The End of the Summer That Never Was

The last post left off with our return home from America, back in early August.  I wrote most of this blog in late September, and today as I go through it one last time it is the first of October.  Although we have been very busy in the interim, it hasn’t been eventful busy, just ordinary-life busy.

With a few exceptions, like the life-changing moment when Maddie got her braces:

Maddie spent the afternoon mostly upside-down, and Molli sometimes joined her.

Neighborhood walks with Didi have been spiced up by the presence in our neighborhood of either a whole school of hares (“a wig of hares?” “a toupée of hares?”), or one extremely peripatetic hare.  The next two pictures are from two separate walks on two different days.

Unlike the local deer, whom Didi rarely notices before I do, these hares almost always catch her attention before they’re even visible.  If there’s one around the corner, for example, she’ll raise her nose, sniff at the air, then start straining at the leash.  Once she actually spots the hare, If I’m not ready for it, she can practically jerk my arm off.

AS SEEN ON FAMILY GROUP: First day of school, 2017.  Once again, I am given precise instructions on how and where Molli’s picture should be taken. . .

…but Maddie is still young enough to allow me at least the illusion of directorial control.

I love the picture below because I think this very blog has an almost identical one of Molli Malou at about the same age.

The first Friday of 3rd grade, there was a hyttetur (“cottage tour”) for Maddie’s class.  We met up at the bike racks by the swimhall, whence we rode en masse about 4 kilometers through the woods to a cottage where the kids would spend the night.

No pictures from the ride because I’ve spent the last few years roaring at the girls that only suicidal idiots try to use their smartphones while they ride their bikes.  But here’s Maddie claiming her bunk:

And here’s a shot of the cottage:

And here’s a shot of Didi that evening, wondering where the littlest human of the pack had gone and why we weren’t all out sniffing around to find her.

But we weren’t worried because we just knew she’d be like this the next morning. . .

Morfar was with us on and off through late summer and early fall, and got this picture of us Skyping Nana and Pop Pop.  Clearly a very serious discussion was underway!

The household arrangement is that Trine generally handles the mice and birds that the cats and dogs sometimes leave around, whether wholly or in parts.  I’m the go-to guy for spiders.  But I have to admit I feel like I’m getting the short end of the stick when I come across a spider like this one, who was very nearly the size of a mouse:

This year’s Danish summer consisted of five gorgeous days spread out at wild intervals between June and August.  It was a cold, wet spring that by mid August was already transitioning into a cool, wet autumn was upon us.

“Wet” is sort of an understatement.  One day in August the sky unleashed about a month’s worth of rainy-season rain on us, and it was too much for the house: we sprang a leak in the bathroom.  (This isn’t a great picture, it’s more a note for the permanent record.)

August 9th marked the 20th anniversary of Trine and me being together, and the 13th anniversary of our wedding.

The seventh anniversary is the Pickling Anniversary, right?

Yes, the joy of pickles in the states — crispy, crunchy, Vlasic kosher dill pickles — had made pickleless life in Danmark unbearable to me, so I found an online recipe for same that seemed relatively simple, quick, and easy.  The experiment above was actually a wild success: we had spectacular pickles for two days, but the brine turned on day three and that was that.

I’m going to keep playing around with the recipe until I get it just right, then I’ll share it.  If you want to try before I get around to that, however, you can find it on the “foodie with family” website, in an article called “Homemade-Claussen-Knock-Off-Pickles.”  (I’ve also now given you enough information to find the recipe online with a simple search engine query.  No outbound links in the blog, remember!)

There’s no real reason to include the picture below in a blog about Molli and Maddie (and pickles), but it really felt like a Poltergeist moment: I kept expecting that weird formation in the middle of the cloud to emerge as a fully-formed face.  It was fascinating and terrifying, but in the end it never did quite come together.

Peaceful: a walk with Didi in Hareskov.

Creepy: a walk with Didi in Hareskov where she points into the dark pit of the Great Hole Tree and growls for five minutes.

…then runs up beside you with her tail between her legs.

Molli draws stuff like this free hand:

Two years ago I made the horrible mistake of trimming away all these stupid creeper branches that were jutting out in all directions from the alley garden: as Trine later informed me, those would have been our berry-producing plants a year later.  So last year I let the intrusive branches grow unrestrained, and it paid off:

I can see it’s not so impressive when reduced to fit the blog format, but this is a beautiful picture of Didi:

I spent a whole Saturday afternoon trying to find (so I could tar) the leak we had sprung in the bathroom ceiling, but ultimately failed.  There were no obvious cracks of any kind on the roof, and subsequent rains have produced no leaks.

But Maddie thought being on the roof looked like about the coolest thing in the world, so I got her up there with me.

And I noticed yet another problem:

What kind of animal crawls around on chimneys and scratches, chews, or claws out the mortar between the bricks?  And what’s to be done about it?

I don’t know, but now that it’s noted in the permanent record I’m sure we’ll figure it out eventually.

Trine playing with Didi in the woods: she’s doing it to distract Didi from the deer that had just gone racing by.  Didi had at first given chase, but ultimately stopped to respond to Trine’s call.  I have to say, I was awed: if I had been alone with Didi, she never would have come back to me.

A delivery guy left this note with a package I’d ordered.  If everyone acted like this guy, the world would be an infinitely better place.  (Translation below.)

“Hi Greg.  Left package for you on the terrace.  Kind regards, [Signature].  PS Have a nice day!”

Cost to him of writing a friendly note with a kind wish and a smiley face: nothing.  Improvement it made in my and Trine’s day: immeasurable.  This is something anyone can do, free and easy.  It was a great reminder that niceness is contagious.

At the end of August I was off to Strömstad for the Dialog Conference, but after last year’s experience none of us wanted to take the bus.  So we made it a road trip.

It was just Mads:

And Louise:

…and me.  Strömstad is on the west coast of Sweden just a little south of what would be a horizontal line across the Scandinavian peninsula between Oslo and Stockholm.  It’s about 500 km north of us.  Mads drove us up to Helsingør, where we caught the ferry:

…and not long afterwards I got behind the wheel and drove the rest of the way.  And I drove all the way back.  I love driving, and once you get above Skåne the driving in Sweden is a lot of fun: lots of hills and curves to keep it interesting, and gorgeous scenery to keep you engaged.

But here, let Life360 help with the geography:

I don’t want to pollute the blog with a lot of pictures that have nothing to do with the girls, but I did take some pictures for them, and I’ll share a sampling of them.

Here, for example, is the greatest “blend yourself” candy outlet I’ve ever seen:

And here, from the hotel we stayed at, is proof that the Danish summer is not the worst summer in Scandinavia:

I loved this placard in the elevator:

Translation: “When should I have my breakast?  Nice or hectic atmosphere? GREEN: Nice atmosphere.  YELLOW: hurried atmosphere.  RED: hectic atmosphere.”  And times are provided for when each of those atmospheres is most likely to be encountered.

And you have to love the Swedish signage for the “Ironing Room:”

It’s like rain on your wedding day, right?

I took a lot of pictures of the scenery.  They’re boring: coastal Sweden looks like coastal Maine.  So I include this one shot from a little solo hike I took one morning as representative of the eight pictures just like it that I have now deleted from this  post:

For more stunning photographs of coastal Sweden, see your own photo collections of coastal Maine.

Pittsburgh aside, every address I’ve had my entire life has been within a few miles (max) of a great body of water.  And apart from L.A., the water has always been to my east, and therefore the place where the sun rises.

So I still find a special pleasure in watching the sun set over the water.

(That’s probably why the post from one of our recent Oslo sailings included about thirty pictures of the sun setting over Skaggerak.)

Enough of the scenery.

Torben and Mads — the former directors of Responsive and Adnuvo, respectively.  I am probably the common thread that requires the “former” in both of their titles.  Everything is my fault!

Yet again: awed by the amount of champagne and wine assembled for the dinner out on the island: this was one of three or four such stations in the dinner tent (which seated about 500, so it’s not like there was too much wine — in fact, there wasn’t enough; it ran out about ten minutes before it was supposed to).

Me with Louise:

Once again, the incredible Swedish shellfish soup (the “wok” is big enough to bathe in):

I sent this pic to the girls to let them know I was almost on my way home:

They sky and sea should be blue, I know.  But there’s something appealing about gray on gray:

I think it’s insane that the sight of Hamlet’s castle now makes me think, “ah, I’m home.”

Weirdly, that seems to be the same emotional response aroused in Didi by the sight of the waters of Hareskov:

And, lest I forget, the picture I texted to the girls that made them most jealous of my business trip:

# # #

Believe it or not, that’s about it for the past couple of months.

The biggest news of the season, though, had nothing to do with the girls and everything to do with their father.

On Monday, the 25th of September, I got a letter from the Immigration Ministry informing me that my application for citizenship had been processed and that I had been approved for the final step of the process: my name will be written into a law that is expected to be passed by parliament in April 2018, and I can expect a final answer at the earliest in July 2018.

There is absolutely no reason to believe anyone in parliament will object to my citizenship (note to self: keep mouth shut for seven more months!), so I fully expect to be a Danish citizen sometime next summer.

And since I’m already a permanent resident, I am finally done with all the paperwork and hassle of immigration.  Even in my worst-case scenario, I’m entitled to live and work in Denmark as long as I please without filling out another form, standing in another line, or spending hours at the awful immigration center.

Whew!

Meanwhile, Maddie is loving every minute of her hectic schedule of school, gymnastics, dance, and handball, and Molli is doubling down on her obsession with handball.  She had an overnight with her new class this weekend, and when I picked her up she gushed that she loved her new class and that the school had done a great job of reshuffling the 7th grade classes because everyone in every class seemed to think their new class was better than their old class. 

So I guess we no longer need to “prayFor6B.”