I don’t remember the chronology, but based on the way the photos were stored on my phone it looks like Molli Malou managed to get some handball in before 2016 gave way to 2017. And like she allowed me a photo of her beautiful smiling face before one of her games.
Molli and her team are doing very well. She’s such a spirited player — her natural athleticism has been fortified with an incredibly competitive spirit, and that already formidable combination is amped up still further by her almost obsessive love of the game.
As Gronk said of Brady: she really brings the ampage.
I keep trying to get pictures that show all that, and keep failing — although I think I am getting closer:
Here she is fighting her way through a defense:
And here she is (I think) either winding up for a shot on goal or a pretty convincing fake (she’s number three, remember:
We went up to Steve & Elizabeth’s for New Year’s Eve. We made it just in time to settle in and have a glass of wine in hand as the Queen gave her annual address.
We were fortunate in that respect: a huge swath of Denmark, including Værløse, lost their cable service about ten minutes before the Queen’s speech. But in little old Espergærde, a town or two over from Helsingør, cable service was intact.
Steve & Elizabeth let the kids light their sparklers inside the house, which was a rare treat.
Having failed so miserably to get a single picture with humans in it from our Thanksgiving (which had the same cast of characters), I made sure to get some pictures of us on New Year’s Eve.
Maddie and Becca are getting so old!
We had to bring Didi with us, but since Becca and Elizabeth are allergic, she had to sleep in the garage. She handled it just fine.
We had a great brunch New Year’s Day, after which we brought Didi out to the local beach before starting the journey home.
Looking out at the sea, I couldn’t help thinking how a new year was like a new day dawning over the waters: you just don’t know what’s over the horizon.
What’ve you got in store for us, 2017?
Molli took advantage of her last day off to get her ears (re-) pierced… photos courtesy of Mormor, whose gift it was.
From time to time Molli offers handball classes to Maddie.
Maddie and I spent one Sunday afternoon with the crystals kit she’d gotten for Christmas. We followed the instructions meticulously, but after twelve hours not a single crystal had formed in our solution.
Complaining of it to Pop-Pop on Skupe, we were told we had obviously (!) created a super-saturated solution and should just drop a single salt crystal into the solution and see what happened.
That happened! So we dropped another crystal in, and here’s what we had the next morning:
I won the Andersonville Fantasy League this year, and the first thing I did with the prize money was get myself, at long last, an Amazon Kindle. Like every other new device I’ve bought over the past ten years or so, it immediately changed my life. I love it and I’m never gonna let it go.
We had an “innovation day” at work in the middle of January. I ordinarily hate those kinds of things (is it so wrong to think we should be innovating every day?), but at least this time we got to play with Lego for a few hours. I loved showing Maddie the fruits of my labors —
— and my group’s labors —
— and being told in an awed whisper that when she grows up, she wants a job where she gets to play with Lego all day.
But I’m not in any hurry to see her grow up at all. I’m glad she’s still so ungrown-up that she accidentally texts me photos she meant to text to her friends.
For the permanent record, I just wanted to note it’s been a dry, cold, and very foggy January.
She sometimes even sends me selfies deliberately, and I also appreciate those.
Happy, happy Didi!
The reaction to Trump’s inauguration was as balanced in Denmark as I’m sure it was in the States:
(“TRUMP turns the world on its head”)
One of Didi’s old playmates, Sigurd, died last fall, and his owner immediately got a replacement; the puppy Arthur, who has become a great new friend to Didi. One afternoon they played tug of war with one of Didi’s toys for a full five minutes. Didi seems to be going into heat now, so you probably won’t see much of Arthur again until March…
This is how I watch the AFC Championship: in the quiet and darkness, with a fire to keep me company.
Given the result, I have to say it was worth it!
I was due for a trim, so I asked Maddie to help cut my hair. She did, but she insisted on before and after pictures. Here’s the before:
…but there is no after, because eight-year-old girls get bored pretty fast.
Eight-year-old girls also have interesting imaginations:
That’s the first page of “The girl Cecilie and the Killer Clown,” a wild romp of a story that involves stolen houses, a naked policeman, families living in shopping carts, and, of course, a killer clown.
But don’t worry: it all ends with a romantic kiss.
We had to clean our basement fridge one day, and I came across this archeological find>
Cranberry sauce! Yum! But look at the expiration date:
I have to assume that a cranberry sauce that expired in April 2009 was originally purchased for Thanksgiving 2008 — our first in this house (suggesting the cranberry was not any older than that), but our last before Maddie was born. Maddie can now read and write (fluently in two languages), can ride a bike, ice skate, and do cartwheels. The cranberry sauce had made no progress at all.
So we tossed it.
There was also some sweet mustard:
And yeah, there’s a mustard that expired almost three months before Maddie was born.
I’m happy to report there is no longer anything (non-alcoholic) in that fridge that is more than a week old.
I dropped Maddie off at school on the last Friday of the month to find, for the first time ever, that every other kid in the class had a smartphone or tablet with them for their weekly “toy day.”
Lastly, today (Monday the 30th) we finally started the project of replacing every window and door in the house. (That’s the “New Outlook” of this post’s title, in case you were wondering.) I therefore went around this past weekend getting indoor and outdoor pictures of every single window and door.
When it’s all done, I’ll make a before and after slideshow of all the changes, but for now, here is a sampling: the last pictures you’ll ever see of our house how it looks today:
Can’t wait to see how everything looks when it’s all done!
# # #
It was a pretty unextraordinary month full of the usual extraordinary moments. Best of all: in a little over twenty-four hours from right now it’ll be over, and from that point on winter is all downhill.
