Spring in the Time of Corona

We start on Didi’s sixth birthday: the 11th of May.

I’d picked up her birthday present — a bone wrapped in fish skin — earlier in the week, and she went berserk for it the moment I brought it in the house. I had to hide it away until the big day, and when I brought it out she was beside herself with anticipation. So I’ll present the birthday presentation sequence without further comment.

Don’t remember if I mentioned it in the last post, but Nagan of Copenhagen was officially incorporated on May 12.  It doesn’t change or signify anything, but it gives me more options in terms of the taxes and income from all my freelancing, which has been getting substantial.  I’ve actually owned NaganOfCopenhagen.com (and .dk) for more than a year, and had been meaning to migrate everything over there from JustMorons, but hadn’t got around to it yet.  So it made choosing a name for the new business kind of a no brainer.

By the middle of May I was really stretching my bike routes out. I had no way of knowing it, but they were winding to a close because once I resumed working in the office I no longer had the necessary extra time. The last big route I discovered was just a 5km extension of my big 23km loop, but it took me through some very picturesque parts of Ganøse and Søsum I’d never seen before. These pictures are just one particular part of that scenery, but they’re all I’ve got: the

One side effect of Corona was an astonishing slow down in postal services: on May 15, I received the birthday cards Nana and Pop-Pop had mailed me about a week before my birthday two months earlier.  I sent this picture to them via text, and it had been so long since they’d sent them they no longer recognized them and had to ask what it was:

Malls had by now opened again in Denmark, and I ventured out to the Bilka up in Hillerød’s Slotsarkaderne mall (Bilka is now apparently the only place in Denmark selling sunflower seeds).  I actually texted Trine these pictures because seeing people in a mall was so surreal.  Look at these pictures, at their stupid banality.  But they were wild to me: I felt a kind of terrified excitement being in a mall with so many people.

I look forward to reaching that place in the future where those pictures make no sense: people at mall?  And?

During this whole period from the middle of May to the middle of June, the overarching project on the domestic front was the back property.  The hedgerow was in place, as I chronicled in the last post, but a lot of work lay ahead of us.  Instead of taking all that work chronologically, mixed up with all the other events of the past month, I think it’ll be more fun to go through that project in one long thread here, before coming back to mid-May and resuming the chronological flow.

So here’s how the yard developed.

The arrival of the stones: two one-ton bags of white stone.  (We’d end up needing to order a third.)

The next set of pics shows the gradual clearing of our side of the hedge in preparation for the stones.

This little section outside the kitchen door was for some reason very irregular, as you can see (you may also notice a missing “row” of bricks above them):

That slowed things down, because it meant we had to find appropriate bricks to “normalize” the weird tetris shape into an actual square.

As you can faintly discern in the photo above, we had by now found our bricks, but my digging and tidying had also revealed a strange bit of moisture in the soil.

Turned out we had a leak from the water line running out from the utility to room to the garage.

It meant a delay, but only partially: it meant I could lay down the fabric and the stones over the rest of the area, but would have to leave room around the area of the leak.

From there, it was just a question of waiting for the plumbing fix.

I have in fact filled the gap now, and can’t explain why I don’t have pictures of that — I will next post, promise — but I do have a picture of the evening terrace ledge in its before and after states (it had become overgrown and need a thicker layer of stone).

Before:

And after:

Now let’s get back to May.  We can cleanse our palate with some shots of Didi, enjoying the woods as they finally exploded fully into life.

May 20 ought to have been Molli’s sidsteskoledag: her last day of classes at Søndersøskolen, the only school she’s attended.  In a non-Corona world, the 9th graders would have worn costumes to school, the younger students would have sung to them, and they’d have carried out water fights (water balloons, water guns) and thrown out caramels to the younger students.  It’s a day that all the students look forward to, and a day that this years ninth graders were deprived of.  So Molli and some friends actually arranged instead to have a nice breakfast together, and then to celebrate after school.  Not quite the same, but nice enough. Trine was able to get some nice pictures of Molli on her “last school day.”

Compare to her first school day, back in August 2010:

And a few more from the batch of recent ones:

In the last post I shared a picture of the nest in our carport and promised to try and get a better one in the next post.  Well, here’s the next post, and I can’t do much better: the bird apparently flew the nest without laying any eggs.

One evening on our way back home from a fancy dinner at McDonalds, I asked if Trine and Maddie wouldn’t mind driving the extra long bike route I’d done on my last big ride, because I was sure it had been close to thirty kilometers but Life360 only gave me credit for twenty-four.  It seemed impossible to me, so I wanted a real odometer to give me a more accurate assessment.  The girls consented, so I drove the route and it turned out to be twenty-eight.  Not the thirty I’d been hoping for, but better than what Life360 had insisted on.  In any case, the length of the ride inspired Trine and Maddie, so the very next day they took a long bike ride of their own, all the way into the city.  (They took the train back.)

They stopped along the way to pick some flowers.  And yes, that whole long stupid paragraph was just to set the stage for these pictures.

Never too many pictures of the girls, never too many pictures of Didi.

By now restaurants had opened again, with some restrictions, and we’d already decided to dine out as often as possible to support our local restaurants as soon as they reopened, so we had a dinner at Mediterraneo on one of the first nights after the great reopening.

…which reminds me: did I ever mention that Trine’s now wearing glasses full time?  I honestly can’t remember.  I can’t even remember whether it was before or after our trip to Florida.  In any case, consider now duly noted (or renoted) for the permanent record.

There are so few pictures of me to begin with, why does one of the only ones from this period have to make me look so unlike myself?

A propos of nothing: the cats in standard “feed us now, human” mode.  They’re like this every morning when I get up at five, and every evening when we come in to start making our own dinner.

A shot few shots for the historical record: in the photo below I’m seated on the DSB train on one of my first commutes back to the office.  Helpful floor decals suggest seating strategies.

And a shot of Scarf Lady talking to the world through a facemask, the fashion accoutrement that wasn’t necessary according to the WHO until it was necessary according to the WHO, which divided America while Denmark’s health authorities warned us all along that masks posed more health risks than health benefits.

Thirdly: my first day back at work, I found the company had added to our desktop office supplies:

Yep.  Still can’t get a decent stapler at my desk, but now I’ve got hand sanitizer and lotion.

Lastly: considering how long it took for a birthday card to reach me from Estero, I thought the record should reflect that Maddie’s birthday gift to Hannah was mailed just a few days after Hannah’s birthday.  Hopefully it will reach Hannah before she moves to Bismarck in August!

A more localized development of the quarantine: the first weekend in March (“back toward the end of normal times,” I guess we’ll say eventually), Trine and I decided that instead of letting Nemlig pick up our recyclable bottles each with with their deliveries, we’d let the girls take turns bringing them back to the stores for refunds.  Keeping the money in the family, as it were.  But of course by the second weekend in March, normal times were over.  There could be no talk of the girls going anywhere near the obviously toxic recycling machines, and although Nemlig kept us in groceries, they stopped retrieving recyclables (for which they’d always taken 20% of the refunds for their troubles, and applied the rest as a credit to our account).  We therefore accumulated recyclables from March through the end of May.  By then we had lost our guest room: it had become our in-house recyclying center.

We take the bad with the good in this blog.

On the 16th of May we were blindsided by sad and terrible news: Susanne Hagemeister, eldest sister of Gert’s second wife Lise Lotte, had died that afternoon.   It still feels unreal to write that.  It’s strange to think we’ll never see her again.  She was a kind and wonderful woman, and she and her sisters really took me under their wings as I tried to find my feet in Denmark, and my place in that whole huge and complicated clan that was, and remains, such an important part of Trine’s life.

Here are the three sisters playing poker with us up at the Hagemeister summerhouse back in 2006.  From left to right, it’s Lise, Anne, and Susse.

Her funeral was held on the 29th of May.  It was strange to attend a funeral in the age of Corona: the hugs that are such a natural expression of sympathy had to be approached carefully, as many of the older mourners preferred to maintain distance.  There was a kind of dance when approaching people: there was always an unspoken “…shall we?” accompanied by physical gestures indicating each party’s receptivity to an embrace.

It was the first funeral the girls had ever been to. 

The wake was held at Jacob’s, out in the backyard to allow for social distancing.  It obviously wasn’t a big day for photos, but I rarely see the girls sitting together and talking at social gatherings, so I couldn’t help taking a couple of pictures of them doing so.

The explosion of the rhodies into their usual purple splendor brought some color and comfort into an otherwise bleak time.

The pictures above are unimportant, but if you were wondering what happened to all the berry bushes we’d had out behind the house, there’s your answer: Trine dug them up and potted them, and we’re hoping to be able to replant them later this summer.  (As of this writing on the first full day of astronomical summer, they appear to be surviving just fine.)

The annual Kammer family Pinse picnic was canceled out of respect for the rules on public gatherings, which were still supposed to be restricted to a maximum of ten persons (although a few days after the picnic was to have been held, a gathering of fifteen thousand would be allowed downtown).  So instead of the usual picnic in Frederiksberg Garden, we had an afternoon with Vibeke, Jørgen, and Mette.  We began with a delicious lunch, followed by a little tennis (and some juggling lessons), and finally a walk to see Mette’s new apartment on Aksel Møllers Have, about a hundred meters from our old place on Holger Danskes Vej.

I had the Olympus with me and tried to get some nice pictures.

I didn’t realize at the time that our youngest daughter is now almost as tall as Jørgen!

I’m now able to get sharp, clear photos at speeds that freeze tennis balls in mid-flight.

Hard to make out in this condensed format, but the girls were very happing sitting on the sill of Mette’s big picture window.

We heard a lot of, “why can’t we live in Frederiksberg?” as the girls made themselves right at home.

And coming out of months of quarantine, it was a real joy to see people out enjoying life again.

And of course, it was a joy being out and about again.

I pointed out this statue in Aksel Møllers Have to Molli, and told her how when she was still just forming her first sentences she would often point to it on our walks and say “dit det?” which was her toddler Danglish way of asking “what’s that?” — and how this was the only thing for which I was never able to provide an actual answer.

And still can’t.

We let Didi frolick a few minutes in a fenced off dog park that was maybe five yards to a side.

We pointed out a rope jungle gym that had been one of Molli’s favorite back when she was three or four, and the girls went rushing onto it.

Back at the pool on Lyøvej — it’s a dumb picture, but it’s all three generations.  It’s also six shades of blonde.

It wasn’t St. Patrick’s Day, so there was definitely something wrong with the water in the pool.

Some of those pictures were taken with my phone, and I actually looked them over before we drove north.  When I took my phone out of my pocket back in Værløse, it no longer worked.  I tried everything, but in the end the best I could do was plug it into my computer, make a backup, and hand the phone over to our IT department at work the next day I was in.  They gave me new phone, an iPhone 11, and it had some new photo features I experimented with a few evenings later when we made a trip to McDonalds for dinner.

(On average we eat at McDonalds at most once a year as a family, but we’ve been there three or four times since April, including the visit mentioned in the previous post.) 

Maddie was a pretty good sport about my photo experiments; Molli was less cooperative.

Since I chronicled so much of the rest of the yard, I thought I should include some of the usual “how our yard looks this year” shots.

(Yes, I know we need to deal with the shredded paint on the eave trim.)

I love this picture of Didi at peace with one of her toys.

We’ve been having a mostly pleasant spring, weather wise, but we’ve also been very busy: Trine and I forced ourselves one early June evening to take a time-out on the terrace.  We sipped a scotch while Didi kept us company, and I took a couple of “depth of field experiment” shots that I like the looks of.  Every evening should end so nicely!

On June 10 I bought an electric bike: a Bavura Harlem E-Go.  I’ve been riding it to and from work every day since, and will be doing so from now on.

(The battery is not shown in that pic: it mounts on the lower frame bar.)

On my first trip into the office, I had some navigational difficulties:

That only shows the segment from where I stopped to check my phone for directions. Værløse’s about 15-20 km to the northwest of that spot, and it had taken me about 45 minutes to get there.  As you can see, whatever “directions” I got out of my phone, I clearly didn’t make the best use of them.

I spent a fair amount of that day at work studying Google Maps and found the right route on the way home and have been sticking to it ever since.  As you can see, it would be hard to find a more direct route.  (The weird little juke at the end–the drop south and then back up north–is because the office is out on a finger of land sticking up into the harbor.)

The 22½ km (15 mile) trip takes about an hour: my average speed is around 26 kph, but the stoplights in the city slow me down considerably.  It’s a great way to get two hours of exercise per day without losing a lot of time: the old bike-train-bike commute took around 50-55 minutes, so I’m only giving up 5-10 minutes per commute to gain a full hour of exercise.

The electric motor is really more of a booster than an engine.  You go farther and faster than you would with the same effort on an ordinary bicycle, but you’re still pedaling all the way.  The best thing about it is how it flattens the country: hills don’t feel much different than flat terrain.  Anyway, I’ve already racked up two hundred miles and I’m loving every minute of it.

Ah: and for the permanent record: the traveling circus announces that its coming to town as a “circus with social distancing,” which poster will hopefully elicit only curiousity and laughter in the future…

And my favorite virus-related meme of the month:

There are so many pictures of our world today that would have been baffling or terrifying just a few months ago.  But we’re nearly halfway through 2020 now, so here’s hoping it all gets better from here!

Speaking of which, watching the Spacex launch and seeing the first commercial flight to bring astronauts to the International Space Station was a wonderful moment.  More moments like that in 2020, please, or I’m really going to have to speak to a manager.

And just to end the photographic record on a happy note, in moving my phone contents from the old phone to the new one, my “screen lock” pictures found their way into my camera roll.

First this picture from a happy time (I can’t remember if it’s France or Cape Cod):

And this one from Les Baux De Provence, which remains one of my favorite family pics of all time.

That’s a wrap.  It’s June 21 today.

Molli had her actual last day of school (as distinct from what ought to have been her sidsteskoledag) on June 19th.  We’ll be attending her “dimission,” or folkeskole graduation, on the 24th.  That’s the day after Sankt Hans.  And in just two weeks she’s turning sweet sixteen on the very day our summer vacation begins.

Maddie still has two more weeks of school.

As mentioned before, our vacation in Rhodes had to be canceled, so along with most of western civilization we’ll be taking a staycation this year.  We’re thinking of parlaying the money we’d set aside for the trip not taken into next year’s summer vacation and doing a big western states road trip.  (Assuming, of course, we’re able to take our now hopefully annual February trip to Estero.)  We really want the girls to see of more America, and the number of family vacations ahead of us is dwindling with alarming speed.

But that’s next year, and these days planning anything that far in advance seems like an exercise in futility.

And once again, I conclude by hoping that the next post comes from something closer to normal.