It’s time to get back to the chronological narrative: time to move this blog from mid-March right to mid-May so that we’re finally all caught up.
POLICY ANNOUNCEMENT. Readers are herwith advised that the author is as tired of explaining the frequent chronological anomalies within these posts as readers must surely be of reading them. Effective immediately, it is therefore the editorial policy of this blog not to waste anyone’s time explaining or apologizing for chronological anomalies.
We’ll start things off with photos texted to me from the girls.
Atheneskolen had a party, or a dance, or something? (Maddie will remember the details, and this is her and Molli’s album, so it doesn’t always matter that I do.)
On Aunt Deb’s birthday, Maddie got to see Girl in Red at Falkonersalen in Frederiksberg.
Fastelavn was back in in February, so I don’t know why I had a lot of images from Birkerød Gymnasium’s fastelavn festivities on my phone, but Molli surely does.
I don’t know why Maddie sent me this picture of her and her classmates wielding a tortoise. Or turtle. (I never could tell the difference.)
For reasons I no longer recall, Mormor sent us some old pictures of the girls at some kind of art event she apparently took them to at some point in the UNBEARABLY ADORABLE past…
I love a good flashback!
Now here we are on March 7.
We’d been looking forward all winter to spring coming along so we could finally use our new terrace.
A sudden surge in snowfalls in early March seemed like a deliberate taunt.
And yet there were signs of spring’s imminence…
We’ve already seen there was some sort of dance or social at Atheneskolen, but in addition to that Maddie’s Confirmation was not far off, nor were the Confirmations she’d been invited to attend. So Trine and I were getting a lot of texts like these in the middle of the day:
Translation: “LOOK!! 15 bucks!! Last chance department. Would you be able to pay for half or a quarter?“
I wish I’d had a better camera then my crappy iPhone SE to take this picture down at Søndersø while walking Didi one day. The water was really like glass, and the reflection virtually indistinguishable from the reality, but the crappiness of the camera takes away from what was actually a very striking view.
Speaking of striking views: Molli in her studenterhue! (Just a drill, obviously, but a powerful portent of things to come.)
One morning when I was working at home Molli woke up and told me that in the middle of the night she’d had a dream about a brilliant breakfast food that was such genius it would surely make her a millionaire. The vision was so brilliant she actually woke up and feverishly recorded the recipe from her dream… then fell immediately back asleep. When she woke up for real that morning and saw what she’d written, she was obviously a little disappointed:
Ready for the full recipe in English?
“Pig in a blanket” (pølsehorn) with egg and sausage in.
Make dough and let rise
Make scrambled eggs
Put scrambled eggs and sausage in a lump of dough
Put sausage down in the dough together with the eggs
Roll the dough together so you have a “pig in a blanket” with scrambled eggs
Put in the oven
Serve with ketchup
We can all laugh, but at some point just 40-50 years ago, some enterprising McDonald’s employee had a similar dream and it was worth millions. So keep dreaming, Molli!
On April 24 I had another boy’s night out at the Library Bar, which is still my favorite bar in the world.
Making it even better on this occassion: that little trio was doing the American Songbook.
Aunt Deb and Uncle Gene: you will spend an evening at the Library Bar during your visit!
And speaking of visits, the very next day (March 25), Chris and Maria came by with their kids. The way their eldest daughter went running after the cats at one point—and the way they went running to a place where they knew she couldn’t reach them—reminded me of Sophie chasing Ollie and Clara around the apartment in Astoria.
But with the tousled blonde hair and pink tee, that could easily be a picture of Maddie at that age—except we had no cats then.
March 27—so it’s technically spring now—and still we’re being slapped around with sudden snowstorms.
March 28:
The crappy weather meant I was still taking the train to and from work (my rule is that I don’t bike when it’s under 5C at 6:00 in the morning). Because I was still taking the train, however, I was able to see this poster up at the Værløse train station:
Recognize the painting? It’s the very one that Maddie had sent us a shot of while she was apprenticing at the museum—one of just a few paintings that had caught her eye. I take that as an official ratification of her artistic taste. (Although I’m disappointed they cropped the painting so you can’t see the dog.)
None of us made it into Tivoli for opening day, but Mormor send a pic to let us know that she and Jørgen had.
April 1 was a Saturday this year, and both girls were out that evening, so even though it was still just a smidge above freezing outdoors, Trine and I fired up the grill for the first time this year and treated ourselves to some deliciousness.
Q. Why are you posting pictures of steaks on a grill?
A. Because I think one of the questions on this year’s “Year in Preview” quiz—the one we take every January and then open on the following New Year’s Eve—was the date of 2023’s first use of the grill.
However, if the question was 2023’s first outdoor meal, April 1 is definitely not the answer.
For the permanent record, we had our electrician in and out of the basement repeatedly this spring to finish off the wiring for the stove. It required the removal of the old control panel that once managed the pool pumps and heating, the fans, the humidity, and the overhead dimmers. (It apparently also had an outlet for the old landline.)
The wiring behind the panel was a mess, so I thought that before taking the panel to the dump I’d better get a permanent image of it just to remember what electrical elements it was controlling.
(Any electrician looking at those photographs: yeah, great, thanks, that’s a BIG help…)
We’re in the middle of something like a drought as I write this (the date today is 29 May), but the winter had been so wet that Søndersø rose enough to swamp a lot of the recreational areas along its banks.
Incoming photo from Maddie, I think, and I believe this is also from down by the lake.
Maundy Thursday, April 6, Trine and Maddie and I decided very spur of the moment to go to the local cinema to see Dungeons and Dragons.
It was one of the most extraordinary movie-going experiences of my life: we were the only three people in the theatre. I’d never experienced that before, ever. Not even close. I doubt we ever will again.
(Molli was off at the handball tournament in Holstebro.)
The very next day I decided that it was time for the spring trimming in the yard. I spent most of Easter weekend doing exactly that.
I didn’t just get the apple tree, but man, did I ever get it! (Use the roof of the garage as a reference.)
Incoming from the Lees—I assume that’s Hannah’s Easter basket, but I don’t remember the particulars.
Mormor and Jørgen hosted an Easter lunch.
Although it was well under 10C outside, it was sunny enough that we allowed ourselves to sit out on the patio, where we received a vist from a duck. I don’t know why, but I love this photograph:
It looks like a still from a Wes Anderson movie, doesn’t it?
There’s room in the foreground for a title: “Chapter IV. Duck.”
Or something.
Besides the apple tree, I was very proud of having finally leveled the flowering shrubs on the inside of the hedgerow: they, too, had been getting a little unwieldy.
Unfortunately, the little scaffolding set I’d bought last year to prevent killing myself while trimming the high hedges with our hedgetrimmer failed me: while trimming the bushes above I’d been standing on the scaffolding platform when it suddenly began to lean right.
“Uh oh,” I thought.
I took a mincing step or two to the left hoping to balance it, but that didn’t help. I tossed the hedgetrimmer into the hedge to not have its sharp blades as part of the equation as the whole scaffolding slowly collapsed rightward, and next thing I knew I was standing on the platform, on the ground, with the hooks of the leftward ladder pressed into my left foot exactly where the couch had bored a hole in my foot last summer.
No big deal, really: I stepped off the platform with my right foot and was then able to pry the platform up enough the get the jaws clamped around my left open enough to withdraw it.
The side ladders of the scaffolding were undamaged, as were the “security bars” designed to prevent what had just happened from ever happening, but the platform was destroyed: its hooks had been bent beyond repair.
To the dump with you, you murderous bastard!
Speaking of bastards: at that Library Bar night I mentioned earlier, all three guys had been like, “Oh, man, what was that picture of you that was posted on your birthday on Facebook?” I had no idea what they were talking about, but apparently someone (my guess would be Allison or Heather) had posted this old thing:
I’ve always loved that “publicity shot” from Fathomless, which is why it is to this very day framed and in my office.
By April 20 we were just a few days away from Maddie’s Confirmation, so it was finally time to give the lawn its first mow of the year.
It actually got up into the low teens (Celsius) that day, so it wasn’t as awful a job as I’d feared it would be.
It certainly felt like summer to Didi:
The Confirmation itself is covered in its own post, as you know, but as I mentioned in that post there were a few pix Trine had only sent me after I’d uploaded the Confirmation pix to my computer, so here they are now.
Confirmand before the altar:
And Confirmand beside the baptismal font:
The Confirmand made out like a bandit at her Confirmation, and we agreed to match whatever she wanted to spend on a new computer. (She really needed one badly: it’s been years since she had one with a working keyboard.)
She did the research herself, chose the model she wanted, we made a preliminary visit to El Giganten to let her get a sense of its look and feel, and a couple of days later—we insisted she sleep on it at least a couple of nights—we went and bought it.
She seemed pleased.
Another neighborhood house bites the dust:
I include that picture less as a note for the permanent record of our changing neighborhood than I do as a reminder of how the sight influenced me in the weeks ahead: it was a reminder that homes all come down in the end, and what we call the “comforts of home” today are just tomorrow’s piles of scrap. It sounds bleak, but it wasn’t: it was inspiration for a very thorough spring cleaning, which I began in earnest not long after that photo was taken.
We have too much crap. Why not get rid of it now, while we still live here, instead of waiting for the (real or metaphorical) wrecking balls of the future to do our dirty work? Why put up with crap we have no need for or interest in, and never will?
Only yesterday would I learn that those thoughts were entirely consistent with some new school of decluttering called “Swedish Death Cleaning.” Google it and see.
Paper routes are a good introduction to work, but they’re not really jobs.
So here’s a picture of Maddie on April 30, 2023, the date of her first shift on the first real job of her life: as a barista at a café out on the Værløse airfield.
I paid her a visit that afternoon, arriving shortly after some huge swarm of bikers had arrived. The line was about 20 people deep when I got there, so I sat and waited while Maddie and her colleagues worked through them.
No stress at all!
And look who can make a cappucino heart:
Speaking of hearts:
On Wednesday, May 3, Denmark tested a new national warning system. We had been reminded of the forthcoming test for weeks: do not be alarmed when at noon on May 3rd all of your digital devices will issue a siren and a warning message from the government.
Not a single phone in Denmark made a peep at noon… It popped up on my tablet while I was eating lunch (at home), but for the next fifteen minutes my SMS feed was full of messages like “Did your phone do anything?” “No, did yours?” “No one heard anything here,” and so on.
So we not only don’t have a viable military, or any bullets for the military we don’t have: we don’t even have a functioning warning system.
The following weekend—the long weekend of Denmark’s last “Great Prayer Day”—we attended two Confirmations: those of Maddie’s old friends Astrid and Josephine.
Maddie gave a very well received speech at Astrid’s…
She also spoke up at Jose’s (I think? how do I not remember?), but the only photographs I have are of the bagpipers that had been brought in by Jose’s godfather.
That weekend wasn’t particularly lovely weather-wise, but spring was right around the corner, and by May 7 it was getting into the middle teens (C) on a regular basis… and the trees finally burst into life.
For the permanent record: it was May 7 that the water company sent a guy to replace our old meter with a new one, which will eventually be able to be read remotely.
Out with the old:
In with the new:
May 12, 2023, was Molli’s last day of school. I hadn’t caught her on her way out the door that morning, so I’d asked her to be sure and send me a selfie at some point that day so I’d have a “last day of school” picture to go along with her “first day of school” picture from 2011.
I got this.
Which is, I suppose, an interesting juxtaposition to these from her very first day of school (August 2010):
A propos of nothing:
I took a selfie of myself sunning on the terrace on the afternoon of May 12: the weather had finally, finally, finally turned spring-like, and I had been aching for sunshine so long and it had been such a hard week I felt entitled to get out there and soak up some rays and read.
Then while culling the photos to post in this blog I thought: that was the first real good moment of spring, I should record the date and time. So to make my life easier I just scribbled them onto the photo.
I live and die by index cards. Why on earth did I not just make a note of the date and time and leave the damn picture alone?
After just twenty minutes of glorious sunshine, however, I got a phone call from Trine. She was at Jysk, the furniture store. She’d gone to look at patio sets, because after the experience of having the couches out on the new terrace for Maddie’s confirmation we’d agreed that we absolutely needed some nice furniture out there for keeps so that our daily life could be as nice as the Confirmation had been, terrace-wise. She’d found a set that she thought would be right for us and at a really good price but, long story short, it would have to be bought today, right now, and they couldn’t offer delivery.
So much for sunshine. I got dressed, Trine picked me up, we drove back to Farum, and the rest of the afternoon and evening were spent putting the set together.
The only interruption was to get a few pictures of Molli—this is still her “last school day,” even though she’s done with school at this point and is now dressed for the evening’s festivities.
(See the couch behind her, still being assembled?)
I love the next one for the sheer fun factor, and for Didi’s photo bombing it:
Finally, the following afternoon:
Is it not glorious?
(Trick question. Yes, of course it’s glorious. We’ve all been spending much, much, much more time out on the terrace than we ever have in the past.)
I like this next shot, taken over the grill, because it gives a sense of what an enormous addition of living space the terrace now offers: instead of a crowded jumble just big enough for a table surrounded by some chairs, we now have a grilling area, a dining area, and a living area. Roomy and expansive.
Meanwhile: more shifts, more practice, better cappucino hearts:
On May 14 I began the Swedish Death Cleaning (heh) of the garage. These are the before pictures that I look forward to someday being able to juxtapose to some radically different after pix.
It’s already a lot better, but my effort got sidetracked when Molli, Trine, and I were smitten with the worst non-covid virus to hit our house ever.
A lot of the early effort has involved bringing boxes of old documents and books into the house for triage. While sorting through their contents, I came across a lot of fun stuff that’ll probably be popping up in this blog over the course of the year.
First, this December 1981 Marblehead Reporter shot of “one of the Header’s top throwers” (!) Greg Nagan doing the shotput. That’s right, girls, Daddy’s best sport was throwing heavy metal balls. (And yes, I only came in third but I was a sophomore, and this was a varsity meet.)
Very important for the permanent record, since this is something I still sometimes talk about when discussing the importance of article placement and headlines in journalism (from the Salem Evening News):
Mom says she actually got calls from people who scanned the stories without paying too much attention and thought I had been struck in the head by a shot from the gun of the Danvers bank robber. Not sure I buy it—they’d have to be pretty inattentive even as scanners—but that’s her story and there’s no getting her to change it now.
Most of all I love the story as told in this other paper because of the highlighted portion:
I need that for the permanent record because so many people refuse to believe me when I tell them the story of my having been beaned by a shotput at a Conference Championship while wearing a full-length leg cast, because how the hell is someone in a full-length leg cast competing in track?
Who knows. There’s also a photo, somewhere, of my mowing the lawn in that damn cast. Yep. Pop Pop made me mow the lawn even in a cast from my thigh to my ankle.
The last yard project before the virus took me out of commission, and finished up only when the virus finally began to wane: weeding the cherry laurels on the east side of the property and tidying up the white gravel.
Looks sharp, right?
The forest is now in its full verdant majesty.
At one point in April (I think) we were out and Molli sent us the following horrifying video of what she’d walked into when she arrived at home from wherever she’d been. It’s an instant family classic.
And here’s a video of Trine’s song to Maddie being sung at the Confirmation:
And you know what?
We’re all caught up now.
Finally.
Except for my favorite internet memes of the period. It’s a three month period, so I allow myself three.
It was really hard not to be able to share that one with Dad, who blew out at least two sets of speakers with the 1812 Overture.
The next one is also musical:
But my favorite of them all was an Easter meme:
But wait—that’s not all!
Not only are you now caught up on everything from the end of February into late May, and not only did you get not just one, not just two, but three memes of the month: readers who have persevered this far will also get: history meme of the month!
First, I took a screen shot of this news image for the sheer absurdity of it.
But this headline about the event is among my favorites of all time:
Happy spring, everybody… now kindly prepare for a Very Eventful Summer, coming soon right here on the soon-to-be 20-year-old Molli and Maddie blog!
