Fuller House

I concluded the last blog post by saying, “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.”

Everything is proceeding as I had foreseen.

Moster Mette arrived on the fourth.  Morfar was already hunkering down on Hybenvej, so were suddenly a household of six.  This required certain changes to the room assignments: Morfar would keep the guest room, but Trine and I would move into “the big room” and convert our former bedroom into a room for Moster Mette.  Moving ourselves into the big room meant moving a lot of stuff out into the garage, but since the garage was already full, we’d have to find a place for that stuff.

Meanwhile, Trine’s birthday rolled around and we held a party to celebrate it roughly a month later (so that it could also serve as a “welcome home” party for Moster Mette).  Those two events are the thematic bookends of this post: we begin with Trine’s birthday, and we end with her birthday party.

I also once again hijack the family blog and pervert it into a travel blog to chronicle my trip to the ancestral land of Lithuania.

Also the eponymous heroines of this blog make some appearances here and there.

First, though, a couple of pictures that don’t really follow the chronological flow of this post, starting with a Schmidt family shot the source of which I can’t remember.

And here’s the Snoopy I got from Great Grandma on my fifth birthday — unquestionably the longest-held possession I’m aware of.  (There may be a book or two lying around somewhere that antedate Snoopy as personal possessions, but no children’s book accompanied me to every home I’ve ever lived in, as Snoopy has.  Port Washington, Marblehead, Pittsburgh, Chicago, L.A., East Haddam, Astoria, Frederiksberg, Værløse… wherever I go, he goes — amigos!)

Now we can start at the very beginning (a very good place to start), with Trine’s birthday on September 12.

A lovely new water bottle from Maddie:

And a beautiful hand-made shirt from Molli…

…which was just a little small for Trine.  Bewildering, because it seemed to fit Molli just fine!

And here’s the big gift…

Okay, it’s not a great picture of Trine (sorry!), but it was important to capture the laughter.  The source of the laughter was that her sudden discovery that her gift is a Sous Vide cooker.

I realize sous vide cookers are not generally a source of hilarity.

The thing is, just the previous weekend I had spent almost a full hour mocking the very notion of sous vide cooking.  We were having some frozen chicken wings, they were marketed as “sous vide cooked,” so I pretended to know nothing about sous vide — I mocked it as a stupid and faddish new trend that was obviously just a scam.  I made up ridiculous arguments against it, deliberately ignorant arguments since I’d spent half the day before studying sous vide so I could make a smart choice of a cooker for her.

I can overdo things sometimes (as anyone reading this blog knows), and was afraid that my over-the-top mockery of sous vide cooking so close to her birthday might have tipped my hand — but the genuine laughter when she opened the gift reassured me that I can still misdirect when I need to.

Once all of the birthday presents were opened, Maddie very excitedly presented us all with a surprise gift for the whole family: an apple feeder for birds that she’d made herself in woodshop!

(And for the record, we’re all big sous vide fans now.)

Maddie attended a “super song weekend” (I think it was called) at her singing school, where all the students of all ages worked together for a weekend, concluding with a mini-concert for parents and friends.

Here are some pictures of things you will never see again on these electronic pages, because to get them out of the house or garage to make room for the Great Rearrangement of 2018 we had to sell them:

This kiddie table at which Molli and Maddie spent hundreds and hundreds of hours drawing and painting and getting crumbs all over…

This recumbent exercise bike that helped me keep my knee together for almost six years…

This Brio baby carriage that both girls spent probably thousands of hours playing with…

Dolly’s swing set and high-chair. . .

And this seat that kept our girls safe for so many miles. . .

And this Nautilus exercise machine that. . .

. . . well, never mind about that, we’ll come back to it later.

Meanwhile, handball had resumed, as you can see in this terrible shot which is so far the only one I have from this season to date:

And the weather was getting more volatile — but, by compensation, also more photogenic.

And I got my overseas ballot for the mid-terms (already completed and mailed in, so no recommendations are being solicited):

History will probably not remember the period of this blog post for Trine’s birthday, or Maddie’s song weekend, or either of the girls’ handball games, or for Mette’s arrival, or Gert’s visit, or my trip to Lithuania, or our big party. . .  no, the period of September to October 2018 will surely be remembered for the one thing that absolutely dominated the news:

…so I’m just gonna leave that there for historical context.

Those of you who are Molli & Maddie blog purists and just want to keep up with the family stuff are now welcome to scroll way down — the next thousand photos (or so) deal exclusively with my weekend Trip to Kaunas, Lithuania.

It was supposed to five of us this year (after my trip with Søren and Mads to Riga last fall, we decided to make it an annual thing), but Søren had to cancel and Bartek canceled at the last minute for the second time in a row, so in the end it was just Mads, David, and myself.

We flew out of Copenhagen midday on a Friday and landed in Kaunas about 80 minutes later.  It was the smallest airport I’d ever seen bar one — the little shack on Tortola we flew into back in the 70s.  That building you see in the background is the whole thing: the entire terminal.

We were just kind of dumped off in the middle of the tarmac and had to walk the couple of hundred yards to the “terminal.”

Instead of a hotel, we’d book a big old apartment in the middle of town.

MEANWHILE, back in Denmark, Trine was attending her workplace “sommerfest,” which involved dressing up as old ladies.

Trine’s rolling her eyes as she reads this (as usual), thinking, “stupid Greg, we’re not just old ladies, we’re. . .”  — and that’s the problem.  They were some kind of category of medical assistants, or nurses, or bureaucratic busybodies, or some other thing that I can’t remember.  For all I know each of them was channeling one particular such woman.  But I don’t recall.

Kaunas is a pretty old city (by which I mean it’s both pretty and old) city full of anachronisms.

Since it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, we stepped into a little pub to have a beer and some snacks.  The snack we chose was the local bar food specialty: fried bread.

We ate a lot of fried bread on this trip — probably as much as Sophie and Molli Malou had of focaccia in Rome — but no one made it better than they did at this first little random pub we’d walked into.  It was practically a sacrament.

The beer didn’t suck, either.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I were told Lithuanian Catholics take beer and fried bread at communion.

We’d also ordered a little pizza to share, and it was the damnedest pizza I’ve ever been served:

It was like a filo dough frisbee stuffed with cheese and meat.  Not bad, but not pizza.  (And yes, it turns out they make sort of regular pizza, too, but apparently this is not an unusual style.)

After this little pub stop we wandered around old town.

(The statue is of Jonas Vileiss, mayor of Kaunas during its interwar period as capital of Lithuania.  We didn’t know that at the time.)

This is, by the way, Town Hall Square in old town.

I was shocked by the disrepair all over the city — which, by the way, is going to be the “Cultural Capital of Europe” in 2022 (a rotating honor that was enjoyed by Denmark’s Aarhus just last year).  Kaunas is not a giant city, with less than 300,000 souls, but there seems to be commerce, business, and tourism enough in the city center that some of that filthy lucre should have been able to splash a little further out than the ten or fifteen square blocks of the vibrant city center.

But no: even the sidestreets downtown offered sad old sagging buildings with crumbling facades.

These next two pictures are part of a compound (shot by holding my iPhone through the grating of its gates) fronting the motorway the runs along one of the rivers.  It’s a spectacular location with a beautiful view.  Think Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.  And yet it looks more like something you’d see on the west side of Chicago.

Searching for whiskey bars in Kaunas before we traveled, I had stumbled across an article entitled “8 Of The Best Places On Earth To Drink Malt Whisky.”  The number two place on the list was a “W 1640” in Kaunas.  I had therefore set my heart on making it one of our first destinations — in the hopes that, if it was indeed the second best place on earth to drink malt whiskey, I would have the opportunity to spend 48 hours there.

It was, in fact, a spectacular place to drink malt whiskey.

We had a lot of very delicious single malts, with guidance from a very knowledgeable bartender who was so, so, so sorry they were out of Caol Ila, but just knew that if I liked Caol Ila, I would also like this new Smokehouse.  Or this old Islay secret called… something.  Or that other one, called something else.  (The memory gets a wee bit fuzzy at this point.)

The whiskey selection wasn’t actually that impressive, but it was a great location.  One of the things that struck me was the construction: it’s like it had started out a stone building, then had sloppy brickwork piled on top of that, then neater brickwork on top of that.  It sounds silly like that, but see for yourself:

…even the tidiest brickwork looked like this:

And yet the building is considerably older than the United States, and still standing!

In any case, here’s a shot of the very unprepossessing frontage so you can all find the joint the next time you’re wandering through Lithuania looking for a wee dram.

Afterward we went to more commercial and touristy pub (that actually seemed to have a bigger assortment of single malts), and although I’m not much of a beer drinker, I know certain family members who are, and to them I absolutely recommend this:

Yeah, I have no idea how to pronounce Varniuku, but over the course of the weekend we all learned to just say, “The beer from the triangular tap.”  Really good stuff!

Meanwhile, back in Denmark, Maddie was drawing at Mormor’s. . .

…and somewhere else, although this appears to be the next day.

Some Lithuanian dishes from our Saturday brunch:

Fried bread is such a thing in Kaunas that you can even buy it (several different varieties of it) at supermarkets.  Cold.  I guess you take it home and pop it in the toaster oven?  I love the stuff, but the idea of cold fried bread is not appealing.  It has to be hot, and oily, and garlicky.

Below is St. Michael the Archangel Church.  It was quite near our apartment.  It now houses a museum for the blind.

It also serves as one bookend of the main drag through town (kind of like a Sears at a mall circa 1980).

The main drag itself is partly very nice, but mostly under construction as they get ready for their closeup in 2022.  I’m sure in 2022 it will be a wonder.

I don’t know why, I love taking shots of people dining through restaurant windows.  (That’s Mads and David — I don’t take shots of strangers this way!)

The weekend before our visit, Kaunas had received a slightly more eminent visitor.

If the gift shop where I saw this weary Jesus had been open, I would have bought it.

I think the artist was either trying to capture how Jesus must have looked listening to James and John go at it, or how he might have looked when constipated.  Or he’s already up in Heaven and the annoying angel behind him is telling him how many likes she got on Facebook.

The picture below has no scale of reference, but those bugs on the ground were only a little shorter than me.

Kaunas is a triangular city, like Pittsburgh, defined by converging rivers (or a diverging river).  Either way: it’s a confluence city.  The town hall area is down toward the end of the triangle, the very last part of which is a small park.

Unfortunately we only reached the end of the triangle at night, and it wasn’t very photogenic.

But Kaunas Castle and the stuff around it were.

And, of course, so were we.

The apartment we were staying in had a coffee table book about Kaunas, and some of its aerial shots were helpful in understanding the city’s layout.  I wish I’d come across these pictures before our last day in the city.

Here’s Town Hall Square: you can how it fills up the last little section of the triangle before the park.

And here’s a shot of the main drag I was talking about, with St. Michael’s in the center.  Our apartment was in a building just out of frame in the lower right.

And here’s a look at the triangle from the pointy end back:

And here’s a shot of some of the best eggs benedict I’ve ever had in my life.

I shared with Mads and David the billion dollar idea Trine and I came up with in Turkey this summer, and they’re ruminating. . .

The flag of my ancestors!

This was at a little open air market.  The vendor didn’t speak English (or Danish, French, or Flemish), so I have no idea why “blown apart flat fish” is so popular.  Or how one would go about eating it.

Our last day in Kaunas we went out to the Holocaust Memorial.  On the cab ride their, I managed to snap this shot of what appeared to be a Christiania house that got really, really lost.

The Holocaust Museum at the Ninth Fort (technically IX Fort if you want to Google it) is a little ways out of town, and the second we crossed the river the poverty increased dramatically.  There were potholes the size of Volkswagens, and the streets were dug up all over, presumably for improvements, but without any traffic cones or warnings.

So here we are, the Kaunas Holocaust Memorial.

I’ll shut up and just leave the images here in the hushed and contemplative silence owed the 50,000 men, women, and children slaughtered and buried here.

And with that it was more or less the end of our day: our flight the next morning required a wake-up at 3:00 in the morning, so our plan was to go to the restaurant across the street, have a big meal with enough to drink that we could fall easily asleep by nine o’clock.

Here’s a shot of the restaurant we decided to dine at just because it billed itself as “Authentic Lithuanian cuisine” and was so close to our apartment that — well, this photo was taken, without zoom, from the front door of our apartment building.

Their front door:

The name of the place:

Now, I will grant that there’s authentic and there’s authentic.  This place — one of a chain of seven, I believe, three of which are in the UK — was clearly in the former.  It was professionally authentic.

The menu was tantalizing.

And the prices were, in case you haven’t noticed, basically nothing.  We over-ordered and we loved every morsel they set before us.  Although their fried bread was covered in so much grated cheese it looked like hairy bread:

Here I am blowing Trine a goodnight kiss:

And from there it was all about the food.

..oh, and the vodka.  Such vodka!

And the pickles!  Unquestionably the best pickles I’ve ever had in my life!

I include this shot to remember the name of the vodka we drank, which was the restaurant’s own brand — Grudu Gerimas.  It was strong, it had a flavor, and it was perfect with all that food.

We three ate like royalty — like fat, hungry royalty — drank like maniacs, enjoyed fantastic service, and our bill…. was about 21 euros per person.

Must.  Revisit.  Kaunas.

Our strategy of knocking ourselves out early by drinking too much was successful, so we made it to the cosmopolitan hub that is Kaunas airport by about five o’clock in the morning.

Our cabbie was a nice kid in his early twenties who loves America and is saving up so he and his Norwegian girlfriend can move there.  He asked if Chicago was a nice town.

No doubt a Lithuanian immigrant will be arriving at the city by the lake in the not-too-distant future.

I’d gone straight to work from the airport Monday morning, and more or less straight to bed once I got home, so come that Tuesday it was time rotate the rooms to be ready for Moster Mette’s arrival.

The following day, I was taking the elevator up from the ground floor after lunch when it suddenly made a horrible lurching sound and stopped cold.

Its power was out, and I was trapped between floors.

I called my colleagues, who helped enormously by coming out onto the stairs and laughing at me and taking pictures.

They finally got the superintendent’s attention and the power came back on in the elevator — but that only freaked me out worse, because this elevator in our five floor building told me it was going to the 22nd floor.

Moral: take the stairs.  Always take the stairs.

And finally, Moster Mette arrived!

(There aren’t any photos for her actual arrival because Morfar picked her up from the airport while I was at work.)

Maddie wasted no time getting her into the game of Diamonds, although I’m not sure what Maddie enjoys more: playing the game, or making “pictures” out of the diamonds and rubies.  This one’s a yin-yang:

As I already mentioned, we’d decided to sell the old Nautilus:

…so I finally had to commit to disassembling it.

As a note to myself in case we don’t sell it: I took photographs of every part, or collection of parts, and packaged the smaller ones in baggies including note cards saying what each piece is used for — including even the step number from the assembly instructions.  And I combined all the photos into a single document stored on our home server.  So even if it just sits in the garage until some distant date when we decide we want to bring it back, putting it back together won’t be as awful as it was the first time.

It sure opened up some space in the big room!

Meanwhile, the demolition of Peter and Lotte’s house next door began.  (It’s a pile of rubble as I write this.)  Tough to make out in the photo below, but the roof was the first thing to go:

We got the digital “proofs” of the girls’ school pictures.  You’ll probably see the final versions in the next post on this blog, but for now here are two I liked but which were not chosen:

(We chose a different shot of Molli because both she and Trine preferred it to the one I liked, and we let Maddie have her picture taken again on the “second chance” date because we all thought it was weird with the ear.  There’s nothing wrong with Maddie’s ear, but neither is it spectacular enough to warrant the emphasis we felt the photographer chose to bestow upon it.)

Regardless: I still think they’re a couple of very nice pictures of some very beautiful girls.

Oh: and fall came along.

And here’s a shot of maybe-pregnant Didi.

We got a week-long reprieve from autumn in the form of an Indian summer that began, happily enough, on the very date of the big party.

We were ready!

It was a great party, enjoyed by all, and I don’t think there’s anything I can say that isn’t obvious from the pictures themselves.  I’m including all of them, even the ones that are redundant, or that aren’t very good, because one thing I’ve learned from looking through old photo albums: it’s the pictures of large family gatherings that always seem to draw the eye, and the memory.

And that’s it!

# # #

One final addendum: the Friday before the party — October 12th — was Motionsdag, or exercise day, in Denmark.  Schools and many workplaces try to make it a day of physical fitness.  At the girls’ school, classes became teams that competed against one another all day at a variety of sports.  Each team had to come up with their own “uniform” — some kind of colored top that would make them recognizable.  Molli was so proud of her team’s Netto bag tops (which had apparently been her idea) that she took the extraordinary step of sending me a copy of this team picture!

And one last bit of news: we have tonight, October 17, approved the contractors’ bids for the new bathroom, so work should be starting shortly!

Oh — and one final, final bit of not-news: we still don’t know whether Didi’s knocked up, but should be finding out definitively next week.