The Longest Night of the Year (And Other Nights)

The stupid camera is still the stupid camera, and the insurance company rejected my claim because I was too honest on my claim form, but fate has kindly intervened in the form of Molli Malou’s Crazy “Aunt” Lisa, who was magnificent enough to mail us her old camera, which is actually very nearly the same model of the shiny new camera that was STOLEN, never lost, in New York.

I say “us,” but Lisa actually mailed the camera across nine time zones to Molli Malou and informed us it was hers and hers alone. We are merely acting as regents until the child is of an age to take full responsibility for the camera.

Lisa also sent a little glass or ceramic mouse to Molli Malou.

We were not appointed regents of the mouse, however, and Molli Malou managed to break it before I’d even finished writing a thank-you to Lisa.

As regents, Trine and I consider it appropriate to give Molli Malou additional training time on the old camera—the camera we all now refer to almost exclusively as “the stupid camera.”

What’s fun about those shots is that I was obviously taking a picture of her taking a picture—so here’s her shot:

And here she is checking it out in-camera.

I brought the new camera into my new office so I could show you all where I work now. This is my desk, one of about twelve against this windowed wall.

My desk is the one on the left. The desk on the right belongs to a guy who’s never there, which is nice because I think our backs would be knocking against each other all the time if he were to actually sit there.

Here’s the view out my window—it doesn’t look like much here, but this is really a nice part of town and even if it wasn’t, it’d still be a hell of a step up from the view down onto the tar-and-gravel courtyard roofing that I enjoyed at Titangade.

This next shot is looking up at our building. (The old Berlingske building, now under construction, is on the right.) My desk is on the third floor (US floor counting; second floor Euro style) of the white building on the left, just to the left of what you can see here. The name of this street is Gammel Mønt. The pedestrian shopping street, Strøget, crosses Gammel Mønt just a few blocks down.

But never mind all that. Here are Molli Malou and Haddie.

We went into the department store Magasin this weekend to take advantage of their huge midsommer sale. The wandering “Cows” art exhibit is in Copenhagen this year, and one of them was grazing on the border of Women’s Lingerie and Cosmetics.

I didn’t put two and two together until I was “developing” the pictures, but since this was the next picture sequentially it’s pretty clear the bull gave Molli Malou some ideas.

Saturday night was Sankt Hans Aften, or midsummer’s eve. (Yeah, yeah, I know: Danes aren’t real sticklers about astronomy.) Molli Malou dolled herself up for the occassion.

As in previous years, it was raining on and off all day. Unlike previous years, we actually close enough to the pyre for me to get this lovely “before” shot of the witch.

(Er.. the make-believe witch, made of wood, not at all real, okay Molli Malou?)

A women’s chorus sang from a tent in front of the castle while we wait for the bonfire.

Ignition…

Blast off…

Molli Malou was not pleased as the witch began to burn. We’d all got so caught up in trying to get her to look forward to the fire that we forgot to tell her that when we kept talking about the witch burning, it was all just make-believe. It took a little effort to talk her down from her disapproval—she is apparently a hardcore witch sympathizer.

As we left the garden in the surreal twilight of 10:30 pm, there was a low mist hanging over the grass. I tried to capture it using different camera settings, and although neither one captures the moment precisely, taken together I think they give a fair representation. As we stood there we tried to imagine the same evening 100 years previously, when it would have been very much the same except the dark figures moving about on the distant paths would have been silhouetted in elegant suits and hooped skirts instead of jeans and pullovers…

We spent Sunday up at Morfar’s house. Horrifying to report, I didn’t take a single shot of Molli Malou with Morfar on this trip, and I apologize for that.

Molli Malou was extremely playful all day—literally all day, since she has decided she no longer needs naps and we’ve decided to honor her decision.

She spent at least an hour entertaining herself, and us, with a box.

She discovered a lot of snails, and in fact that led to dramatic moment later in the afternoon.

The drama was actually captured, start to finish, in a video, but I was recording in high resolution at the time and the video is therefore half a gigabyte in size and therefore cannot be shared without enormous editing beforehand. What happened, succinctly put: Molli Malou found a snail and brought it over to us, setting it on the flagstones just beyond the terrace. She then told us she was going to crush it. We told her not to—were frankly horrified by the innocent glee with which she seemed determined to crush the life out of this poor bewildered snail. I told her she could only kill it if she ate it, because animals that aren’t doing us any harm should only be killed if we’re going to eat them. She didn’t seem to grasp that line of reasoning, and I saw the little wheels in her head turning in dangerous directions, so the next argument was simply that Mor snail and Daddy snail were probably wondering where their little baby snail was, and wouldn’t they be sad if she never came home? That worked. Moments later the snail’s life was spared as Molli Malou ran about the yard looking for its parents, ultimately settling on a croquet wicket and announcing that one end was the snail’s mother, and the other its father.

Why was there a croquet wicket in the yard? Because I thought I could teach Molli Malou how to play croquet. She got off to a promising start.

But after some frustration, she decided to take it to a whole new level.

Yes, there are windows at Gert’s house, but no, none of them were casualties.

We went to an open house up in the area to see an exciting new development. Just out of curiosity. There was whole former military base being converted into a cool little community.

These row houses were brand new, built to fit in with the older buildings that are being renovated.

We looked at the model unit, which I think had a price of about 4.3 million Danish crowns, or about $800,000.

See this big room here?

That’s the dining room front left, the kitchen front right, and the living room beyond. The door to the master bedroom (with master bath that doesn’t even have a tub) is back left. To left of foreground here is a big foyer, off of which is a nice laundry and utility room. To the right of this big room are two smaller bedrooms and another bathroom without a bathtub.

$800,000 and all 128 square meters are yours. (And you really don’t get much in the way of private property, either. And you’re just a ten-minute walk from a ten-minute bus-ride to the train, which will only take twenty-minutes to get you downtown.)

Didn’t mean to get tied up in the absurdity of Danish real estate. I’ll close with a shot of Molli Malou in her Morfar’s shoes.

Thanks again to Lisa for the new camera that makes all this possible!