September

This blog post is uncharacteristically light on photos of its principle subjects not out of any emerging trend but rather out of circumstances in which the photographer actually had very little time with those subjects.

I wanted to acknowledge that up front to avoid apologizing for it over and over while we make our way through the following ninety-one pictures.

Molli Malou got very interested in the Manga style of drawing and was especially proud of this drawing.

(She has subsequently added coloring and it occupies pride of place on our refrigerator right now.)

Didi is apparently cribbing her sleeping style from Bill the Cat:

The Danish sky is very interesting in autumn; the dramatic changes in weather and lighting make for some interesting skyscapes, and some of them come out all right even on the crappy little iPhone camera.  So you’ll see a lot of sky pictures and I won’t bother annotating all of them.

Didi’s appetite is legendary, but just look at the path she chewed through the forest!

Maddie is getting terribly chic all of a sudden.

…and Molli Malou has trained her to be a masseuse (I think the technical term is “enlightened self-interest…”):

Trine’s birthday was kicked off with breakfast and presents…

…followed up with a spectacular dinner at a great steakhouse…

…after which we decided to cap the night off at Tivoli.  And to save time — and satiate our curiosity — we decided to take the shortcut through the main train station.

On the outside, it looked its usual self.

On the inside most of it looked its usual self, as well, except for the very middle of it.

It was the season of the “refugee crisis,” as it’s being called, and the center of the train station had become a kind of gathering point for the collective generosity of Denmark.  There weren’t many refugees on hand, but there were hundreds of boxes of food and clothing and baby supplies and coats and jackets and scarves and just about everything else you can think of, all of it being sorted carefully by volunteers, most of whom wore yellow safety vests.

After I took the preceding picture, Trine said “that woman has asked that you not take a picture of her.”

My first reaction was, “What woman?”

I had thought I was taking a picture of just the boxes of clothing.  I’m not being cheeky. I truly had not been aware of a human being in anything but the margins of the frame.

But I think it’s only good manners to delete pictures when people ask you to nicely, so I looked at the picture  more closely and noticed the clad figure in the foreground.  I ultimately chose not to delete it since — well, if you can actually definitively tell me whether that’s a man or a woman, a child or an adult, then I bow to your observational powers.

And the irony of someone dressed like that, and in the middle of a public train station, asking not to have their picture taken is worth chronicling as yet another exhibit in defense of the proposition that the human race has lost its mind, or perhaps never had one to lose.

I had thought Trine would enjoy going to Tivoli to have a nice drink or two at one of the fancy places we never get to visit because we’re always with the kids.

Or maybe she’d just enjoy strolling hand-in-hand through the hygge capital of the world and sharing the occasional moonlit smooch with her loving husband.

Or maybe she’d want to take a spin on one of the rides the girls don’t care for.

But no… it was straight to the Pirate Ride!

…And then in line for Odin Express!

And then instead of a nice cocktail in one of the chi-chi joints, it’s beer in a plastic cup at one of the outdoor places.

Is it any wonder ours is such a happy marriage?

…And, so, back to fall.

One of the things I’ve always found so charming about Denmark is, for want of a better word, its essential innocence.  I regularly come across things in the woods that betoken treasure hunts or scavenger hunts either underway or soon to be undertaken — things that wouldn’t even be attempted in most American woods with which I’m familiar since they would be so quickly vandalized or destroyed.

On one September walk in Hareskov with Didi, Trine and I came across a waystation that was obviously part of a scavenger hunt of sorts: the instructions (not pictured, but pinned to the same tree) informed readers that that they should try to remember as many of the posted words as possible and would be called upon to recall them later — and stitch them into a story.

I only realized just now how many of those simple Danish words appear to be English.  They are not.

Mad is food.  Ben is bone (or leg).  Bog is book.  Drab is kill.  Hate is… well, it’s not a Danish word.  So I guess it’s just good old English hate.

Anyway, while we were trying to memorize all the words Didi chewed another chunk of the forest down to scraps.

Back to the meme of: “Daddy, take a picture of the back of my head.”

It was Susanne Hagemeister’s 70th birthday and her sons Joachim and Jakob planned a surprise party.  Here’s everyone waiting Susse’s arrival in Joachim and Bibi’s apartment.

And here’s Maddie practicing her surprise moves.

I actually got a great video of the surprise moment itself, but am still too lazy or confused or whatever to be posting videos here, alas.  So we move away from Susse’s party and advance directly to …

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: Maddie’s surprising drawing on a day I really don’t think she knew was Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Sometimes I just want to kick back and watch football and Didi disagrees with my choice of activities.

I got a surprise business trip to Krakow, Poland, toward the end of the month.  I post the picture of my hotel room not because it’s especially interesting to any of us, but because Molli Malou and Maddie always love to see hotel rooms and consider even the most humble of them to be astonishingly luxurious.  When I shared this picture with them they oohed and aahed at the magnificence of my accommodations.

Behold my Versailles!

The view from the room was actually lovely.

The view in that direction, anyway.  Over to the right — the little cluster of business buildings where I actually spent the majority of my time.  This is actually IBM’s biggest development center in Europe right now, I learned: there are over 300 developers working on many of their flagship products here.  (And by IBM standards, I guess that means at least 1200 managers?)

And for the record: no, it’s not 100% IBM in those buildings — my guess is IBM owns the buildings but only occupies about 50-60% of each building so the mortgage can be paid by the renters (who are all also international business firms).

It was a short and pretty intense business trip so there was only one evening to experience Krakow, which turned out to be much bigger and lovelier city than I’d been prepared for.

For one thing, it had gorgeously picturesque buildings in rough shape, like this one.

And the following picture was taken out of an uber car — I actually signed up for and used Uber for the first time while I was down there, so now I get all my Uber marketing emails in Polish — and though it’s lousy, I thought is was funny because I gather “druk” is Polish for pharmacy/druggist/drugs, but in Danish it means drunkenness.

Generic tourist pictures ahead.

I took the following picture before I realized there were golden arches on the other end of the tunnel.  At first I was disappointed, but on reflection I think they make it a more communicative photograph.  (Hard to make out at this resolution, I know.)

I found the posters and broadsides advertising cheap fares to Auschwitz and Birkenau sort of disturbing, even though if I’d had the time I would have liked to have visited one or both of them.

I’m not a big fan of the selfie genre, but I felt like I needed at least one picture of myself in Krakow just to prove I was there.  (But FFS, Greg, learn to smile!)

“Traditional Polish food!” they assured us.

Mm’kay?

Seriously, I would have been better off with the Asparagus Polska.  (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Nana and Pop-Pop.)

Leaving that “authentic traditional Polish food (that we traditionally do not like and therefore dump off on tourists)” restaurant, we came across this unattended dog who captured my affection for obvious reasons.

So, it was a German IBM guy kind of leading us all around.  The whole rest of the crowd was eastern and central European.  After dinner, the German IBM guy took us to a place called “House of Beer” so we could all enjoy Polish beer.  I said, “I don’t really like beer, but I feel like while I’m in Poland I should be drinking vodka, and my Facebook feed is backing me up on that.”  And all the eastern and central Europeans around me lit up: vodka!  Ja!

Thus begins the end of my one single night in Krakow.

12½ years in Europe, within about 200 miles of Berlin, and this is the closest I’ve ever come to it.  Seriously.  It’s actually the only connecting flight I’ve ever even taken through Berlin!

I love prop planes, so sue me.

Home again!

I’ve spoken before about the mysterious bicycle thief of Værløse — whom I even thought I caught on digital film once.  Well, he’s been striking again.

You probably can’t tell from the photo, but that’s actually leaning up against the hedges across the street from us.  I took the picture because I always take pictures of the stolen bikes in their abandoned positions, in the vague hope that whenever they do catch this jerk, we have plenty of thefts to hang around his neck.

Oddly, however, the day after I took this picture I found the bike on our side of the street, leaning against our hedges.  I was appalled that our neighbor would have attempted to solve his own problem of unwanted stolen property being dumped on his turf by carrying it across the street to dump it on ours, so I carried it straight back.  The next day after that it was gone.  Ha!  I thought.  We sure taught him a lesson!

I mentioned the episode to Molli Malou a day or two later — “Did you see the bicycle thief dropped another bike on our street?” I asked.

“Yes, he did, Daddy!  And he left it right in front of our driveway and I thought it was so rude I carried across the street and leaned it up against their trees.”

So, yeah.  I was the bad neighbor in this case and didn’t even know it.  (It doesn’t change the fact that our neighbor across the street is a jerk.  But in this case, I was the jerk.  At least with me it’s the exception, right?  Right?!)

Sigh.  Life is a Seinfeld episode.

Meanwhile, back in the woods:

On the last weekend in September I got a double treat: the nice thing about it was that it was my first time inside the Danish parliament; the sad thing was that it was to see a panel talk on free speech and that was the only venue “safe enough” in Denmark for it to take place.  (And even then it was not considered safe enough for Lars Hedegaard, who is under lifetime police protection because of a cartoon he drew.  Scroll up for my previous observation about the human race having lost its mind.)

Anyway, look: the famous steps of parliament!

And my friend Søren and I got seats way up front!

And holy shit, it’s Mark Steyn in Denmark!  (That’s Kathrine Winkel-Holm behind him.)

I actually got to talk to Mark Steyn briefly during a break and enjoyed it immensely — he is every bit as fluid and quick and convivial in direct conversation as he is in his writing.  I wrote to him afterward to point out that not only the British state department but also the American one had warned its citizens not to attend, along with other rambling thoughts, and he quoted me on his blog.  He is a hero of mine — I know a lot of you don’t like his politics, and fair enough, but he’s an absolutely brilliant defender of free speech and I admire him immensely for it, so I was very honored to have met him and spoken with him and been quoted by him.

Meanwhile: sky.

But wait!  It’s not my blog, it’s the girls’ blog.

We finally got around to watching the “actual people” version of Cinderella one evening, and the emotions on the girls’ faces as they watched tell the whole story.

…or maybe you had to be there.

In any case, I emptied out my phone of photos and prepped them for this (much delayed) post on about the 28th of September, thinking, “two days left in the month and it’s the middle of a work week; ain’t nothing much gonna happen in the next two days, so I can lock and load September now.”

Man, was I wrong.

And October is off to a crazy and eventful start — but that’s a story for another day!