We’re starting with a shot of Didi for the permanent record.
You can almost see her smile there, right?
We’re at the vets.
And that’s the note for the permanent record: Didi has, for all of her life, loved this particular veterinary office. You can’t even walk by it without her straining at the leash with all her power to pull you to its front door. Whether we’re taking her there for a nail clipping (as I was in the shot above) or for a serious surgery (as we did this summer), she loves it. As soon as we’re in the door she’s prancing and making happy sounds and just squirming with delight as she sniffs everything.
What the hell kind of dog likes the vet?
Also for the permanent record: I hit the 9000 kilometer mark on September 5.
Will I make 10k by New Year’s? Depends on the weather: my rule is that when the morning temperature is under 5C or it’s raining, I take the train. I forget what I’m up to as I write this—around 9300, I think—but having worked from home all week this past week of efterårsferie and with a week off in November, it’s going to be a close-run thing.
The whole family is asleep when I head out to work around 5:50, so I always sent Trine an email once I’m settled in at the office. (You may ask, “Why?” I’ll tell you: I don’t know—but it’s a tradition!)
In any case, at about the halfway point of my bike route into the city, there’s about a kilometer through a pretty little marsh called Høje Gladsaxe Park. It’s nothing special, but on some of my morning commutes in September its misty sunrises were so spectacular I had to take pictures so I could share them with Trine in those morning notes.
Here it is on September 5:
And the very next day:
As you’ll see, the look changed through the course of the month—and here in late October it’s cloaked in the dark of night when I go through—but it was a cheery bit of scenery to pass through in the middle of those long rides. Lifts the spirits!
A propos of nothing: Didi just being adorable when she sleeps.
Here I am trying to show off my new haircut not long after getting it.
And here’s Maddie sporting a classic David Bowie look (she and a friend attended Bowie cover band event).
Trine’s birthday fell on a weekday this year, so we celebrated with a dinner at Mediterraneo.
It was just the three of us because Maddie had an event Ungdomshuset (“The Youth House”), which is ironically enough just across the street from Mediterraneo. And I’m not pictured because, well, obviously.
September 14:
September 14 was harvest festival at Atheneskolen: Maddie’s class was responsible for a drink stand at which if you ordered a drink from concentrate you were given a cup with the concentrate in the bottom and had to “milk” a big inflated cow for your water.
That’s Maddie’s classmate and good friend Lucas demonstrating the process.
And here’s Maddie making a sale.
We celebrated Trine’s birthday for real on Saturday the 16th.
Besides Mormor and Moster Mette, we also had Jose and her mother Marta as guests.
It’s so hard to get pictures of Molli that I find myself sometimes just sneaking them.
Trine had a very specific wish for her birthday:
Yes, the “Roborock S7 Max V Ultra” robot vaccuum and mop.
We’ve had a Roomba for years, and it’s been pretty good, but technology has advanced so much that the new cleaning robots are light years beyond our dumb old Roomba. And I mean “dumb” literally in both senses of the word: dumb in that it can’t talk, and dumb in that its approach to vacuuming is just to zig zag through a space and build an internal map of where it’s been and just continue until it thinks its reached everywhere that it’s not blocked.
Roomba’s age was showing. More and more often it was ending up stuck somewhere, or it would be unable to find its way back to its docking station. So it was definitely time for an upgrade.
We’ve only had it a little over a month now, but the Roborock S7 Max V Ultra is now a big part of our life.
Because it’s like having a live-in maid, we named it Alice (note to Maddie and Molli: that was the name of the live-in maid on The Brady Bunch). I’m going to sing her praises for the permanent record and to urge all family members to get one.
First, here’s what Alice looks like as she goes about her business:
But unlike the Roomba, Alice is not dumb in any sense of the word.
For one thing, she talks. (And texts.) She can also be talked to. For another, she literally maps rooms the first time she cleans them. She catalogs obstacles, and even identifies them. She vacuums and mops. And empties her own dustbin. And cleans her own mop.
All we have to do is empty her dirty water bucket once every couple of days, top off her clean water bucket, and empty the docking station dustbin about once every 3-4 weeks. She’s magnificent and our floors have never looked so clean.
Alice comes with an app that offers a level of control (and interaction) that’s pretty amazing.
She doesn’t just have sensors, like the Roomba: Alice also has “eyes”: a video camera she uses for object recognition. Through the app, you can peek through her eyes at any time.
Here’s a screenshot I took from one of her maiden efforts.
That’s Emma sitting by the kitchen, wondering what the hell is going on.
The inset in the top left is Alice’s map of the rooms she’s cleaning. The white line represents areas she’s already cleaned. A thick white line represents areas that have been vacuumed and mopped: a thinner, less stippled line means she’s only vacuumed. (In the middle of October we threw a rug down in the living room: Alice recognized it right away and vacuums it without mopping.)
The microphone icon lets you talk to Alice—she accepts verbal commands in person and through the app, but we’ve never used that function because it hasn’t really proved necessary yet.
You can also pull up a remote, allowing you to take control of where Alice cleans:
I’ve only used it once, mainly to test it, and it works. But who wants to waste time steering Alice around when she does it so well on her own?
If you check in on her progress while she’s cleaning, you get a split screen of her live video feed and her map.
Her video feed reminds me of the “Maddie Eye View” videos I used to take when Maddie was crawling around the house back in the day.
She can work with multiple saved maps, so besides the front of house (living room, dining room, kitchen) we’ve also got her doing the foyer, hallway, guest bath, and old master bath. The other rooms are inaccessible to her from the hallway because the door jambs are too high for her… and, frankly, apart from the black bathroom, the other rooms have so much clutter and stuff that they’re not really safe for her anyway. No way she’d make it out of Maddie’s room alive. (Sorry, sweet Maddie, but you know it’s true.)
She has all kinds of functions we haven’t even tried to use yet.
So there you go. The pitch is over. Get yourself an Alice today!
She’s not cheap—she cost about what we spent to fly three of us to and from Portugal this summer—so in addition to being Trine’s birthday present we decided she’s also Trine’s and my Christmas present to each other, and probably my next birthday present as well. But well worth it.
Alice doesn’t do windows, alas, but she has friends who do, and we’re taking a good look at them…
September 21:
The next shot is from September 23, but it’s not the marsh: it’s a view down Enebærvej (the tall tree on the left is our big birch tree). It’s not as spectacular in this photo as it was in real life, but the sun was like a ball of fire balanced right on the horizon. It was very dramatic:
September 26 back at the marsh:
The sun was only just above the horizon at that point. We went into a period of cold and rain after that, and by the time of my next bike ride it was too dark for pictures.
Oh well: the sun’ll be back. . . in late February.
I had another Library Bar evening with Mads, David, and Torben, and this time I also brought along Cheyenne, the New York friend of ours who had become romantically involved with a Dane last year and is thinking of moving to Denmark.
Unfortunately, the Library Bar experience was not what it once had been. I don’t know whether they changed management or what, but everything was worse. The service was worse, the drinks menu had changed for the worse, the prices had gone up dramatically, and it just wasn’t the same oasis of tranquility it used to be. The jazz band was the same, and they were still playing from the American songbook, but everything else was just. . . lousy.
Although one of the new menu items was a whiskey flight: you choose the region (Islay, Highlands, Japan, etc), and you get three little (very little!) scotches from that region to sample.
I got the Islay sampler, obviously: Tallisker, Laphroig, and Ardbeg.
It was nice, but given the exorbitant price increas of their single malts I fell back on their cocktail of the month for the rest of the evening: gin and tonics that were only about 10% gin.
Also we ordered something they called “Nordic nachos.”
Our expectations were low, but we we were all feeling snacky. We expected only tortilla chips covered in melted pepper cheese. Hard not to live up to something that basic, right?
Instead we got this abomination:
It’s cheap potato chips doused in dollops of sour creams and sprinkled with chives, and in the middle a little bowl of cheap caviar.
Grotesque. Abominable. A desecration. An egregious violation of decency.
I may give the Library Bar one more try at some point in the future to see if we just caught them on a bad night—a worst night—but if things haven’t improved dramatically, that’s it for the Library Bar.
In late September and early October, meanwhile, the cherry laurels along the eastern edge of our property became the transitory home of a massive flock of butterflies. Actually, I didn’t know if butterflies traveled in flocks, so I just now looked it up: they do not. I learned something new: a group of butterflies is a kaleidoscope.
So we had a kaleidoscope of butterflies out there for a couple of weeks, so thick that Maddie shrieked every time she opened the kitchen door to the back path, because the opening of the door set dozens of butterflies into motion.
Here’s one:
They were apparently the common Admiral variety of Danish butterfly. I also just looked that up.
We had a kaleidoscope of Admirals. Fun.
They’re long gone by now, though.
I should note for the permanent record that that picture was taken on October 7.
That date used to be notable for me personally as the date of my wedding with Allison in 1989, a date we later referred to as our “non-aversary.”
Now I suppose the date will live in infamy as the date of the massacre in southern Israel. This isn’t the place for that kind of thing, but failure to mention it would have seemed even more inappropriate. So I mention it and we move on.
(Note to future Molli and Maddie: if this was in fact the start of a third world war, remember that it was preceded by a kaleidoscope of Admirals.)
The cold, wet weather has the cats spending a lot more time indoors. Also, they’re getting older: they’re about 12½ now, so the thrill of the outdoors is waning for them. Emma’s only presented us with one or two mice over the whole course of the season, where in the past we often got more than that per week.
I was nevertheless startled to encounter Emma sitting among our devices in in the big room, her face to the wall. I eventually persuaded myself she was just warming herself from the heat they give off, and I hope that’s correct—I don’t like the idea of Emma trying to figure out how to hack our home network.
But I wouldn’t put it past her.
Maddie is still rockin’ it with her guitar:
Without getting into any details, I’ll note for the permanent record that the period after October 7 was a hard one for us as a family. We began clawing our way out of it with a trip to Hillerød on October 14.
The plan had just been to wander around that pretty little town a bit: fresh air and a change of scenery.
But as we drove by the giant plant nursery “Plantorama” when we came off the highway, one of us noted that we’d driven by the place a thousand times but had never gone in—and they’d heard it was actually a spectacular place and had pets as well as plants.
I can’t remember whether it was Trine or Molli that said all that, but we decided to check the place out.
We were properly astonished. It’s like five acres of store. They not only had a greenhouse the size of a football field, full of every kind of flora you can imagine, but a massive Christmas display, a smaller but no less impressive Halloween section, and lots and lots of critters.
Like these bunnies.
No other mammals—no dogs or cats—but a huge assortment of fish and reptiles.
It was the chameleons that really caught our eyes, though, and vice-versa.
I have to convert the next two into memes:
I don’t know what the capitions should be, but certainly “WTF?” is a possibility.
Also: “Ta-daa!”
And: “Behold!”
Such weird critters…
We spent a lot of time at Plantorama, so the sun was already dropping toward the horizon by the time our wander through town began.
I love this next shot: reminds me of the cover of Abbey Road, the iconic Olsen Band imagery, or a scene from a Wes Anderson movie.
The guy with us is Molli’s friend/boyfriend (it keeps changing) Lucas. He’s a good egg.
The main drag of Hillerød is undergoing a lot of reconstruction, and a lot of its storefronts (or empty lots) are boarded off. Peering through one of the boarded segments, though, I was able to get this picture of what lay behind it:
I thought I should post it either in support of or as a refutation of the pictures I’m always taking in poorer European countries—Estonia, Latvia, Lithania, Portugal, Spain, Poland—where I wonder aloud at the decrepit state of properties in otherwise prosperous parts of town.
Well, it can happen in Denmark, too.
On the other hand, it may just be the exception that proves the rule, because I’ve never seen anything else like that in Denmark. Nowhere. Not in twenty years of living here.
So make of it what you will.
File it under weird: a single rose blossomed in among our rhododendra in the middle of October.
And suddenly we’re in the second half of October: time for pumpkin carving!
Maddie went with a Minecraft theme:
Molli went with a more triangulish theme:
So I saw no choice but to go roundier on my own:
I should note that we got more pumpkin seeds than ever this year, and they roasted spectacularly in the air fryer. Quickly, too. Boil ’em, dry ’em, coat ’em in a little oil and melted better, sprinkle with a lot of salt and a touch of pepper, and they roast to perfection in about 12 minutes.
Lastly: Maddie had a Mormor day down in Frederiksberg on Friday (the 20th, the last day of her autumn vacation) and sent us this photo of their game of Rummycube.
That’s it for our fall.
Coming up we’ve got Halloween and then a very busy November, including my trip to the states, followed hard on its heels by a celebration of Mormor’s 80th birthday, Maddie’s 15th birthday, and then straight into the Christmas rush. Whew!
So watch this space!
Oh, but wait, before you go, as always: my favorite silly memes of the period:
