You know how long I’ve been doing this? So long that I remember when I was first trying to share videos I would always include the links to them at the top of the post so that you guys could start downloading them while you read the post and then maybe the download would be done by the time you finished reading.
Here I’ll just drop a video right up top so you can enjoy it right away.
It’s chronologically out of place, but here’s the setup: Maddie studied band at the youth school thing in Farum this year—the same program where she’s been taking writing classes for a couple of years. She came home from practice every week telling us how bad she was at guitar and how awful she was at singing. . . but she kept going. When the big night finally came around, when all the kids in all the classes get to put on a performance or sell their baked goods or read their stories or whatever, Maddie would be performing—but she kept waffling on whether or not she wanted us to come. Only at the very last minute did she grant us “permission” to come watch her.
We did, and man, were we surprised!
Well done, Maddie!
Besides Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World, they also did Come Together, The Wall, and that cute 90s pop hit Kiss Me (Sixpence None the Richer).
They did them all well, but I was most impressed by the Bowie.
I can’t remember the other girl’s name. (It doesn’t matter.)
The last post left off on my actual birthday (the 15th of March, for those of you capable of forgetting such things), and resume on the day on which we celebrated it—which happened to be Saturday the 16th.
To keep things simple and cheap, I chose the usual venue for my birthday dinner.
It would be possible for someone with infinite patience to go through this blog and identify every birthday our family has celebrated with a dinner at Hai Long. One could then make a note of the age being celebrated (Molli’s seventh! Maddie’s fourth! Mor’s 41st! Daddy’s 48th!), then add them all up and arrive at a number. It would be a large number, what with Trine and I having celebrated so many of our birthdays there with the girls while in our 40s and 50s, but what the geek inside me finds fascinating is that it would be whole number, an integer somewhere between 600 and 1000, and I kind of really want to know what that number is.
But, like I said, that’s a job for someone with infinite patience, meaning I’m not qualified.
(Within a year or two I’ll be able to point a private AI agent at this blog and ask it to do that for me. And I will.)
I insisted on getting pictures of my birthday just to be sure I could prove it had happened. Nothing fancy, just some shots of my lovely family, and at least one of them with me.
Maddie’s band presentation, which you’ve already heard about, was the following Thursday (March 21).
The following Sunday, Molli was off on her Easter vacation in Tenerife, where she’d be spending a week at the Piramides resort with her colleague Amanda.
Trivia note: Tenerife is part of Spain, but geographically it’s part of the African continent, so Molli is the first member of our immediate family to set foot on African soil. Counting Turkey as Asia, the girl has hit four continents before the age of 20. Well played, Molli Malou! (I’m coming up on sixty and still stuck on three, while my own little sister is on track to have visited all continents by sixty.)
She sent us a couple of videos, too, including a tour of their lovely room, but they didn’t seem ripe for sharing.
She couldn’t send more pictures because in addition to her still lingering stomach issues, the poor girl got herself a case of sun eczema on day two, and then had her phone stolen. Not the best vacation ever.
Meanwhile, back in Værløse, we were enjoying our new fireplace nightly.
It wasn’t just for the aesthetics: winter just wouldn’t leave us alone. It’s April 23 as I write this, and we’re still getting overnight frosts and daily highs in the single digits Celsius.
It was an early Easter this year. Molli wasn’t returning from Tenerife until that evening, but we managed to have a cozy little low-key Easter lunch anyway.
And within an hour or two of Molli getting home from Tenerife, Lucas came over.
I don’t have technology problems, I’m actually deliberately rotating some pictures as an aesthetic experiment. “It’s about forcing the viewer to engage with commonplace things from alternative perspectives,” said the great artist, “or some shit like that.”
This month, the experiment was mainly directed toward my photographs of the belated spring finally emerging around us.
We’ve had more fires in the month or so since the fireplace got redone than we probably had over the previous 2-3 years. I freaking love the aesthetics of our fireplace now.
I told you winter wouldn’t let go of us. . . here’s a shot of the light dusting of snow we got on April 3.
I also noticed a few stray flakes falling out of the sky Wednesday afternoon—the 25th of April. Yes, this post is taking days for me to grind out, but it’s still just the 27th and I expect to finish it today.
The flora lost all patience and decided to bloom anyway.
The cold did wane briefly one weekend—I think it got up to 12 or 13 Celsius—so on Sunday, April 7, I fired up the grill for the first barbecue of the season.
The date is embossed on the photo because I’m pretty sure the date of our first barbecue of the spring was a trivia question on our annual New Year’s quiz, and I thought I’d make it easy for myself to find the answer next New Year’s Eve. (It’s okay to say that out loud because our answers are already all written down and sealed in an envelope.)
On Monday, April 8th, Maddie set off for a school trip to Ireland. They spent the whole week there, Monday through Friday, with side trips out into the mountains around Glendalough and up into Belfast.
You can tell she was dreading it.
April 8th was notable for us because it was the start of her big adventure, but the eyes of the world were looking elsewhere that day.
(Not my own picture, obviously, since it was a North America thing, but I don’t even remember where I stole ir from.)
Most of the pictures Maddie sent us from Ireland were of food, as though we’d be excited to see that a Chinese Box Lunch looks the same in Dublin or Belfast as it does in Copenhagen. I’ve culled (most of) those photos from this post.
Her fabulous hotel room—so much nicer than the Dublin hotel room I stayed in back in ’97! (That’s not sarcasm. My room was so small I barely fit in it. The shower was so narrow I had to open its door to get my arms over my head to wash my hair.)
Her roommate, and classmate, Laia. Liea? I know it’s not Leia, but it’s so close. . .
Maddie was very impressed by the old charm of the hotel, which she compared to the place we stayed at in Lund, Sweden, on her birthday.
A picture Trine sent me, not from Ireland but from a walk she took around the lake:
And now back to Maddie’s travelogue:
Okay, I’ll let one food pic remain to represent the genre:
(Thanks, Maddie! We were so afraid you were going to starve in Ireland!)
The caption for the next two photos is “What’s going on out there?”
The answer is: I have no idea. But we have spotted foxes trotting through our yard… Didi spotted them one evening and went absolutely insane, barking and rushing at the terrace door while one of the foxes just stared in at us as if daring us to do something. I took that dare and went out to chase it off. Haven’t seen the foxes since, but we’re being very mindful of the cats—who are fat, dumb, old, and slow.
Maddie wanted us to feel the boredom of one of her long bus rides.
This is from the Titanic museum in Belfast:
This is the Titanic museum in Belfast.
On Saturday the 13th Trine and I attended the Liberal Alliance convention at the Tivoli Congress Center. It was our first political party convention in Denmark.
That’s Alex Vanopslagh accepting his re-election as party chairman—not much of a feat, given that he ran unopposed. Whether he actually succeeds in becoming Denmark’s next prime minister, it’s great to have someone articulating so many good ideas so well being so well received by the Danish public. (In polling this week, LA is now the second most popular party behind the Social Democrats, and less than a single percentage point behind even them.)
When we got home I flicked on the television to see whether we’d be visible in any of the coverage of the event. It had been widely covered during the day—some of it live—but by the time we got home there was only one story on all the news channels: Iran’s launch of hundreds of drones and missiles towards Israel.
My phone was all atwitter, too—not literally: I’m not on the X formerly known as Twitter—with news alerts hitting me from the New York Times, the Journal, TV2 News, Berlingske, and Fox:
As we all know now, the impact was minimal—almost all the drones and missiles either malfunctioned or were shot down well before they reached Israel, many of them by American, British, and a even some Arab state militaries. But it was a hell of few hours there, waiting to see what would happen (which is why I include it).
It still didn’t feel very spring like outside, but by April 14th the lawn was demanding attention.
I gave it what it craved.
You can’t tell in that picture, but the well-pruned apple tree was just beginning to bud. (April 27 as I write this, and there’s still not a full blossom: we’ve had a few overnight frosts this week, and that’s surely slowed things down, but they’re saying the weather is finally going to turn this weekend.)
Meanwhile, I got the final, fully-proofed copies of “The Danish Book” (as we call it in this house: actual title translates to “America Out of Focus: The Danes’ View of America”).
Now I just have to figure out how the hell to market it.
For the permanent record: at exactly 6:00 in the morning on April 16th, I finally logged my 10,000th kilometer on my bike—roughly the distance from Copenhagen to Ecuador.
That’s over a four-year period, but without the covid interruptions and the shift to a two-days-a-week-from-home employment schedule it wouldn’t have taken so long. Anyway, it felt like a big milestone—and yes, I’m pretty sure there was a question about that on the annual New Year’s quiz, so let me repeat: April 16, 6:00 am, in Hareskov.
Speaking of bike rides: the weather may not have turned, but the light sure did: this picture was taken at 6:22 one sunny morning (April 18) while riding through the marsh in Emdrup.
Let’s get back to April 16, though. It doesn’t just deserve Permanent Record status as the day I hit the 10k mark on my bike, or even because it was Margrethe’s first birthday in over half a century on which she was not Denmark’s reigning monarch. It’s because it’s the day the iconic Børsen burned down.
Maddie was in town a few days later and got a picture of the remains:
Did I mention that we really love that fireplace?
And also spring.
And now it’s time for my favorite internet stupidities of the month. . .
For reasons not even hinted at above, I think we’ll all be very happy to have the month of April behind us. This blog is a kind of family highlight reel and therefore doesn’t feature the lowlights. Suffice to say we had plenty of them, but life goes on, and by focusing on the highlights instead of the lowlights we all stay sane.
In May, Maddie will finish her primary education, assuming she passes her exams (which we have no doubt she will). While she goes through those exams, Trine, Molli, and I will be heading down to Portugal for a few days to help Morfar celebrate his birthday. Didi turns 10 on the 11th—easy to remember because it’s exactly a week before the only day of the year on which there are birthdays on both sides of the girls’ family tree.
And the weather is turning as I write this: next week’s low temperatures are the same as this past week’s high temperatures.
See you next month!
