Quarantine Continued

Here’s how I wrapped up the last post:

Meanwhile, I look forward to someday browsing through this whole blog, from the day of Molli’s birth up until whenever, and feeling myself clench up when I notice the next post is from March of 2020. I look forward to it because I just know I’ll be thinking to myself, “maybe I’ll just scroll ahead on down to May… because man, once we got over the hard part, 2020 was one of the best years ever!”

Well, my hearties, if you have indeed scrolled ahead on down to May, maybe you should give June or July a shot, because although things are improving rapidly, we’re still not out of the hard part.

Things have been opening up gradually in Denmark.  It’s the tenth of May as I begin to write this, a Sunday evening, and tomorrow many stores and malls and restaurants and cafés will be opening their doors for the first time since March 13.  Søndersøskolen will open its doors to 6th through 9th graders a week from Monday — just two days before what ought to have been Molli’s long awaited sidste skoledag (last schoolday).  There’s still no official word on how (or whether) that will be handled: we have four kilos of caramels standing by for her to throw out on that day, minus the handful we agreed she could treat herself to this evening.

In March, as I chronicled in the last post, I made the decision to start taking my exercise from my new bike, and I tossed the elliptical.  (Metaphorically, anyway: it’s still sitting in our carport.)  I also observed in that post that the space in our bedroom freed up by the removal of that big machine cried out for an optimization of our interior design.

Trine and I therefore spent a weekend on that project.  We began with the green room that was once our bedroom, then an exercise room, then our bedroom again, then Mette’s room, and finally just a big storage room full of stuff leftover from all its previous incarnations plus additional crap we heaped in there for want of anywhere else to put it.  We cleared it out and converted it into a sort of den.

It’s nice to have an extra room where people can sit and read, or play the keyboard, or just lie in relative quiet.  And having that bed in there means it’s also an extra guest room.

The couch and the sofa table had formerly been in the big room, so getting them out of there meant that the non-bedroom half of the big room could accommodate some of the furniture we’d stashed in the green room without becoming too cluttered.

And the commitment to making the green room a den and the big room our permanent bedroom meant I could finally take the headboard and lamps off the wall in there and move them into our bedroom, giving it more of a settled feel.

Meanwhile, the guest room has been stripped of a lot of the storage bins we’d pile up in there, but it’s also become the holding space for the returnable plastic bottles we’ve been accumulating.  It isn’t pretty, but it represents a kind of savings account for the girls: in normal circumstances, they’re allowed to take those bottles to the grocery stores in exchange for the cash paid out on the returns.  It’s a nice income supplement for them.

I’ve made a lot of progress with the Olympus during the quarantine.  There’s be ample evidence of that ahead, but these silly pictures of Didi represent some of my baby steps of coming to terms with indoor photography.

Another thing I mentioned at the end of the last post was our online grocery delivery service’s promise to start offering next-day delivery slots to loyal customers like us.  Since we’d been forced to order groceries seven to eight days ahead of time for several weeks, this was a godsend the significance of which will hopefully be difficult to understand for the rest of my life.  (It already seems kind of surreal in retrospect.)  The first morning the service was available, I was ready to pounce:

It wasn’t flawless, and the system was clearly being stressed by all the loyal customers trying to get in, but with patience and persistence I did at last manage to get next-day delivery scheduled.  Things have only gotten better since then, and we’re now even able to order same-day delivery again.

I’m happy to say that most of the “just in case” food I had slowly and steadily stockpiled through January and February, and even into March, still remains on hand: we only really had to dip into it a couple of times in the crazy first days of the lockdown, but for that alone it was worth it.  My plan now is to keep that surplus on hand at all times, periodically using and refreshing the canned and dry goods.

As my biking took me further and further afield of familiar territory, I was startled by just how rural our area is.

It was also fun to get up close to the old airport tower for Værløse airstrip:

Also to finally cycle by the distant lights that were clearly in place to guide planes onto the airstrip, out in the middle of nowhere (at first I thought the big bank of lights in the second photo was a very old and abandoned billboard; I didn’t even notice the row of lights on the other side of the road, in the first photo, until the second or third time I rode this route).

We were getting some nice weather as the long Easter weekend approached.

…but I think these pictures were less about the nice weather and more about the season’s first mowing of the lawn.

In addition to the improving weather, our spirits were improved by the prime minister’s announcement that things were going well and that we could begin opening things up a little more after Easter if they continued going well.

By coincidence, I found myself taking some online photography-for-idiots courses the very day that Trine decked the house out in its Easter glory.

(I’m glad that in its shrunken form you can’t tell just how filthy the window is in the photograph above.  We really need to wash our windows!)

And here’s Greg playing around with depth of field:

…and here’s Greg just taking pictures at different settings in different lighting at different times of day to try and come to terms with how ISO, shutter-speed, and aperture work.

The green room – big room shuffle was an interior project we’d been meaning to get around to for at least half a year: there were also outdoor projects we’d been deferring even longer.

For example: the hedges on the south side of the driveway had eaten away a full meter of the driveway.  Enough with that.

Also, the collar of flowers around the base of the hedge by the terrace had been slowly devouring more and more of the brickwork.  Trine made short work of that.

(We still need to trim the hell out of that little hedge itself, but we decided to wait until summer’s end to do that, since we don’t want it all chopped up and ugly all summer.)

It was around this time that I finally discovered how to get the Olympus settings right for fast action shots — good for pets and kids in motion!

And I was starting to be able to get the lighting just right on indoor shots.  This is now my new favorite shot of Didi:

I also like the shot below because it’s such an accurate representation of daily life with Didi, how she comes meandering over for love and affection from whoever’s on the couch and will not leave until she has received adequate love and affection.

Also I played around with the black-and-white option.

…and struggled mightily with how to get a decent picture of a very black cat.

So here we are on Easter Sunday — April 12th.  No Easter Egg hunts this year (the girls seemed to understand that the Bunny was in lockdown, too, although it was an acknowledgment they made with a roll of the eyes I found mystifying), but we had a nice traditional Easter lunch just the same.

I wish I could remember what was going on in the next few pictures: I cannot.

One nice thing about better weather and Molli being out of isolation was that intramural handball could be resumed.  I took a lot of pictures of what was nothing more than twenty minutes of the girls shooting against each other, but as you can see I finally, finally solved the action-versus-lighting problem that had been my bete noire:

Molli’s nowhere near as bad a goalie as she appears to be in the following pictures — and in fact what look like laughably bad attempts to block a goal actually looked, in real time, like very close calls.

Seriously, she almost had this one…

Also this one:

And this one’s my favorite:

Similarly, you can’t really tell just how hard Maddie is throwing her shots when she and the ball are frozen in time and space like this, but she has a rocket arm.

And is also a better goalie than the pictures might have you believe.

Most of the time.

On second Easter day we drove down to visit Mormor and Jørgen.  It was the first time we’d seen them since the lockdown.

Jørgen stayed home while the rest of us (including Didi) set off for a walk through Frederiksberg Garden.

I almost discarded the picture above, since it’s a pretty stupid picture, except I realized something: the gate you see us passing through there is the back entrance to the apartment complex property.  It requires a key: the same key used for the parking garage and the doors to the various entrances of the complex.

I got that key when we moved into the joint back in March 2003.  I have had it ever since.  That is now more than seventeen years: the longest I have had any (useful) key in my entire life.

That seem to merit inclusion on this, the permanent record of all the things.

I wonder how we’ll judge ourselves on this whole episode in the future:

“No more running in Frederiksberg Garden,” the sign says.  And it recommends another nearby park for joggers and runners.  This, and other measures like it, strikes me as superstitious silliness.  I could be wrong, but I’m guessing the number of people worldwide who’ve been infected by a passing runner is in the very low single digits, if in fact it’s above zero.

I could be wrong, but so could people taking the opposite point of view.  Time will tell. I still believe that when all of this is behind us — and that day will indeed come — the most important and the most difficult thing we’re all going to have to do is forgive ourselves and each other for everything we got wrong.

I’m going to shut up for a while now, because a walk through the park doesn’t really require a lot of commentary: I was just trying to take lovely pictures of our lovely family on this lovely excursion.

Same lighting, same distance, different ISO settings in the next two shots:

This is the part of the park that abuts the zoo (as the elephants may have already suggested to the perceptive viewer).  And the stretch of path that runs alongside the wolves elicited an intense reaction from Didi.

She couldn’t see them, or hear them, but man could she smell them!

Still need to work on getting the camera to focus on the appropriate subject: the person, not the shrubbery!

I don’t think the bench in the foregoing pictures was designed for social distancing, but it worked out pretty well for that.

This goose was very friendly.  I took a lot of pictures of her, but all I was thinking was: another time, another place, and you could my first self-bagged Christmas dinner…

Very annoying to need a public bathroom these days.

Meanwhile, coverage of the virus, the attendant lockdowns, and the slow-motion economic collapse of western civilization evinced the serious media coverage we’ve all come to expect.

The Tuesday after the long Easter weekend, Maddie returned to school.  Classes only ran from 820 to 1220, but it was a wonderful first step back toward normality for us.  (Maddie really was excited, even if it doesn’t play in the picture.)

Meanwhile, work was about to begin on one of the bigger outdoor projects.  We had agreed with the neighbors to split the cost on tearing up all the lousy hedges and trees and bushes and weeds between our properties and replace them with some nice cherry laurels.

Here are some before pictures of the mess between our properties.

And here are the after pictures:

The laurels are nice, but they’re going to take some time to grow in, and they’re drinking so much water every evening that our cleverly automated water meter monitor keeps trying to help us out by turning off all our water.  (Fortunately Trine can override that with an app on her phone, but it took a while to figure that out the first time it happened.)

And Trine tidied up the clematis.

A little blackbird has chosen to nest in our carport.  She’s still out there as I write this.  The nest is up on the top of one of the walls, just inside one of the narrow little windows between our living room and the carport.  (We didn’t even notice until Didi and the cats’ sudden habit of planting in the living room and staring up at that little window aroused our curiosity.)  This is the best shot of the nest I’ve been able to get, but I’ll keep trying and maybe there’ll be something better in a future post.  (For example, a picture of the nest with someone in it.)

Didi’s always loved trying to drink water from the hose, and with my newfound ability to take action photos I was able to get some fun shots.

And my favorite ugly picture of Didi ever:

Trine came across a bunch of old handball pictures — or pictures of her old handball crowd, in any case.  I recognize Trine as the blonde, third from the right, in the picture directly below, but although I have some guesses as to the identities of some of the people in some of the other shots, I’d rather not beclown myself by guessing at them.  I therefore present them without any captions (thought they deserved a place here in the permanent record).

One evening last week we finally got word from the prime minister that restaurants, cafés, retail shops, and malls could open (under some restrictions) on Monday the 11th, and that older kids could return to school (sort of) on Monday the 18th.

That set us up nicely for our long weekend (“Great Prayer Day” was Friday the 8th).  We took advantage of the long weekend to take a trip up to Gilleleje just to finally get out of Værløse as a family for the first time since out early April trip to Frederiksberg.

Kattegat still looked itself.

There were a couple of vintage American cars parked in the middle of the harbor parking area.  No idea why, but it was fun to see.  This big pink Buick was my personal favorite.

Our plans for a harborside fish lunch al fresco were thwarted by the weather: it was cloudier and cooler than it was supposed to have been, with a biting wind coming in off the water.  Without an option for indoor dining, we decided to forego our seafood lunch and just swing by a McDonalds on the way home.

Thus did Week 8 of the lockdown become the first week in at least 17 years that I ate at a McDonalds twice in one week.

(Title: “You are not going to make me eat fish outdoors in this weather.”)

Eating outdoors in Gilleleje would have been a challenge even had the weather been better: for reasons I can’t begin to imagine they had even taped off the public picnic tables.

So we piled back in the car, stopped in Hillerød for some Tasty Cheese menus at McDonalds, and the weather immediately began to improve — to the extent that Maddie and Trine even managed to get down to Sønderø for a quick dip in the still very cold waters.

So that’s it: house and yard projects, an Easter lunch, a trip to Frederiksberg Garden, a trip to Gilleleje, and some fun pictures of Didi.  That’s what we’ve got show for the past two months.

# # #

One thing we did during this period is buy ourselves a quarter of a cow.  There’s a public field not far from us, down around the western shore of Søndersø, and the kommune allows some farmer to set a bunch of cows down there each spring to tend the pasture naturally.  If you join the club (for a nominal fee), you’re then permitted to buy yourself a share of a cow.  There’s a rotation for going down and checking on them, and being sure the electric fence is turned on, and picking up any stray litter, but it’s very minimal work — and then come fall the cows are butchered and divvied up.  We’ll probably be getting about 70 kilos of beef (you pay by the kilo, but it’s a very reasonable price).

The girls don’t want to look at the cows because they don’t like the idea of eating anything they’ve been introduced to socially.  But I asked Trine how the cows looked on the day of their arrival, and her answer was a bright and chipper, “Tasty!”

# # #

There’s really not much more to say.  I feel like there ought to be more: I feel like future me is going to come back to this period and want to know so much more.  I want to assure future me that things were much less interesting than I probably remember them in hindsight.  I’m not leaving out anything significant.  Our weeks were different than the usual routine, but they still had a routine of their own, and we were still always grateful when Fridays rolled around.

People can get used to anything: that’s the horror and the comedy of it right there.

Surely things will be even better in the next post!