Here we are in February. It’s Sunday the 11th as I prepare to publish this post.
It’s been a normal winter so far: cold, snowy, lots of head colds and little flus, and the abdication of our queen.
It was therefore a mostly uneventful January for our family, just the way we like it after the usual madness of the last 35-40 days of every year.
Before we get into it (and there’s not much to get into), I got a little help from AI designing our new downtown affiliate.
January had barely gotten started when we got walloped with our first snowstorm of the season. Here’s a shot from the evening of the 3rd:
Here’s how things looked by the 5th:
The temperature refused to rise above freezing, so the heavy snow just lay like a smothering blanket on top of everything.
The next picture is from the 7th, and though it’s probably hard to make out at this size, the hedge along the carport was so weighted down by the snow that it blotted out two of the living room windows.
Couldn’t knock the snow off the boughs because it was a wet snow that the freezing temperatures had frozen solid.
Nice weather for a delicious bowl of French onion soup. . .
On the 8th my copies of Amerika ude af fokus arrived.
These were my “proof” copies. They were full of typos I hadn’t caught. I was so mortified I spent the whole night cleaning it up and updating the text on Amazon, where the book can now be order without any typos in the body text.
In any case, the following week clearly flew right by, because I don’t have a single picture from the 8th until the 14th.
The changing of the monarchs.
For reasons I no longer recall, I was the only one home that Sunday afternoon. So I put the affair on television while I cleaned the living room. Here’s my experience of the event.
I felt especially alone realizing almost all of Denmark had thronged downtown to say goodbye to Margrethe as queen and hello to Frederik as king.
The only relative (we know of) who got anywhere near the whole mess was Mormor, who shared this picture from a downtown rooftop.
Here’s our new king, introduced as such by our prime minister.
I was just taking random pictures, obviously, and didn’t pay much attention as I took them. This next one cracked me up a little when I finally did look through them.
It totally deserves a caption contest.
Anyway, let’s wrap this show up.
I’d heard first from Trine and then from Molli that the waters of Søndersø were unusually high, but it wasn’t until the snows had melted enough for me to get down to the lake that I saw it for myself.
That bench is obviously not normally in the water.
Once it got dark on Coronation Day (or whatever it was called), Tivoli gave the biggest fireworks show in their history. Fireworks never play in still photos, but I felt like I had to include one because it was part of the day.
Maddie had gone into town with some friends to see them: she reported back to us that they were too far away to have a really good view and plus, it was freezing and her toes were numb.
When I got up for work the next day, it was not only freezing but snowing again.
We had a work event that day: a private preview screening of… god, I no longer remember the name of the movie. It was a Danish “Department Q” crime thriller about a serial killer. We were invited to bring guests. We got sandwiches and popcorn. Molli bailed out at the last minute, so Maddie invited Jose along.
Here we are on the subway—the first time Trine or I had ever ridden on the circle line.
The circle line opened years ago—pre-covid, I think—but it just doesn’t go anywhere we do. Or it does, but not in any kind of helpful way. We haven’t avoided the line, we’re not opposed to it in any way, we just never had the need to ride it until that night… and that was only because the S-Tog wasn’t running between Hovedbanegaard and Østerport.
Didi loves the snow, and no longer tries to eat at all.
I’m happy to report that the boys and I gave the Library Bar one more chance, and it seems to have come back to itself.
I forget what that drink is called. It wasn’t good, but their single malt price increases still made me shy away from them. I ended up drinking gin and tonics all night.
A few pics for the permanent record: our 16-year-old television is giving signs it’s going to need to be replaced one of these days. Samsung model LE40A656AIC, apparently. (Yeah, it’s a stupid picture, but this blog is so damn valuable as a permanent record for easy access to all the things.)
We had the one-year inspection of the new kitchen. Our chief complaint was the dishwasher, and although the inspector agreed it was not optimally installed, the company eventually said that was our fault, our decision, and we’re stuck with it. The inspector did manage to make some of the minor adjustments we’d wanted, however, like aligning all the cabinet doors (some which were 1-2 mm off alignment).
Meanwhile, in preparation for the great Fireplace Change of 2024, I took note of the chimney fan specs since we were advised to replace it with a “dimmer” type control So here it is: 6×6 cm.
There was one big noteworthy event in January: Maddie began her new job at Kvickly, one of the grocery stores in Bymidten.
Trine spent week six (Feb 5-10) down in Portugal visiting morfar. That offered me a chance to serve the girls one of their favorite dishes I make: pasta with mussels sauce. It may have been the best batch ever, and we had a very nice dinner (also with Lucas).
I had dropped Trine at the airport not long before I cooked up that dinner; after we ate it, I took Didi out for a walk. The weather was rapidly deteriorating: Trine was getting out of Dodge just in time.
We’d been expecting rain, but it seemed to be coming down as snow. Aggressively.
“Oh yeah,” Trine told me, “they’re saying it’s going to be like 24 hours of rain.”
That’s how it started. (You can see how I carved out the area around the walk in an ultimately futile effort to avoid flooding the garage.)
Only later in the night did it turn to rain. By then Trine was safely down Casa Morfar.
She was sending me pictures like this:
While I spent the entire next day at home bailing out the stoop to the garage, which was indeed flooding. Only a little by the time I woke up, so I was able to fill an 8-10 liter bucked every 15-20 minutes for five or six hours. No, wait, seven.
So there was no real flooding of the garage, but only because I had to work my ass off.
(I didn’t mention that Molli and I been up all night at Herlev hospital because she was having stomach issues—since resolved, she’s fine—but we had been, so I’d already taken the day off from work, I had only thought I could sleep rather than bail all day.)
That’s a freshly-plucked clementine off one of the trees you see on the far side of the pool.
I was of course very happy for Trine, but I have to admit it made me even more miserable for my cold, wet, tired self.
A picture of Morfar checking the mail at the drive to the old house:
Not only did the garage stoop keep filling up with rain and melt-off: we had a recurrence of the living room leak. You may recall we just spent a small fortune getting a completely new roof installed. That’s why these are for the permanent record.
(The roofing company has been made aware of the leak and accept responsibility, so it’ll get fixed eventually on their dime, but still!)
The day after all that, the fireplace contractor showed up to tear our our old fireplace and install the new one.
When I say “tear out,” I guess I mean smash out.
One problem: although the company had come and measured and told us what size fireplace we could get, they told us wrong. The new one we ordered didn’t fit! We’ve worked our way around that and are going to have the chimney built out a little to accommodate the one we ordered, but until then our living room is going to look like this:
Oh. . . and more snow. Started the Friday evening before Trine’s return, and ended up dropping about 6-8 cm on us.
Fortunately it’s been melting away very slowly and steadily, so we’re down to about the last centimeter or two and there’s no sign of any puddles. (Yet. Keep reading.)
I got the next two pictures via text within about five minutes of each other:
Trine dining with Morfar at a French restaurant:
Molli and Lucas dining Hos Mormor.
Trine got home Saturday evening. Now it’s Sunday.
I opened this post by saying how uneventful January was. And mostly it was. But that last week? Blyech.
Next week will hopefully be completely uneventful.
And soon it will be March.
Except they’re forecasting another 20 hours of rain starting later today. . .
As always, I’ll end with my favorite foolishness of the month.
I’d just attended an AI and Law conference and was, like many of the attendees, a little dispirited by the way European regulation was going to crush innovation. To summarize the conference for my colleagues I asked GPT4 to draw me a cartoon of a farmer labeled “EU” preparing to slaughter a chicken labeled AI. Here’s what I got (look closely, don’t skim):
Was that a threat?
