November

November was better than October, but to quote from my own work, “this is akin to saying a bullet between the eyes is better than a hand grenade up the ass.”

But it wasn’t really as bad as all that…  things were (and still are) getting better slowly but surely.

I don’t know why the first picture of the month is the picture that follows — I don’t remember the context, and the expressions are as unusual as the apparent willingness to let me photograph them together — but this is how November began.

We were working on easing Maddie into a regime of going to school alone.  The idea was that every day for a couple of weeks we’d “drop her off” a little further from her cubby in the 1.b coatroom.   So in a sense this is a picture from everyday life, but only for a little window of time:

(I’m sitting on my bike, ready to race off to the train station, watching Maddie make her independent way around the school to the door of her coatroom.)

Amazingly, from the perspective of mid-December, it can’t be much later than 7:45 here and it’s that light out!  The darkness was actually already encroaching, to the extent that I don’t know if the photo below was taken at 6:45 in the morning or 5:45 in the evening.  (As I write this just a week before Christmas, such darkness might mean 8:30 in the morning or 4:00 in the afternoon…)

We had long ago decided that this would be the year we moved from our variable-rate mortgage to a fixed-rate one — and would use the opportunity to add a little debt to the loan so we could finally convert the former sauna (destroyed by the water damage a couple of years back) into a lovely bathroom for the girls.  So Trine and I spent a Saturday in early November visiting showrooms and showing them the following pictures and saying, “We want this to be a nice bathroom.”  So consider these the “before” shots for what will hopefully be complemented by spectacular “after” shots before April…

(Aside: for setting our parking meter incorrectly by four minutes, we received a 750 kroner fine.  That’s about 115 U.S. dollars.  We challenged the absurd ticket, but of course our challenge was knocked down because “the law is the law” and four minutes could just as well be four hours, and if the “guard” company could make exceptions for anyone, they’d have to make exceptions for everyone, and the law is the law!  And that’s correct!  Right?  Right?!)

Autumn was in full swing, and since Didi was in heat I got to enjoy the splendor of the part of Hareskov forest where dogs must be leashed.  (If the logic is opaque: Didi has to be leashed when she’s in heat, and needs to be kept out of the part of the forest where there are a lot of male dogs running loose.)

And the local bike thief wasn’t letting the seasonal change get in his (her?) way.

Scenes from daily life:

Scenes from daily life when Christmas is drawing nigh:

(“What do you mean ‘be sure to get a picture of Didi?’  What did you do to — oh, Maddie…”):

Picking Maddie up from after-school (FFO) on Fridays is always fun.  On this one particular November Friday, she and BFF Sara had set up “an animal store.”

(See the “dogs only” drawing?  Hold that thought.)

Ah, the rides home with Maddie…

Friday, November 13, 2015, Morfar had just arrived for a very brief stopover visit.  We were up very late watching the news that night.  My initial Facebook reaction was, and remains, a visceral howl: unleash les Gaulois!

Saturday mornings are Maddie’s handball practices.  Sometimes she hasn’t had enough sleep:

…and she’s been well trained to raise her arms in defense against even a sneak attack from below.

The wretched cur:

The silent, brooding thoughtfulness:

Maddie is helping me prepare the Thanksgiving dishes we’ll be bringing up to Steve & Elisabeth’s:

Speaking of Thanksgiving dishes, the apple crisp I made was by far the best ever, so I don’t want to lose the recipe.  It really was fantastic: the Platonic Ideal of apple crisp.  (I cooked it a little longer than usual, moving it to the top rack in the oven for the last 10 minutes or so, to be sure the topping mix got good and crunchy.  Because that’s the trick, right?  We want apple crisp, not apple mush!)

Incidentally, if you’re a detective and you’re testing the validity of my narrative against the date stamps of my photos, you will wonder why I am preparing Thanksgiving dishes about ten days before the actual holiday.  Well, my sleuthy friend, it’s because Thanksgiving isn’t a Danish holiday, obviously, so we’ve gotten into a tradition of having it the Saturday after the official Thursday…  except this year that was too problematic given everyone’s schedules, so we had to take it the weekend before.

Which was, of course, a perfectly normal weekend — meaning we start the day early with Maddie’s handball practice:

And yet manage to make it to Snekkersten by a little after two in the afternoon.  (It’s a 35-40 minute drive, so no biggie.)

It was, as always, a lovely Thanksgiving.  The kids really enjoy one another.

And best of all — especially for Maddie, who had been begging for it — a little light snow began to fall during the meal, so we let the kids go out and play in the snow while we adults prepped the pies and coffee and talked.

… and really, it was a surprising amount of snow for a light dusting…

Enough to build a snowman!

But not enough to distract us from pie!

… Except, of course, I kept getting this increasing urgent messages from Trine (who was home sick, poor thing) telling me I should come home right away because the snow was really coming down.  Her wording and my interpretation of her wording will be a hotly disputed storyline of family mythology for many years, I’m sure.  Because what Trine knew by this point was that northern Sjælland was under assault by a major blizzard.  What I thought I knew at this point was that it was a little snowier in Værløse than in Snekkersten and that I should therefore hit the road a little earlier than originally planned.

Which I did.  At about ten o’clock.

So, thanks for another great Thanksgiving, Steve & Elisabeth!  Everyone’s all smiles!

…Until about fifteen minutes into our drive we encounter this.  (As seen on Facebook!)

I had Molli Malou and Maddie in the car, of course.  Maddie was already asleep, and Molli Malou was upset because it was already so late and she had a handball match Sunday that required her to be at the handball hall and ready to rock at 8:30.  She was worried she wouldn’t get enough sleep.

I reassured her this was just a momentary delay.  And it was — for sixty or seventy moments.  (A truck had jack-knifed across the highway and it took them for ever to clear it.)

It then took us another 90 minutes or so to make the 40 minute trip home.  I have never driven in worse conditions, or more utterly convinced that I was going to find myself stranded somewhere.  With Maddie and Molli!

Eventually we made it home at about 1:30 in the morning.  I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story, but if you’re curious as to why there are so many pictures of the big birch (which still looks demonically possessed to me the way it’s leaning over the house so malevolently in some of the pictures), it’s because it was making sounds no tree should ever make, and Trine and I were convinced it was going to come crashing down onto the house.  So we had the whole family camp out in the living room for the night. Ultimately the birch remained upright, although many of its branches fell, and there were more downed trees and branches in our neighborhood than I have ever seen: more than the ice storm in Port Washington in the mid-seventies, more than in the Blizzard of ’78, just… more.  Too many.

But, like I was saying, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.  Remember this is Denmark.  In November.

Oh!  This next one isn’t a shot Trine took of me finally approaching the house at 1:30, but a shot I took of the car where it finally lost all ability to drive in the snow.  The car was there for about 30 minutes, which is how long it took me to liberate a path to the driveway.

That’s as far as I could get it, and I figured: any port in a storm.  Its ass is still sticking out into the street a little, but who on earth was going to find that inconvenient?  (In our last big blizzard, several years ago, it was three days before they plowed Hybenvej.)

Having been up very late Friday prepping for Thanksgiving, up very early Saturday to get Maddie going for handball, and up (obviously) very late Saturday and into Sunday morning, of course I was happy to be awakened by squeals of girlish delight at 7:30 Sunday — surprised to find myself lying on the living room floor.

The girls were out and in the snow within moments of waking.

The pictures really don’t need much explanation.

Don’t skim over the next one: see if you can find Didi!

(It only took another hour or so of shoveling to get the car into the car port… the snow blower simply couldn’t compete with such heavy snow in such huge amounts.)

Polar bear sighting!

As it turned out, Værløse had been more or less the epicenter of this freak blizzard, although the area affected stretched for many miles around us, from Roskilde up through the northeastern coast.

Still, this was the first (and, god willing, will be the last) time where we saw the words “Live from Værløse” on a news broadcast.

Our campsite: the girls had the couches and we had the floor.  And you know, actually, in retrospect it was kind of fun.

Not everyone in the neighborhood got off so lucky.

Maddie and Astrid!  (They’re in different classes now, so they don’t see as much of each other, but the love is clearly still there!)

Scenes from every day life: door edition.

Commute edition:

Christmas in Bymidten edition:

Molli Malou playing handball edition (and wow, is she good!):

Maddie’s birthday card to Mormor: “Hi MorMor, I am happy that I was able to come and and I wish Didi could have come along I have made this here drawing for you to say Happy Birthday! friendly greetings MADDIE.”

(MVH = med venlig hilsen = standard written signoff, like “yours sincerely” in English.)

Scenes from daily life, weekend afternoon edition:

As seen on Facebook!

And the birthday dinner for the birthday Mormor!

# # #

November already feels like the distant past.  It’s December 19 as I wrap this up — the last Saturday before Christmas — and the girls had their last schoolday of the year yesterday.  They (and Trine) are on vacation for the next two weeks.

I did a birthday post for Maddie on December 1, but her birthday itself and all the subsequent festivities will have to wait until the official December blog to be posted in early January.  Which will also include Christmas and New Year’s Eve, obviously, for neither of which are we yet fully prepared.  So I’m going to post this blog despite feeling that it’s not quite done and get back to hardcore holiday prep!

Merry Christmas to all, and see you in 2016!