system was not merely underground: it was halfway down to the center of the earth.

The picture above shows a subway escalator that was by no means the longest we encountered in our little visit.  Hungarians are a burrowing people, we decided; Hobbit-like in their affinity for caves and tunnels.

The public transportation system was actually very nice and we were able to buy two all-day tickets giving us the run of the city for about 7 bucks each.

Our first stop in Pest was a no brainer:

Astoria was not far from the Dohány Street Temple, the second biggest in Europe and one of the largest in the world.  It had been on my list as one of the sites I wanted to see, but I felt a little sheepish as a semi-Jew myself not to have realized Saturday might be a bad day to come calling.

The synagogue is built over (or on or around) what was reportedly the birthplace of Theodor Herzl (or, in Hungarian, Herzl Tivadar).  And since tér is one of the few Hungarian words I picked up, I can tell you that this sign is proclaiming: “Theodore Herzl Square.”

(Closed Fridays and Saturdays?  Go figure…)

From the side street we could look into the courtyard of the synagogue and seem some kind of monument, but with the naked eye we couldn’t really tell what we were seeing.

Zooming in with the camera, the date “1944” and the only English on one of the plaques — “Never Again!” — were enough to tip us off.

That particular plaque was affixed to a marble slab on top of which was some kind of sculpture depicting what I assume are supposed to be Torah scrolls — but could really be just about anything.

See that beautiful weeping willow statue?  It’s pretty, right?

Yes: each tiny leaf on that weeping willow is imprinted with the name of a human being who was put to death for the crime of being Jewish.

The unbearable thing about so much of central and northern Europe is that there are memorials to Jews, and museums of Jewishness, tributes to the men and women who fought to save the Jews.

But there aren’t any Jews.

Not to speak of, anyway.  Not in any substantial numbers.  And for some reason it was this visit that finally brought it home to me: the allies didn’t save the Jews in WWII.  We stopped the Nazis, defeated them, and created a bulwark against the Soviets, but the Jews?  We liberated some, and although I have no statistical data to back me up, my sense is that most of them got the hell out of central and northern Europe right away.  Meaning the “Final Solution” actually worked.

No one teaches that.  No one talks about it.  But the fact of the matter is that for all practical purposes, Jewry was essentially purged from a huge swathe of an entire continent, leaving nothing behind but memorials, graveyards, and plaques that say “Never Again.”

Sobering.  And depressing.  So let’s stay depressed by contemplating the state of Hungarian open-face sandwiches:

They actually look okay at this resolution, and we’ll give them an A for effort, but you could not force me to eat one of those sad, dreary sandwiches.  Blech.

On the other hand: bike lanes!

And St. Stephen’s Basilica!

As a person of no particular religious beliefs, and an increasingly hostile outlook on organized religion generally, I wasn’t there to for religious reasons.  I wasn’t interested in anything theological or spiritual, I was just interested in seeing the Great Big Building That You Have to See.  And I liked the story of Stephen: he wasn’t just a saint: he was a king, the first Hungarian king and the founder of their nation.  He fought great wars and build a dynasty that has lasted 1000 years.  And he did at least some of it, I gather, without a head, arms, trunk, or legs: he had by the time of his death been reduced to a single hand, which remains preserved in this sacred basilicum erected in his honor just over 100 years ago.

The hand itself was in a sacred relic room.  In a sacred relic box.  And get this: it was unlit.  To get the lights on required a “voluntary” donation.  So what you end up getting is a roomful of relic watchers playing chicken to see who’ll fork over the donation to turn on the lights.  (Hint: it wasn’t us.)

There was a big public market place I wanted to see.  We stopped in at a café off the square for hot coffee drinks and got directions: go straight this way, the girl told us, and then go right and there will be shops on the right or go left and there will be shops on the left.  They were confusing directions but we followed them anyway, and ended up not at the big produce market we’d hoped to see but the high-end shopping district.  Hugo Boss, Benetton, Ralph Lauren, Versace, whatever.

And a lot of stalls selling souvenirs, sausages, hot dogs, and weird Hungarian candy.

Funny thing about that walk: it took us down a modern street with modern glass-and-steel office buildings on either side, but at one point concrete pylons embedded in the sidewalk defined a broad perimeter around a featureless building to our right.  It was clearly a high-security area, and the pylons were obviously intended to prevent carbombs, or cars carrying human bombs, from getting too close.

“Sad,” I sighed, “but I bet that’s the American embassy.”

When we reached the intersection and glanced down the side street at the buildings frontage, we saw it was the British Embassy.

“Wow,” I said, “then I can’t imagine how awful it must be at the American…”

We’ll come back to that thought later.

After buying some little tchotchkes for the girls (which, I should note, have both already broken), we ducked into a milk bar for a snack.  I knew I’d heard of milk bars, but I’d never been in one.  It took me a while even to remember where I’d heard of them: A Clockwork Orange.

The milk bar had the strangest bathroom decor I have ever seen.

Finally it was time to head off to the last touristy site of our visit: the castle in the public garden that had been built in dozens of styles from dozens of eras.

(I look pained in that shot because I got some kind of weird rib-cage muscle-spasm cramp and it was killing me for about the whole 10 minutes of our visit to this weird castle thing.)

I liked Trine’s comment on the statue above: “What’s a naked lady gonna do with a rake?”

There was an odd and vaguely spooky shadow in the grounds within the castle.  It looked like Death holding a pen.  Beside his left hand is an open book.  It was all in Latin, and I can now state conclusively that I have finally lost what little I had retained of Arthur Leavitt’s teaching: I have no idea what any of it said.

And for once another tourist had a quicker sense of humor than I did:

Caption: “Just sign here, sir.”

The reason we ended our tour of Pest (which is unfortunately the Danish word for “plague,” which goes a long way toward explaining Trine’s initial reluctance to cross the river from Buda) here in the city park was because it was also the location of the Szechenyi spa, which was actually our headline destination for the whole trip.  These last few pictures of the weird castle are taken from a spot about equidistant from the castle and the spa.

Awful picture of me, below, but at least my rib stitch had finally faded away.

And turning around, lo!  The Szechenyi spa:

A girl in the lobby talked us into having fish feed on our feet before entering the baths.

The fish were ticklish, and I admit I giggled a little at first, but not half as much as Trine.

I cannot overstate the pleasure of the baths.  Whether or not we ever make it back to Szechenyi itself, it will not have been our last visit to such a spa.

Two hours later, we were a very relaxed couple taking the train back to Buda.

Back at the hotel room, we enjoyed a leisurely nightcap, Skyped the girls again, and had the concierge book us a table at “the best steakhouse in Budapest,” a little place just a few blocks south of Parliament on the Pest side.

Here’s Parliament at night, from across the Danube on the Buda side:

We crossed the river by train, exiting just south of the right side of the building in the photo above.  We then cut through a big city square all of whose buildings were lit up spectacularly.  This was apparently the historic city center.

And this was our destination:

I include it here not because the photographs are anything special, but because that restaurant was indeed one of the best steakhouses I’ve eaten in — certainly the best in Europe.  It wasn’t cheap by Budapest standards, but we had a meal — and an experience — that would have cost three or four times as much in most other western countries.

Three strange things happened on the walk home: first, we noticed the American embassy off the main historical square and I wanted to take a picture.  We could see from afar that its security was roughly double what we’d seen at the British embassy: the concrete pylons defined twice as broad a perimeter and there were actual 12-foot fences barricading the buildings frontage from pedestrian traffic.

Also there were armed guards or cops lurking around the gates of the fence.

Just the same, the building was lit up and Old Glory was flapping in the light breeze, and I wanted a picture, dammit.

We walked closer and I sensed there would be trouble: the guards reacted to our movements and said something to us in Hungarian.

“I’m an American,” I said.  “I’d like to take a picture of my embassy.”

“No pictures!”  they shouted at me.  By this point I realized I had passed a first line of defenses about forty yards from the embassy proper; the fence itself was another ten yards from me, and the embassy another twenty yards beyond that.

“I’m an American citizen,” I repeated.

“No pictures!” they shouted again, and they started swarming toward us.  We backed off until we were well outside the outermost perimeter.

“From here?” I asked, gesturing to my camera.  “I mean, we’re so far away, now, during the day I’m sure the square is crowded and anyone could –“

“No pictures!“

Well, we didn’t agree with them on the finer legal or philosophical points, but they had the guns, so we abandoned the effort and began hurrying out of the square — and nearly tripped over a statue.

“Looks like a young Sinatra,” I said.

“Looks like Reagan,” Trine said.

As usual, Trine was right.  There was even a video kiosk beside the statue:

Reagan it was.  (“A country boy against the evil empire,” exclaimed the video display beside the statue.  It wasn’t running, so we didn’t get to see the video and I therefore don’t know how that exciting bout ended.)

Something felt weird to me that fifty yards from this tribute to America, and to an American president being honored for standing up to the system that had devastated this country, an American citizen had been chased away from the American embassy by men with guns, but I suppose I ought to be glad that our embassy is so well fortified.  (Although of course I wonder why it should require any fortification now that we have President Obama.  Hee hee.)

In any case, I was unsurprised a few blocks later to find Teddy Roosevelt standing on a bridge — or rather a statue of TR standing on a statue of a bridge.

…except it wasn’t Teddy Roosevelt.  It was:

Who is Nagy Imre?  From Wikipedia, “a Hungarian communist politician who was appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People’s Republic of Hungary on two occasions. Nagy’s second term ended when his non-Soviet-backed government was brought down by Soviet invasion in the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, resulting in Nagy’s execution on charges of treason two years later.”

In other words, he was a communist, but dammit he was one of their own, and in having been executed for treason by the Soviets he must have earned his historical Hungarian bonafides: “he just wanted to ruin us: the Soviets wanted to ruin us and enslave us!”

But think of it: Ronald Reagan and a Communist Head of State honored in statuary within a stone’s throw of each other (at least for a major league outfielder).  Interesting.

I also thought it was interesting that the side of parliament not facing the Danube was unlit.  Saving a little money on those electric bills, are we?

There’s nothing else to report about the trip: we got back to our room, slept, woke up early, had a quick breakfast, took a cab to the airport, boarded our plan, and got into Copenhagen well before noon.

We were expecting to take the Metro back to Vibeke & Jørgen’s for lunch and to pick up the girls, but there was a wonderful, wonderful surprise waiting for us at international arrivals — we no sooner stepped through the sliding doors than I heard a child squeal, “DADDY!” and then a beaming Maddie came rushing heedlessly at me, oblivious to the half-dozen travelers who nearly trampled her.

Molli Malou had meanwhile gone running straight to Trine.

That was a welcome home!

So I took these two shots on the train on the way out of the airport.  They’re horrible of everyone, but they’re just there to remind me of that wonderful surprise.

# # #

Now I can catch you — and the permanent record — up on the girl’s developments over this winter.

But wait — one more picture.  It’s something Molli Malou did for Disney Junior in the hopes they would show it on tv.  (They didn’t.)

She was proud of the picture and actually asked me to “put it on the internet so everyone can see it.”

Both girls have been growing and mostly thriving these past few months.  We’re keeping a close eye on Maddie’s ear, which the doctors say still needs watching.  One of the problems is that pressure can build in there and cause her pain like you or I might feel on an airplane: but it’s very hard to get a kid to blow their ears out correctly, so they’ve actually got a kit for this: a little plastic bulb with a hole on one end and an attachment for a balloon on the other.  One can then practice blowing up the balloon with one’s nostril (by holding the bulb with the hole beneath it).  It’s a weird thing watching Maddie blow up a balloon from her nose, but she’s become very good at it and it’s helping her relieve the pressure.

In any case, although the hearing in that ear is still not complete, her hearing overall is quite acute: whether the problem resolves itself over the next year or so or requires eventual surgery, there is no sign of any real consequence to her incomplete hearing in that ear: the only real “symptom” we’ve noticed is that she’s extremely sensitive to very loud noises: they seem to cause her physical pain.

In May she will advance to the “Big Kids” group at børnehaven.

Molli Malou has been having some problems with one of her best friends, and this actually became quite serious, to the extent that it became the only topic of our conversation with her teachers at our parent-teacher meeting earlier this winter and we even scheduled subsequent meetings to monitor progress.  The actual source of the problem is with this friend (arising from her possessiveness of Molli Malou and the inappropriate ways she tries to assert it), not with Molli Malou, but it was affecting Molli Malou is some devastating ways.  We are working with the teachers and this friend’s parents to try and root this problem out for ever.

On the positive side, however, I should note that her teachers actually interrupted that parent-teacher meeting to say, “This is an important issue, but let’s acknowledge that we can only focus on it like this at the expense of everything else because her school work is so good that we really don’t need to talk about it.”

Molli Malou is finally beginning to truly love reading.  One day that particularly warmed my heart she actually spent the entire day from the moment she got home from school reading a Disney jumbo book (the paperback-sized comic books): she curled up with it on the couch, asked me to turn the television off before dinner so she could focus on it sitting at the dining room table, she walked from room to room without taking her eyes off the book, she even brought it into the bathroom with her, and of course she ultimately read herself to sleep in bed.  She has taken some time to warm up to reading, but it thrills me to see it get its hooks in her.

Maddie, meanwhile, is getting increasingly sophisticated in her language and is determined to start reading.  She loves letters and numbers and although she’s still sorting these things out, she startled me one night at bedtime this very week by announcing that her name backwards was “E-I-D-D-A-M.”  I think she sensed my joy at her spelling something backwards, because she’s now trying to spell things backwards (to mixed results) all the time.

Her conversation can be startlingly correct some times.  Just last night she was watching something on television, and she said, “Daddy, the man to the left is very silly.”

# # #
Molli Malou is enjoying her piano lessons and choir.  The choir is connected to the church, as I think I’ve mentioned, and from time to time she gets co-opted into singing in some religious event or other.  This past Thursday the choir sang as a backdrop to the church’s Påskevandring, or “Easter Wandering,” which was actually a pretty cute event where parents and other children were led, scene by scene, through the passion of the Christ: a little girl on a stuffed, wheeled ass was rolled down the main hallway as we waved palm fronds at her, while the priest explained the arrival in Jerusalem.  The same girl then entered the temple — the next room — and very nervously upset the tables where the moneychangers were doing their business, smashing a bunch of old plates and cups on the floor (“Ho!” shouted Maddie with glee, “she made a mess!”).  We went through the last supper, Gethsemane, the arrest, Golgotha, and finally the tomb from which Jesus arose on Easter.  The priest was very entertainingly pedagogic through the whole thing, explaining the whole story in a very entertaining and child-friendly way.  Afterwards there was a passover-like dinner there at the church: Molli Malou ate ate a table with her choir friends, and the priest himself sat with Trine, Maddie, and me.

He pointed out as he joined us that he he’d never seen us at the church before and we had to sheepishly acknowledge that we weren’t religious people.  As it were.  So to speak.  While simultaneously hinting that we didn’t intend to be become such.  Trine and I found it very awkward, but the priest was very gracious and after we got that discomfort out of the way we had a wonderful conversation: turns out he was born and partly raised in Africa.  He’s also taking his family (apparently Danish priests can marry and have kids; I hadn’t known it until then, but apparently half the kids with the lead roles in the passion had been of his own brood) to America for summer vacation this year: they’re flying into D.C., renting a Winnebago, and making their leisurely way up to Niagara Falls.

# # #

It’s also worth noting for the permanent record that it was three days after our return from Hungary that I was let go from Issuu — just as less than a year after I was let go from Nordisk Film two days after returning from Portugual.  I don’t seem to travel well!

(The new American CEO is moving the Business Intelligence, Sales, and Marketing functions to Palo Alto, and apparently already has his own BI guy there that he had planned to bring aboard from the start: ironically, the American CEO I was so excited to see arrive was actually my doom.)

In any case, once again I have three-plus months of severance, so if I can start my new job before July I will once again be able to double up on salary for a month or two, which would certainly be helpful.  I may be able to start at Adnuvo as soon as May 1.  Economically speaking, I should probably try to get fired once a year!

# # #

Besides reading, Molli Malou is spending a lot of her time playing Minecraft these days.  She’s building a spectacular city and sometimes even plays in online mode with a friend.  Maddie is at that age where she seems to be trying to find out what it is she likes to play with: one day it’s all about her dolls (her “babies”), the next it’s her cooking stuff, the next it’s the iPad.  There’s no real throughline with her.  She just came in while I was writing this, in fact, and told me she wanted a bugle.

Spring here, as in America, is way overdue: we had three days of snow here this week that dropped about six to eight inches on us, and it’s still out there, burying our budding spring blossoms beneath a heavy blanket of enoughalready.  The forecast is for still more cold and snow before a thaw in time for Easter, but I’ll believe it when I see it.  Meanwhile, the delay of spring is palpable with the girls: they’re getting a little stir crazy and it’s beginning to wear on all of us.

# # #

I think that covers most of the major events of the last three months.  Actually I’m sure it doesn’t, but I’ve been working on this stupid blog on and off for the last five days and am tired of it: time to hit “publish” and get on with my exciting new life as a job-seeker!

Happy spring!