This post begins in mid-October and runs through the middle of November. It’s late November as I write this: we’ve already celebrated Mormor’s birthday and Thanksgiving, it’s the first Advent Sunday of Christmas right now but I won’t finish the post tonight.
We’re within a week of Maddie’s 14th birthday, and Christmas is less than a month away.
We’ve had our first snow of the season—although it fell after the photos in the post were pulled off my phone, so you won’t see any of that snow until the next post. It fell just a few days after the daily high temperatures dropped from the middle teens to the middle single digits. We were fortunate to have a very mild October, and a mild start to November, but as I write this the temperature is 6C and dropping, and according to the forecast we’re headed straight into a cold spell. It won’t be this warm again for a while.
We’re not heading into a subzero cold spell, but a right-on-the-edge-of-freezing cold spell. Ordinarily it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. It only matters because we’ve hardly used any heat so far this season, but we’re probably going to have to turn it up a little soon.
But the future is an open book, so let’s get into the now closed book of the very recent past.
It wasn’t a very eventful period, but even so I’m sad there aren’t more pictures of Molli Malou. There’s just one, I think, and it’s one she sent to us from a weekend she spent with friends up at someone’s parents’ summer house. I apologize, dear sweet future Molli Malou, but I can’t take pictures of you when you’re not around!
(No worries, though: my phone’s camera roll already has some shots of you for next month, and there are always plenty of shots of everyone around the holidays.)
Here’s the “preview” picture of the school photo we chose for Maddie this year:
Sorry about the watermarks, you’ll get real picture next month.
This next one’s for the permanent record:
That’s our natural gas usage reading from November 8. It’s from an app I use: you record your utility meters as often as you like, and it charts it all out for you—and projects your expected usage for whatever time period you choose. I’ve been using the app for over a decade, so its projections (which are based on past behavior) are by now pretty accurate. We’ve been watching the annual projections very closely this fall, and what you can see in the graphic above is that this year (the green bar) we were on target to use 3948 cubic meters of gas. The white bar shows last year’s usage, which was 4980 cubic meters. So that’s a huge improvement already, but we’ve got the projection down to about 3840 now.
I hope to God I never give a damn about our heating habits again.
We’re keeping an eye on electricity, too, but not quite as obsessively because Trine very wisely got us signed up on a fixed rate policy a while back.
Also for the permanent record: the cows!
November 12 was pickup day: we drew a really bad number in the lottery and didn’t end up with the Vengeance Cow I’d hoped for, but we did get 73 kilos of fabulous beef from red angus #1901.
We also came into another pork windfall, so right now our freezer has over 100 kilos of beef, pork, and lamb, along with a duck and some shrimp. We may be cold this winter, but we won’t be hungry.
Maddie sent me a sweet picture of the beloved Danish children’s show character Bamse (“Teddy Bear”) from school one day:
“I’m tired of the damn children,” he’s saying as he cuddles what appears to be a machine gun.
Adorable.
Maddie also send me pictures of herself getting a self-made lollipop in Tivoli one afternoon:
Does it look familiar to you? Here, we’ll take a closer look:
Familiar now?
It was to me, but it took me a while to figure out why: after some weird Google searches, I had my answer.
Congratulations if you knew all along it was Oogie-Boogie from the Nightmare Before Christmas.
The first seasonal cold snap came abruptly, while our heat was still off. I started making fires much earlier than I have in the past—actually, I’d guess we’ve already had more fires this November than we had over the whole two previous two years.
Kind of fun to see there was still a bunch of crap in the back yard at this point—it’s all been cleared away now.
We also relocated that poor indoor palm tree down to the basement, where it’s going to die a slow lingering death this winter.
We really enjoyed that fire, as you can tell from the clock.
I mean we really enjoyed it.
Yeah, maybe a little too much.
Fall is also rainy season in Denmark, but this was an uncharacteristically non-rainy rain season—probably inevitable since it was the first rainy season after we finally got a new roof. (The reason we got the new roof, you may recall, is that it had been raining inside the house.)
The usual wet spots in the forest were dramatically low on water:
Even Didi seemed to notice something was off:
I mean, the water was really, really low: I never even knew there was a pipe in this one pond:
And this one permanent puddle looked like it was actually on the brink of drying out entirely.
Now that we’ve rumbled through the opening weeks of November—backward, I think—we seem to be nearing Halloween.
Maddie did herself up as the Corpse Bride this year, and as you’ll see later she did a great job of it, but in preparation she did a lot of experimentation with stage make-up.
Trine’s still taking her morning dips, and back before the darkness consumed the mornings she managed to snap this shot of a white-tailed peeping tom:
And here’s the one shot of Molli, with her friends at the summer house for the weekend.
And Maddie at home, warming herself up by the fire.
One day romping Didi in the forest I noticed her sniffing at something in a big bed of ferns at a pretty good distance from me. I called her to me: she glanced up at me, but remained rooted where she was—and I noticed she was chewing something. There are many nasty things in the forest that give her a bad stomach, so I started dancing around and waving sticks and offering treats, and I managed to get her to abandon whatever she’d been eating and come over to me.
I gave her a bunch of treats then wandered over into the ferns to see what she’d been devouring, terrified I’d find the bloody remains of a squirrel or hare or something.
I found only this:
That was hilarious but not very reassuring. There are some very poisonous mushrooms around these parts, and every fall you read about some whole family falling mortally ill after eating the mushrooms grandma plucked for them out in the woods.
Fortunately I was able to find a site dedicated to the wild mushrooms of Sjælland, where I learned Didi had been eating a very common and perfectly safe and delicious mushroom that I myself could have eaten with pleasure.
This is the part of the program where we carve.
Impressive to me how quickly she did that, and entirely free hand!
Didi was awed.
After a couple of years of pumpkins with disappointing seed yields, we hit the motherlode this year—and I roasted them just right. Best pumpkin seeds ever.
As usual we got our voting cards a week or so before the national election (held on November 1st, but such a mess that a new government probably won’t be formed until January), and it was very strange that Molli got one as well. Baby’s first vote!
I hate my new iPhone so much for its having failed to capture the spectacular leaf colors in the next two shots…
And here we have Maddie as the Corpse Bride in all her glory…
We did the carport up as best we could for Halloween, but things still hadn’t been cleared away from the renovations.
For the permanent record: please god never let there be another election with fourteen fricking parties… debates like this are just useless:
I only included this next picture because of Didi’s eye: for some reason instead of giving her the usual red eye, the flash gave her an even more demonic marbled green eye… (Seriously, zoom in. Creepy!)
One of our old granite countertops is for sale. Anyone want it? No reasonable office refused. (Seriously: it’s been posted on Den Blå Avis for about a month and we’ve only had a single nibble.)
Maddie’s school did some kind of in-person RPG for a whole day, and Maddie was apparently the one who had to draw her team’s various characters or scenes from their.. aw, hell, I don’t know, but I was impressed how many different styles she was able to do.
I stumbled over an article warning that a lot of house fires were being started by old lithium batteries exploding in the dead iphones and ipads people left lying around. We have a whole drawer called the “iPhone Graveyard” full of such fire hazards, so I immediately got them all out for disposal. Astonishing to think what the cumulative value of these devices was when they were all brand new, and how delighted we were to have them, and how utterly useless, valueless, and dangerous they’d become.
(Actually I didn’t get rid of all of them: a couple of the phones were still recent enough that we thought it was a good idea to hold onto them as potential backups in the event that any of us should lose or break their current phone.)
The girls send me their report cards and I don’t even know what they mean.
Seriously, I actually have to ask them: is this good? (In this case, the answer was “meh.” Aces in gym, though!)
And finally, just one more spectacular shot of the riotously colorful forest floor… ruined by the awful camera on my stupid iPhone.
And that’s that.
So we had Halloween, national elections in Denmark and America, some nice fires, and not much else.
I said at the end of the last post that the next one would be dedicated entirely to the house because I assumed everything would finally finally be all done very shortly.
And it is, mostly… by this time tomorrow.
So probably the next post will cover the whole home renovation project from start to finish.
Unless things get hectic in the next couple of weeks, which isn’t unlikely.
It’s Mormor’s birthday as I wrap this up on the evening of November 28th. Maddie’s birthday is just a few days away. And then we’re into the full swing of the holidays.
So no promises… we’ll see how it goes.
No, wait, one promise: much more Molli in the next post! (Sorry, kiddo: be around more!)
