One Down

The first month of the new year is in the books, now, and there’s just time enough to get it chronicled before we fly off for our Fantastiske February Florida Ferie.  (I had to go Danglish to get the maximum alliteration.)

Sunday, January 12th, was an eventful day for us: it was the day of the big puppy reunion, where Didi (and we) would be reunited with three of her puppies.  Maddie had a handball game in Fredensborg that would be ending just moments before the puppy reunion was set to begin Hillerød, and Mette’s birthday party would be starting up at our house in Værløse not long after the puppy reunion was likely to end.  And I was still wracked with food poisoning that had laid me low all weekend to that point.

Given the timeline, we had to take Didi with us to the handball game.  We gave her a little walk before the game, then left her in the car.

I may as well acknowledge up front that I’m still struggling to learn how to use my new camera.  It takes much better pictures than any camera (or phone) I’ve owned in a long, long time — possibly ever — but as a high-performance camera it’s not quite as point-and-shoot as I’m used to.

So a lot of this month’s pictures aren’t very good.  And some are much better than what you’re used to on these electronic pages.  It’s a mixed bag, and it’s going to continue to be a mixed bag until I’ve really mastered the damn thing.  (Hopefully I’ll be able to do that with all my free time in Florida!)

That much said, these pictures from Maddie’s game are some of the best handball pictures I’ve ever managed.  You can actually see Maddie, and although there’s a fair amount of blurriness, and although my experiments with aperture and ISO and shutter speed produced some… suboptimal outcomes, overall I still think they’re a step in the right direction.

Maddie is just great on defense!

And on offense — blam!  I love this shot of her tying the game up in the early goings (I think she scored the first three goals, although it may only have been two of the first three).  This shot did score.

So did this one, later in the game.  (Eventually they lost, but it was a hard-fought game against a solid team and they had nothing to be ashamed of.)

I’ll get shots of Molli in action next chance I get, and hopefully my action shots will get better and better with time.

We got out of Fredensborg sports hall the moment the game ended and rushed off to the puppy reunion in Hillerød.

The puppies present were Otto/Blue, Arthur/Green, and Vega/Crimson.  The pictures are a mix of iPhone and Olympus cameras.  The reunion was held in Arthur’s family’s back yard.  Unfortunately they also keep chickens and a rabbit.  As you’ll see, Didi found the bunny and the chickens much more interesting than her own children.

I don’t have a lot of commentary to offer: we just sort of let them run amok and stood back to enjoy the show.

The next shot I find one of the most interesting, because it actually looks like they’re having a conversation.

“Your new humans treating you guys all right?”

“I’m good.”

“Me too.”

“No complaints here. . .”

“Look, a squirrel!”  ain’t got nothin’ on “Look, a rabbit!”

They were all such beautiful pups!

Not that Didi cared. . .

This next one of Didi reminds me of a favorite old one of Ollie in New York, pining after pigeon that was resting on our window ledge. . .

In a post from our Puppies Galore period I wrote of a photo from August 17: “And it’s now, at the age of about 19 days, that playfulness begins to appear. Their favorite game, their first game, is ‘how much of my sibling’s head can I fit in my mouth?'”

And today I say: La plus ca change…

As Maddie would say, indeed.

Negligent mother!

She wouldn’t even allow herself to be distracted by snacks.

Those beautiful upturned faces, how long ago it seems they were staring up at us like every hour of every day!

…but now we’re like grandparents, and can look on at scenes like this with perfect calm… because we ain’t gotta clean those puppies no more!

That’s it for puppy reunion pictures.

I find it inexplicable that I have no pictures on my phone or the Olympus from Moster Mette’s birthday party that night.  Not a single one.  We had Morfar, Mormor & Jørgen, and of course Moster Mette in the house, and it was a lovely evening, but there’s simply not a single picture to show for it.

Just as a note for the permanent record, it was mid-January when we finally got ourselves out to IKEA to buy a replacement closet for Molli’s room: the right side of her PAX wardrobe had been without a door for months.  (The door was fine, but the hinge holes in the cabinet had become irreparably damaged.)

Having given myself a minor shoulder impingement when last I went down to the shooting range with Mads, it was mid-January before I was ready to give it another shot.  (Heh.)  I’m glad I did: I focused more on having a good stance than on trying to be accurate, and lo! it made all the difference.  I missed very few clay pigeons. . . was even hitting most of the doubles.

The picture doesn’t play as well in this reduced form as it does in full size: it’s just a dumpster full of spent shotgun shells from the range, but the colors are so vibrant and rich I think it’s kind of fun.

…but not as fun as it might have been if it had been taken with the Olympus instead of my stupid phone.

I had a little free time one weekend, and actually allowed myself some time to do nothing but screw around with the Olympus and try to get a grip on its use.  I spent about half an hour taking pictures of nothing but this knot in the apple tree with different settings to try and understand how they all worked together.

…interrupting myself only now and then to take pictures of other things to get a sense of how things worked at different distances.

I’ll get there.

Meanwhile I think these pictures of Didi were taken on a different day altogether, but with a similar mission: just to learn.  The third one is among my favorite Didi pics ever.

And speaking of Didi, one late afternoon  I was working down in the basement when I suddenly heard Didi barking with a weird urgency– not her normal, “THERE’S SOMEONE AT THE DOOR!” bark, nor even her, “SOMEONE IS WALKING BY THE HOUSE!” bark.  And it wasn’t even her creepy, “I’M PRETTY SURE THERE’S SOMETHING GOING ON OUT THERE EVEN THOUGH THERE’S NOT” bark.

It was instead a frightened kind of “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” bark.

And if I were a dog, I would have reacted the same way when I finally rushed into the living room and saw what was agitating her.

You can’t see through that plastic window, but it’s Molli in there.

With me in the room, Didi got brave enough to approach the horrible monster.

…but very nervously.

(Molli said she’d been at a friend’s, had tried on the suit, and the friend had said she could take it home for a day or two.  It’s got a built in air-pump to keep it inflated.)

The weather has been unseasonably warm this winter, so already by the end of January the Aconites were blossoming.

Hear that?  They’re saying… “Spring is not so far away…”

And that’s it for January.

We began February with Jørgen’s 85th birthday party, a brunch at the wonderful Allégade 10.  For this big event I brought the Olympus.  It had only been five years since Jørgen’s 80th birthday party, held at the same place (but a different salon), and I remembered that his brother-in-law Rodney was a photographer and had given us a lot of great advice about DSL cameras — that had apparently only taken us five years to take to heart.  I was hoping he could give me some tips, and indeed he did.  Not enough tips to save most of my pictures from being awful, but enough tips to give me patience and hope for the future.

Trine always lets me use her for practice.

Here’s Jørgen welcoming all of his guests.

I realize now that compression into JPG hurts these pictures a lot; the next two pictures in particular, of Thomas delivering a repeat of the song he’d penned for his father’s 60th birthday, are quite sharp and nice in their original glory.  They’re not bad like this, but the second one in particular is very nice in full form.

These of Vibeke and Jørgen are also much nicer in the original.

The next one is probably better like this than it is in the original: it’s a shame, because I love the shot, the moment is wonderful, but even the original is a blurry mess.

I’m just a horrible, horrible photographer.

Okay, that one’s pretty nice.  But get a load of this pearl:

Rodney’s showing me how it’s done here — or trying to, anyway: his viewfinder went blank just as I took this picture!

I took about fifty pictures of this damn coffee cup using all kinds of different exposures and f-stops and ISO settings, and didn’t get a single picture that was any better than this stupid one using the point-and-shoot auto option.

And that, alas, is that.

# # #

It’s Monday evening, the third of February, as I wrap this up.

Last night the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Niners in Super Bowl LIV.  The lack of a Patriots team in this Super Bowl means that from the year of Molli’s birth, exactly half of all Super Bowls have featured them.  Pretty insane given that she’ll turn 16 in July.  They’ve also participated in exactly half of the Super Bowls since the year of Maddie’s birth.   (From my own birth to their first appearance in a Super Bowl took 21 years.)

The day before that was the first full day of a Europen Union without the UK.

And even as I write this, the 2020 election cycle is finally getting real as Iowans gather at their caucuses (I will not write cauci).

None of this really matters, of course, since the Coronavirus is on its way to kill us all.

A week from now — exactly one week from now — we’ll be bobbing around in the tropical waters off Key Largo, snorkeling at George Pennekamp State Park in what is currently forecast to be a sunny day with temperatures in the upper 20s (celsius).  And just a few hours after that, we’ll have made our way across the Everglades to Calice Court, Estero.

We are all looking forward to it!