Summer 2022

This is a long post.

It could have been insanely long, but I cut things down as much as I could and have managed to keep it under 300 pictures.

A lot has happened since the end of June, as I foretold you it would.

It’s the middle of August as I begin to write this, and we’ve all started our second full week of work or school. The house has been torn to smithereens, as you shall see, and is crawling with contractors from about 8 every morning until the evening hours. Also I’m in the middle of the fourth gout episode of my life, so I’m unable to go into the office for the time being. Yes, it’s nice that I can work from home, but it’s not easy with all the commotion. Power tools being run all over the house and property, guys stomping around overhead on the roof, a guy literally jackhammering down in the basement below… but I love a challenge.

This post is not going to be chronological in the usual way: it’s organized by theme. The pictures are arranged chronologically within each theme, but the themes are not in chronological order. (If you must know, they’re in the order of the folder names I gave each theme.)

There are eight themes. I won’t waste time saying what they are: let’s get going.

The House

I explained it all in the last post, but just in case: we’re getting new rooves on the house and garage, include the replacement of all existing skylights and the addition of two new ones in the house. We’re having the front of house floors sanded down and refinished. The front of house walls are being stripped of their textury stuff and painted. We’re getting an entirely new kitchen with entirely new appliances (except the dishwasher). We’re having the pool shut down and filled and the entire basement refloored, extending the floor heat to the area over what is now the pool. And we’re having the terrace expanded, and getting a new and much nicer retractable awning with built in space heaters.

It’s all going to be very nice, which is all that’s keeping us sane right now because daily life in this interim period is a disaster.

You may recall that we had the roofing material out in the yard all spring…

At some point in early July our new refrigerators and freezer arrived. The only place to store them safely until the kitchen is ready was the garage.

Of course, that ate up the last little bit of available space in the garage (which in our case is just a storage space for things that aren’t cars), meaning we couldn’t store anything else in there.

Problem was, we had a lot of stuff we needed to store. Case in point: every goddam thing in the basement.

In the weeks leading up to vacation, we spent a lot of time boxing it all up, with no idea of where we’d put all those boxes.

One “project” that wasn’t on our upgrade list was repairing the lights in the old master bath vanity. One of the bulbs is actually working in the picture below, but most often none of the lights worked. The wiring was a disaster. I actually took the picture below to present to the girls and ask them if they thought this was an appropriate way to leave a bathroom, but I’m glad to have it, because those damn lights are something that one of the electricians dealt with pretty quickly and cheaply and it’s amazing what a difference working bathroom lights can make in your life.

The next two pictures are of counters we’re going to try to sell. We have no further use for them, but they’re very nice.

Some time has gone by: let’s check back in on the basement:

Trine and I were working so hard around the clock to get the house prepped as much as possible before vacation that Mormor offered to swing by and walk Didi just to save us some time. Amazing what a huge difference that one little man-hour can make!

At this point we’re actually back from our week in Portugal, which is a theme that comes much later in this post. We spent our last week of vacation working long days to get everything cleared, because the interior contractors were going to begin work the day we all had to go back to work and school. And the roofers got started during that last week of vacation.

And they quickly found the rot we feared they would find. Thankfully insurance will cover that part of the renovation.

At long last the basement was clear:

One of the final things we had to do before work began was clear away the bush at the edge of the terrace. (If you’re thinking, “God, Greg, that thing needs a trim!”, please know that I knew it needed a trim all summer, but I also knew it was going to be removed by the end of July. Who trims a plant that’s on its way out the door?)

And bada bing:

I did manage to get the stump cut down a little more than that, but couldn’t figure out a way to get the damn thing out of the way entirely without destroying the chainsaw or the windscreen frame. When the carpenter came by to get things started, I asked him if he had any good ideas for how to get rid of it.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, “I got it.”

He’s a fantastic carpenter, Fix-It Felix, but at this writing there’s still a fair amount of stump out there. I’m curious how he’s going to get it out, but I’m mainly relieved not to have to do it myself.

I mentioned the rot in the roof: it apparently made its way into our boiler room, thanks to the vent around which the rot was centered.

At this point, work began in earnest. Not all at once everywhere, but sort of piecemeal, in a very carefully choreographed dance of the contractors.

First major visible change: destruction of the old terrace.

“But wait, Greg, what happened to all the stuff that was on the terrace? Where’d you store that?”

We’ve been blessed so far by a warm, dry summer. Fingers crossed.

At one point during our boxing, I had an epiphany.

I came across a bunch of stuff in the basement that couldn’t fit in boxes and I didn’t know what to do with it. It felt like it belonged in the garage, but there was literally no room left in there.

“Where the hell,” I asked myself, “am I going to store this stupid and ginormous party tent?”

Dawn broke over Marblehead.

We wouldn’t store it. We’d erect it, and instead of being a thing that needed to be stored, it would be a place to store things!

Up it went:

Meanwhile, it wasn’t just the basement that needed to be emptied out: the whole front of house needed it too.

….but that brings us up to the point at which this theme wraps up, more or less. The last image of this theme is one that illustrates just how huge and fabulous our new terrace is going to be…

And with that, we move on to….

General Summer

This is the theme for all the pictures that didn’t fit into any of the other seven themes.

And we start with a doozy.

That’s a very thoughtful text Molli sent Trine late one July night from the phone of a friend to let us know her mobile phone had died but that she was sleeping at Eva’s, where she’d just been hanging out and watching television. She didn’t want us to worry. She says goodnight, sends a heart, and signs off.

It also shows a thoughtful reply at 6:30 the next morning from an unknown person saying, “Good morning Eva, Molli has written to the wrong number, I’m not her mother.”

By then, however, Eva’s phone was also dead. And the girls were fast asleep.

We didn’t know where Molli was until about 15:00 that afternoon. I’m not going to describe how that day played out for Trine and me, because parents don’t need to be told and kids won’t get it until they have kids of their own.

But it’s here for the permanent record.

Along with my favorite meme from the summer:

I take a lot of sky pictures. It’s probably stupid. But after the dismal gray dark of the 6-month Danish winter (which I just read in the news is being shortened to 5½ months starting this year!), the variations of color and texture in the Danish summer sky seem to me a just reward.

Ironically, I spent a lot of the early summer weeding the hell out of the new hedgerow of cherry laurels on our eastern border. I took the picture below because with all that weeding done and the lawn freshly mowed, it was about the tidiest our lawn had looked in several years.

Gonna be a long, long time before it looks that tidy again…

Personal milestone: early in the summer I passed 7000 registered kilometers on my bike!

Maddie threw a slumber party for her entire class on the last day of school. They all seemed to have a good time and nothing got broken, so that’s a big win.

During vacation Trine and I took to ending our evenings sitting out on the terrace for a little fresh air. Didi liked to come out and sit at our feet. I only include this picture as a reminder of how nice those quiet moments were.

Once the terrace got dismantled we got into a habit of taking our air on the evening terrace without Didi, and once the basement got covered in fresh concrete we had to stop that. And then the concrete dried, but the scaffolding went up for the roofers.

One lovely evening in September we’ll have to choose between our beautiful new backyard terrace and our beautiful old evening terrace. I look forward to that.

Desperately.

More sky shots: I remember thinking when I took these shots that it was as if the sky were on fire.

But I clearly didn’t know what a sky afire looked like—as we’ll see in a later theme. (Ooh, foreshadowing!)

We’re still in the cow club so we have to tend the cows once every couple of weeks. Unfortunately this year we were scheduled for a cow-tending on the very day of Sophie and Liam’s arrival. Their visit is an entirely different theme, so that’s irrelevant here.

We decided to let the apple tree fly its freak flag this year: I didn’t do the usual spring trimming.

The tree responded by generating more apples than it’s ever produced before. (We haven’t done the necessary apple-tending, so probably only a tiny few will make it fully mature deliciousness, but it’s nice to see the ole tree still has it in her.)

And of course pictures of Didi all fall into the “general summer” category, so here are a few.

On a romp in Hareskov:

Chilling in the living room (fun to see the living room intact: it’s a sight I haven’t seen in weeks).

The Summerhouse Visit

Our next theme covers a period of about 24-hours: on the Friday after we got back from Portugal we were invited to overnight down at Søren & Bodil’s summerhouse in Gedser, about a five minute drive from the absolute southernmost point of Denmark. (And about a 100-minute drive from Værløse.)

In the picture below you can see Maddie and Harald running back to the house from the beach.

The house is cleverly built as two model summerhouses adjoined on their corners, with decks in the adjacent spaces. I say “cleverly” because it was a joint venture between them and Bodil’s sister’s family: this way, each family gets their own house, with a common kitchen and living area.

The house sits on a property that butts up against a path running along the Gedser coastline.

And we were fortunate enough to encounter some rare Baltic surf. We took advantage of it, bobbing around in surprisingly warm waves that were big enough but not strong enough to body surf. (The water is very shallow going very far out, meaning the waves don’t have much oomph to them: although we were seeing some meter-high waves and expecting them to knock us around, they just kind of glided right past us.)

Maybe I should have refrained from trying to describe the conjoined houses until I got to this picture, which makes it a lot easier to understand. They bought two separate summer house kits, then worked with the guy who designed and sells the kits to figure out the best way to join them.

The only time Molli Malou ever flew a kite successfully was on the Chicago waterfront back in the summer of 2008. The only time Maddie has ever flown a kite successfully was here in Gedser in 2022, with a little coaching from Harald (who’s about half her age but is plainly a grizzled old kite veteran).

In full size and at full resolution these are beautiful pictures.

We had arrived late on a Friday afternoon, with just enough time for some kite flying and a quick swim before dinner. After dinner we just sat around talking until it was time for bed.

The next morning after a quick breakfast dip (for some) we piled into our cars and made our way down to the southernmost point of Denmark.

It looks like I photoshopped the latitude into the picture, but those numbers are actually affixed to the building you see there, which is a kind of “southernmost point museum.”

Below you see the primary attraction of the museum: sydstenen, or “the southern rock.” And no, the southern rock is not Lynyrd Skynyrd: it’s literally just a big old stone commemorating the fact that this is southernmost point in Denmark. (Which is latitudinally just a little north of southern Newfoundland, and just a little south of Alaska’s southernmost point.)

The stone and the museum aren’t actually the southernmost point in Denmark, though. To be the southernmost person in Denmark you have to take some steep stairs down the cliff, cross the narrow strip of rocky beach, and climb out onto the end of the southernmost jetty in Denmark.

Daddy and Maddie, southernmost humans in Denmark!

Hey: flashback! Here are Daddy and Molli as the northernmost humans in Denmark (2004):

And Trine as the singlemost northernmost human in Denmark!

Back to the present.

Interesting bit of trivia: this whole area was a massive Nazi anti-aircraft installation while the Nazis were occupying Denmark. The dark jetty you see in the distance below is actually a concrete platform that once supported some serious artillery.

It’s only a “jetty” because of natural erosion: back in the 1940s, the platform was up on the bluff: the Baltic has simply eaten 30-40 meters of land away in the intervening years.

The beach was covered in flint stones—not the Fred and Wilma kind, but the actual sedimentary mineral quartz: it was fun to pick up big stones and just bang them against other rocks to try and build a flint tool. Behold my self-made arrowhead!

The Baltic has eaten away a lot of the cliff, as I mentioned, but the underground cables and wires laid down by the Nazis didn’t get swept away by the surf: they just hang there, weirdly.

On our way back to the house for lunch we swung by Gedser’s world-renowned (heh) windmill, around which a whole cottage industry of flea market stalls has bloomed.

We scored nicely at the flea market, actually, so I shouldn’t mock it: they had books for sale by the bagful (70 kroner, or a little more than ten bucks, for a healthy-sized shopping bag that you could cram with all it could carry). Suffice to say we bought a bag of books.

We also bought a lamp that exactly matches the two hanging lamps over our dining room table. We’re not sure whether we’ll add it as a third lamp or just hold on to it in case something unfortunate should happen to one of the other two, but it’s in perfect condition and even a used one bought online would have cost us about ten times as much as we paid at the Celebrated Fleamarket of Gedser Windmill.

It was only a 24-hour visit, but it was a very nice idyll to enjoy before the renovations began in earnest.

Molli’s 18th Birthday

This is another one-day theme, and the date for this theme is July 3.

It’s a full two weeks before our vacation begins, and it opens with Molli arriving at the house and greeting Sophie.

Sophie and Liam had arrived a couple of days earlier (they get their own theme later) and Molli had been at the Roskilde Festival (which gets its own theme later), so this was the first time the cousins saw each other this summer.

It’s also the very first picture on this blog—which I started within hours of her birth—of Molli Malou as an adult. So ladies and gentlemen, it’s in the books: this young woman’s entire childhood has now been blogged.

Poor thing. Forgive me, Molli?

Molli needed two things very badly: a shower and a nap. The shower she’d have to manage on her own, but for the nap we were able to offer her big birthday present: a brand new bed.

(Dammit, I have never, ever been able to get a picture of someone’s face right at the moment they were being surprised!)

The house was all decked out appropriately:

…and Maddie was just jonesin’ to get a little Mario Kart in while Molli napped.

But the Mario Kart business won’t make sense until we get to another theme, so never mind.

We were eleven at the birthday table: besides the four of us, we had Sophie and Liam, Mormor and Jørgen, Moster Mette, and Molli’s friends Freja and Selma. (Eva was a last minute scratch—she had family obligations or something. I only mention that in case one day future Molli is looking over these pictures and wondering, “But where’s Eva?”)

You can scroll all the way back to the very first photos on this blog, and you will find pictures of the rainbows over Denmark on July 3rd, 2004. Apparently Denmark remembered.

But back to the party…

Maddie gave a beautiful speech to her older sister. I don’t have any actual photographs of the speech, because I got it on video (and will happily share it with anyone who wants, but it’s in Danish), but I was able to take this screengrab:

You never really know how you’re doing as a parent, but moments like that can certainly help you feel that you haven’t been a hopeless screw-up. For what it’s worth, even Sophie teared up even though she had no idea what the hell was being said.

(Oh: and I just thought of this now: these are probably the last pictures you’ll ever see of that sad old awning. Good riddance to it!)

At the end of the night (remember this is early July, so this was probably at least 22:00, based on the light), Molli took her friends for a ride. It was the first time in her life she’d driven a car without an instructor or parent riding shotgun.

There she goes… driving off from childhood off into whatever wild adventures await her in adulthood.

*Sniff*

Sorry, got somethin’ in my eye there.

But wait! That’s not the end of the birthday theme. This is:

Yikes. . .

Molli Malou in Malaga

You may recall that earlier this year Molli Malou went to Milano.

This summer, rather than traveling to Portugal with her boring family, she chose to spend a week with some friends at an AirBnB in Malaga. As adults may sometimes do.

I can’t give details of the trip and am sure these are not the most interesting pictures of her vacation, but they’re what she texted back to us and therefore all I can share.

The SAS strike delayed their departure a couple of days, but five days in Malaga is better than none, and you can see their enthusiasm was undiminished by the time they were finally boarded on their plane.

Let me add as my final note that after five days and four nights (I think) in Malaga, they flew back via Amsterdam with an 18-hour layover there. For reasons I can’t explain the Amsterdam and Malaga pictures are jumbled together with no respect at all for chronology—I’m assuming it’ll be pretty obvious which pictures were taken where.

I don’t know the significance of any of the pictures, but this blog was never really for me. Or not for me alone, anyway: it’s their blog, for their memories, so I’m just postin’ what she was sendin’.

Smile, everyone! It’s the house where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis until they found her and killed her!

I’ve excluded a lot of food pictures Molli sent us. Most of them looked very appealing—none moreso than the video of shrimp sizzling in spicy oil in a cast-iron pan (which dish had unfortunate consequences, but tha’s how we learn, right?).

But then there was this:

I don’t remember what it was. I just want to note for the record that food can look and smell and taste delicious, and still be highly unphotogenic.

In fairness to Molli, though, most of her dishes really looked more like this:

(Hide the ashtray from the camera, Molli. Always hide the ashtray from the camera.)

Chronology Interlude

Just to help untangle the chronology:

Molli attended the Roskilde festival (coming up!) from late June until her birthday.

Sophie and Liam (coming up!) arrived in Denmark a few days before Molli got back from Roskilde and stayed for a week while Trine and I were still working. Molli’s birthday obviously fell during that interval.

Molli flew off to Malaga a few days after Sophie and Liam flew off to Iceland, and Molli returned the weekend on which Trine and I finally began our own vacations.

Molli then held down the fort when the rest of us took off for Faro (coming up!) a few days into our first week of vacation. We stayed there a week. A couple of days after we got back we made the trip to Gedser, and we spent the final eight days of our vacation packing the house away in preparation for the contractors to tear it all apart and it build it back better.

Then it was August and we all went back to work and school and did our best to adapt to our new life in our suddenly very cramped quarters, in a house swarming with contractors all day every week day, and sometimes on weekends. (But that’s not coming up. For that you have to tune in next month.)

Just thought a little timeline might help because I myself was beginning to get a little confused.

Roskilde

For Christmas 2019 we bought Molli a one-day ticket to the 2020 Roskilde Festival. She was thrilled.

Until corona came along and canceled it. Then she was disappointed.

And so again in 2021.

For 2022 we pitched in to help her get a full-week ticket to the music festival.

She sent more videos than pictures from Roskilde, so there’s not much to see here—but her Roskilde memories are her own and I doubt they’d be appropriate for a family blog anyway.

First, however, two pictures from my own phone: it’s me dropping her off at the BIrkerød train station so she could ride to Roskilde with her friends.

Not pictured: the repeat trip I had to make as soon as I got home to bring a pair of pants she’d forgotten to the father of one of her Birkeroød friends, who was going to be driving out to Roskilde that day or the next and could therefore hand them over to her.

Among the first of the few photos Molli did share with us was this one:

Each line, she told us over the phone, represented one drink. We said we thought that eighteen seemed like a lot of drinks. It was hot out, she should be careful. Et cetera. You know: parental stuff. We were reassured that those eighteen drinks had been spread out over like practically a whole day, and it’s not like she blacked out or anything, although now that she thought of it maybe her last few drinks didn’t get marked on her arm…

I was watching the weather compulsively that week—more than normal, even, given that our beloved daughter was living out of a tent in the middle of an open field—and one day I noticed a big thunderstorm creeping up Sjælland toward Roskilde.

I texted Molli with a fatherly heads-up.

“Yeah,” she texted back, “but the weather’s fine here, we’re all safe.”

I said that was gonna change mighty quick and she should try to get inside somewhere soon. Very soon.

I don’t think she paid me much mind.

I use a real-time lightning website and could see a massive cluster of lightning strikes moving up the island toward where she was. After a while she started giving me updates: yeah, okay, you’re right, it’s coming.

And then:

Wow, yeah, it’s kind of crazy.

And then:

Yeah, we’ve gathered up our stuff and we’re all in our tents.

And then finally she just sent the text “WORD” accompanying the following photo:

Here’s a screenshot of the lightning app shortly before that photo was taken:

Each yellow dot is a lightning strike: the bolder the red circle, the more recent the strike. At this point, more than 100 strikes were being recorded per minute. Most of it was to the west of Roskilde.

Then it changed, and there were so many lightning strikes over the area that I could no longer even see the map.

It was about then Molli sent that picture.

We also got food pictures from Roskilde.

And she sent pictures, like those she sent (or rather would send) from Malaga and Amsterdam, whose significance is known only to her.

The last picture is also one from my own phone: Trine and I had gone to a friend’s party in Roskilde and as we drove by the festival we waved… and took pictures.

No idea whether Molli’s anywhere in that frame—it’s a big festival covering a lot of real estate, and that patch doesn’t look especially crowded. But it’s the only one of the pictures from the car that isn’t all blurry.

You get what you get and you don’t get upset.

Portugal

The great thing about this trip to Faro was that it actually happened… here’s a screencap from my phone the day before we were supposed to depart:

The TV2 headline says (in English): “Negotiations to conclude today, says the lead negotiator for SAS.”

And conclude they did. Sometime around 22-23:00, if I remember. We hadn’t really fully packed at that point: just sort of prepped things in a way that would make packing easy in the morning (it was a mid-afternoon flight) and wouldn’t force us to unpack if the strike persisted.

We went to bed that night knowing that the strike was over but also knowing that not all flights would necessarily resume effective immediately: our own flight was still listed on the SAS website as “probably canceled” when we went to sleep.

The first thing I did upon waking the next morning was to check the SAS website, and finally we had certainty: our flight was scheduled for departure with no further warnings about cancellation.

As it turned out, we’ve never had an easier flight out of Copenhagen. There was no covid status to worry about. No masks. We were able to check in online for the first time, I think, since 2019. We were able to check our bags without waiting in a line. We had enough time to dawdle around the airport shops but not so much that we got bored. We boarded. We took off. We landed.

And began roasting at once.

You can’t tell from that photo, or from anything I’ve said before, but because Molli wasn’t joining us we thought it would be nice for Maddie to have a friend to keep her company, so Josephine joined us on this trip.

(She actually goes by “Jose,” as many Danish Josephines and Josefines do, but that’s not pronounced like the Latino men’s name José. It’s pronounced like “YO-suh.” Just so you know.)

(I know the Lees still check in here now and then, but I just realized I’m directing my parentheticals mostly with Mom and Dad in mind. Sad sigh. Also: I fucking hate August.)

I have to say: at this point I don’t feel the need to point out where we are or what we’re doing all the time. This was our sixth trip down there (I looked it up: 2012, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2021, and now 2022), and every visit has been more than amply covered by this blog, so anyone who’s been following all along probably knows when they’re looking at Vila Moura, Faro, Loulé. or whatever.

So in the interests of economy, I’ll omit the geographical pointers unless I think they’re necessary.

Nightswimming wasn’t just fun but a necessary cooldown before bed: I don’t think the temperature ever dropped below 25C the entire time we were there. Most days maxed out around 35-40 degrees, and I think we actually got up to 41 or 42 once or twice.

And look! I was there, too!

And did you notice: I’ve had a haircut! Got it our first morning there, up in Loulé, and the guy did a great job. I’ve decided this year I’ll get all my haircuts in different countries, since my only prior cut this year was down in Athens. So we’ll definitely need to do something for our autumn vacation!

Look at the parking job in the picture below: the black car on the right is Gert’s Audi, the white car on the left belongs to the absolute worst person in the world.

Seriously, who parks, gets out of their car, looks at how they’re parked, sees that, and goes, “Yeah, that’ll do.”

Someone desperate to have their car keyed, is my guess. I didn’t key the bastard’s car, but I’ve never come closer. Ever. I had to let myself in on the passenger side, skootch over to the driver’s seat, and use every ounce of willpower I could muster not to slam repeatedly into that asshole’s car.

American veterans of brutal summer heat may not find temperatures of 35-40 C (95-104 F) that daunting, but that’s because America is so air-conditioned. Portugal is not. At least, Gert’s lovely house is not. It doesn’t really need to be most of the time—its construction means that if you draw the blinds the house stays surprisingly cool even up to outside temperatures of about 25-30 C. But it was very, very hard to sleep at night in the heat we experienced this trip. The room the girls were sharing was especially stifling, so I had to do a little fan shopping. I had no idea how far along fan technology had come. Some of them looked like the kind of stuff you’d find in the bowels of a Jawa land trawler.

Can I say I’m not a fan of fan shopping?

Probably not. Sorry.

Moving on: Chinese dinner night!

I really struggled trying to figure out which of the following three pictures to include in this post, until I finally realized they belonged together as a series. I love them.

Did you notice the woman in back with a mask on? (She’s the owner, along with her husband.) Portugal had only just dropped the last of their mask requirements on July 1st, just a couple of weeks before our arrival. It was the first trip we’d taken in 2½ years (since Estero in February 2020) in which there were no pandemic-related restrictions of any kind.

Felt good.

I had the Olympus with me on this trip, so you may notice some of the pictures are nicer than most of the others on this blog—I’m still very happy at AP Pension but still grumpy about the crappy phone they gave me.

This one came from the crappy phone, alas.

I assume these will be our last pictures of Splash & Slide for quite a while…

When we got back to the car in the parking lot at the end of the day, Maddie said a propos of nothing: “Hey, it’s finally the year we’ve been waiting for.”

I asked what she meant.

“The license plate!” she said, shocked by my ignorance.

Yeah. At some point on some long-ago visit, we’d noticed that MM could stand for Molli Malou or Maddie Marie, or Molli & Maddie, and that there would come a point in the future when Maddie was 13 and Molli was 18. (We’re a weird family that way.)

The time had finally come.

Amazing.

This shot would have been so much nicer with the Olympus:

But do not despair! We now get a walking tour all the way around the house with the Olympus. Unfortunately I got cocky and used the manual settings, and I didn’t always get them right, sorry…

I love the preceding photograph. I don’t know why. Lines, angles, textures, lighting? It just really works for me.

One scorching afternoon Trine and I dragged some chairs around to the front yard hoping for some respite in the shade. I chose that moment to grab another quick “I’m here too!” selfie:

Trine chose the same moment to grab a quick “There’s my idiot husband taking selfies of himself while I’m right here with a camera” photo.

(Why yes, I’m still a child. Why do you ask?)

Blue! A dog whose very purpose for being seemed during our visit to be proving to us that Didi was not in fact the barkiest dog in Europe. Here she is not barking:

This is how Trine, Morfar, and I ended most of our evenings: long talks out on the terrace, lubricated with wine or Johnnie Walker.

For the permanent record: a ball associated with many warm memories. Seriously.

Funny thing about it, though: it’s supposed to be like Happy Watermelon Ball Man or something, but because they put multiple faces on him, when he turns sideways his smiling mouth becomes an evil eye and his side-of-head “wedge” becomes a demonic leer…

On our last visit Denmark got bumped out of the soccer championship quarter finals.

On this visit, Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard won the Tour de France.

A great moment for Denmark, especially having happened in a year when I’d been unable to take the car to fetch Sophie and Liam at Copenhagen airport because Amager was all but locked down for the start of the Tour. That had made me very angry at the Tour de France. Vingegaard’s triumph helped ease the lingering pain of that trauma.

We decided to eat at the restaurant “Piri Piri” one night. I called and made reservations. We arrived to an empty parking lot, which seemed odd. Even odder, the restaurant was closed. Who the hell had I had made reservations with?

There was a restaurant across the street. “New Fat Frog.” We went there instead.

I like the next two shots because it’s like Trine and Maddie are playing some kind of weird game with me or each other or something. But they weren’t. (That I know of.) It’s just how the pics came out.

If you ever find yourself near Almancil, Portugal, do your self a favor and DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT HAVING A MEAL AT THE NEW FAT FROG.

The food wasn’t bad, but the 75 minute wait for it was. (And we were like one of only three tables they were serving.)

Happily, however, respite always awaited us back at the palace:

Wait… what’s that. Did you hear something?

Oh my god, yes, it’s an INTERLUDE!

Sub-Theme: Molli as the Mistress of the House

Throughout our stay in Portugal, Molli was kind enough to send us pictures of how well she was doing back in Denmark, where she had sole responsibility for the house, the cats, and the dog. Her pictures don’t get datestamped in a way I can work with, so I have no idea (nor any memory) of when her pictures reached us. But here they are, in whatever order they’re in.

Hmmm… now that i think of it, those may be the last pictures you’ll ever see of our old stove.

Back to the Main Theme

On our last visit the Audi had kept things interesting by getting a flat about 45 minutes before we had to drive Gert to the airport and pick up Molli and Kalle. On this visit, it spiced things up by refusing to start at all on the morning we’d planned to take a quick trip to Faro.

With a little help from a mechanic we managed to hit the road only an hour or two later than we’d originally planned to: no harm, no foul.

Yeah, that’s the steakhouse we always ate it, but we’d been so disappointed on our last visit we didn’t even bother this time around. Besides, we were only in Faro for one reason:

Wait, sorry: two reasons.

(That was the Olympus, obviously. Most of the Faro shots are.)

OMG you guys, another shot of Blue not barking!

(She really is one of the sweetest and most affectionate dogs you’ll ever meet.)

One of our last days there we noticed the sky getting a little weird. Eventually it got so weird we looked online to see what the hell was going on: huge wildfires about 30 kilometers away.

It looks like end times, doesn’t it?

By this point I think we could see they had the fires under control, if not extinguished, but it was so smoky outside we actually had to spend an hour or two indoors while it dissipated.

Although obviously I still ran out once in a while for more pics, because chronicle all the things.

By nightfall we were all clear to resume our regular activities.

And suddenly it’s our last day there.

With everyone else out in the packed car, ready for the drive to the airport, I took a quick look through the house to be sure we hadn’t forgotten anything—and suddenly realized we didn’t have many pictures of the inside of the house, which we might never visit again. So I just took a bunch of pictures as quickly as I could.

Doesn’t do the house justice, at all, and obviously ignores the first floor and the basement, but there it is.

Bye, you beautiful house!

And that was it… next thing you know we’re at the airport on our way back to Copenhagen.

Only we weren’t as lucky on the way home as we had been on the way out…

The Sophie Visit

It’s the last theme, even though chronologically it ought to have been one of the first.

Aunt Deb texted me a picture to let me know that Sophie and Liam were safely on their way to Denmark. I didn’t pay it much mind, because I was just thinking “yay, they’re on their way!” and busily writing back to Aunt Deb that we just couldn’t wait.

Maddie came with me to the airport (on the train, thanks to the stupid lousy no good Tour de France tying things up all over Copenhagen that day, and our hating it because we didn’t yet know that Denmark’s own Jonas Vingegaard was going to win it)—Maddie came with me, as I was saying, and on our way she said:

“I obviously know what Sophie looks like, but what does Liam look like?”

And suddenly I realized—that’s why Aunt Deb sent the picture and not just a message!

“Aunt Deb sent a picture so we’d know,” I said, and I navigated my way to the picture on my phone.

Hahahaha. Oops.

But in the event it was no problem finding them.

We took the train from the airport to Værløse, where Trine picked us up and drove us the last kilometer to the house. And I have no idea why I took this picture, but it’s the first picture of Sophie in our house in a long, long time so it’s a keeper. (And it’s kind of a kinetic shot, which I like.)

The first order of business once Sophie and Liam had had a chance to settle in and shake off their travels was the opening of gifts: Sophie came bearing tons of incredible gifts from her family to ours, and Maddie was the astonished and grateful recipient of a Nintendo Switch, complete with accessories and a bunch of games.

The Switch is visible in a lot of pictures we’ve already been through, since most of those pictures came chronologically after this one. Suffice to say that Mario Kart and Mario Party were a big part of the visit, and a big part of the rest of the summer. (We even played Mario Party in Portugal.)

Because Trine and I had to work all week, we tried to pump up the weekend with the touristy kinds of things Sophie and Liam wanted to do that wouldn’t be as easy for them without us. Starting with Kronborg Slot (Elsinore).

We even went into the casemates and got to check in with Holger Danske.

We also went into the chapel. There are plenty of pictures of that old chapel elsewhere on this blog, I think, but what caught my eye this time were the deranged little angels or cherubs carved into the sides of the pews. They look kind of charming from a distance, but when you get close up the time they’re… weird.

The next one is my favorite—does he look sozzled, or what? (“Hey, why is the chapel spinning around? Hic!“)

One thing they got right in Kronborg: how to deal with Sweden!

Can you read that sign? If it’s too small to read, it says “No access” in Danish and English. But there obviously was access, and it was the only way out of whatever hall we’d entered from another door.

I assumed it was a prank—some kid moving the sign from where it really ought to have been—but Trine asked a guard and we were told that the “path” through the castle was one-way, and ordinarily the way we were going was one-way the other way. But because of blah blah blah we had to go this way today.

The blah blah blah might have had something to do with a wedding taking place elsewhere in the castle that afternoon. I didn’t know such a thing was possible.

No, that wasn’t the bride and groom: more likely a flower girl with an obvious crush on a ring-bearer, doing her adorable best to enchant him with soap bubbles. (The boy was unimpressed.)

We never got a very good look at the happy couple, although they sure rode out in style.

Just for the sake of chronology, by the way, Sophie and Liam arrived on a Friday. The Kronborg excursion was on Saturday. Sunday was Molli’s birthday, the day on which she returned from Roskilde and the celebration you’ve already seen took place. Trine and I both had to work on Monday, but we arranged to meet the kids afterwards at the (Possibly) Best Place on Earth.

I like that picture mainly because it looks like an oil painting from the 19th century.

Those are, alas, my only pictures of our Tivoli tour.

The next morning as I rode my bike into work I was treated to multiple rainbows: this one was so strong and vibrant I actually pulled over to take a picture.

I don’t know why it looks sort of faded in the picture: in reality the colors were bright and clear and stark. Oh well, like I said: lousy phone camera.

Sophie and Liam adventured around on their own most of the week, and I’ve heard stories of Molli having taken them downtown one night to drink cocktails at a karaoke bar, but I obviously have no pictures of that. It’s weird adjusting to these kids becoming adults, but that’s what they are, and they certainly didn’t need us getting in their way.

But we did have some very entertaining evenings playing Mario Party over drinks.

That’s actually it for our photos of the visit. That Friday I drove Sophie and Liam to the airport at some ungodly hour of the morning and was back at work in my basement office by 6:45.

My basement office… man, that seems like a long time ago…

But we’re not done with all the pictures just yet: Sophie and Liam sent us shots of their Iceland adventures on their way back home.

This next one’s adorable:

But the next one’s my absolute favorite picture of Sophie, maybe ever:

Well, my favorite funny picture of her, anyway.

The Conclusion

That’s it. That was our summer.

We’ve only been back in the daily grind for a couple of weeks at this point—it’s now August 22nd as I write this, the post having taken more time to put together than I could manage in the usual one- or two-night sessions.

The next post will clearly be all about the house, because that’s pretty much all I can see in my camera roll right now. Installation of the kitchen began today, but there were some complications, and god knows when this is all going to be wrapped up.

Well, mostly about the house. Maybe a word or two about Trine’s big birthday will find its way into the blog.

We’re also looking forward to a September visit from Morfar, and hoping the house is at least together enough to accomodate him comfortably by then.

And there are few little social things on the calendar as well.

But mainly it’ll be about the house, because right now pretty much everything is about the house, and will be until we have it back.