It’s been a weird fall.
With the Cubs winning the World Series within a week of Donald Trump being elected president, the four horsemen themselves are surely saddling up under light flurries in Hell.
But I wasn’t talking about the wider world, I was talking about the very narrow microworld of our four little lives. And I have nothing in specific in mind when it say it’s been weird; it things just feel off.
Probably it just feels weird because we’re about to plunge into winter and the holidays and our Portugal vacation makes me feel like it was summer just a few weeks ago. I feel like we should still be catching up on back-to-school shopping and raking leaves, rather than getting the snowblower primed and fretting over Christmas presents.
One very ordinary thing about this fall was our getting the usual extraordinary school pictures of the gorgeous subjects of this blog.
Maddie’s second grade shot:
And Molli’s sixth grade shot:
I ought to just leave it at that, because photographically speaking it’s obviously going to be all downhill from there. Content wise, too.
But you know me. Downhill we go. . .
(Weirdly, there are just two other pictures of the girls from this month, both of Maddie. But there are videos of both girls, so I hope that compensates.)
The following picture doesn’t look like much:
It’s just a shot of the back yard. Nothing fancy. Except it was taken less than 24 hours after we’d been swimming outdoors, amid palm and olive trees, with four layers of lotion to protect us from the brutal sun and heat.
We couldn’t get Didi home from the kennel until the Monday after our Saturday return from Portugal. Trine and I brought her home together and she went absolutely berserk. Neither of us had ever seen her like that. She ran around the house, whimpering and squealing, rushing from one favorite spot to another, picking up one toy and prancing gleefully around with it until the next caught her eye. Here she is zooming out into the back yard, most recently rediscovered chew-toy in mouth, for the first time in ten days. The exuberance is palpable!
She carried that exuberance with her for nearly 24 hours. I was beginning to worry that it wasn’t just exuberance but total psychological collapse when she finally settled back into more normal behavior.
Over the course of the fall Maddie has become so hooked on reading that she begs us to let her stay up just a little longer every night to read in bed. To the extent that this is not an unfamiliar sight:
(Actually, it’s unfamiliar in the sense that most of the books she reads these days have very few pictures.)
This year Maddie did another vlog of her annual Halloween pumpkin carving. You can download the video here. (In some browsers it will stream very nicely from the link, in some it may force you to download. It’s stored, like everything on this blog, on my old justmorons site, and is encoded not to allow robots to follow it anyway, so it’s a “safe” link.) Here’s a screengrab from the video.
Molli Malou doesn’t vlog anything, but her own pumpkin (on the left, below) was very cool this year, too.
Didi usually curls up into a tight, adorable little ball on her mattress; but sometimes she just kinda lets it all hang out.
There is something so cheering, even uplifting, about watching her romp through the woods.
Her utter abandon always gives me the sense that rest of us are doing something wrong. Imagine walking in to work with that kind of zeal? Or bringing that energy to a parent meeting at school? Or emanating that kind of exuberance while doing laundry? Or sitting down to a family dinner with that kind of enthusiasm?
The weather changed dramatically from late October into early November: temperatures plummeted below zero for a few consecutive days. Probably because Hell was busily freezing over:
When I took this picture from our window at work I thought, wow, you can almost see the cold. Looking at it now, at this size, I’m not so sure.
Like everyone else, we knew exactly what to expect from the American election on November 8. I even took a screen grab of what seemed to me a reasonable projection of the likely results posted on William F. Buckley’s National Review, which can hardly be accused of left-wing bias. Granted, they were ground zero of the NeverTrump movement (I don’t want to use hashtags in here), but even so the prediction reflected the conventional wisdom on November 8.
Trine and I watched the election through the night. The falling snow ought to have been our tip off that strange things were afoot.
And yes, in the end Donald Trump, known in our house as Tronald Dump (thanks, Maddie!), won the election. He will probably be an awful president, but America’s still a great country and we’ve survived worse.
The day after the election (by local standards), I attended a work-related conference and although most of it was jarringly foolish utopianism, I did get to talk to Pepper the robot.
In the aftermath of the election, I was sure glad we had Euro CNN to keep us up-to-date on the breaking news stories as they evolved!
The weather warmed back up from the freezy snowiness for a while, but mornings still sometimes offered very frosty conditions.
Beautifully frosty:
…and deliciously frosty…
One November Sunday Trine, Maddie, and I went undercover to a Lyngby-Ydun handball match to get a video that the Værløse club could use as game prep for their own match against Lyngby the following weekend. After our spy assignment, we recorded a video of Værløse versus AG Håndbold: you can see that video at the following link:
https://www.youtube DOT com/watch?v=OUAXjo0erbE
(Obviously you will need to change the stuff between youtube and com to “youtube.com” — I just can’t have links to youtube in here or the spiders will be all over and our privacy will be gone.)
Reminder: Værløse is blue and Molli Malou is #3.
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It warmed my heart to see this book in the stack of books Maddie had taken out from the school library:
It was the book that had inspired Molli Malou’s brilliant book report a few years ago (“What is the title of the book? BEARS. What is the book about? BEARS. Describe the book. IT WAS GOOD AND FUN. Tell the class why you describe it that way. BECAUSE IT JUST IS.”)
I was also surprised to see the book, since Maddie is right now tearing through the Roald Dahl oevre and Bears seemed a few degrees of magnitude less challenging, but I don’t believe Dahl has much about bears in any of his books, so maybe this was more of a topical choice.
I’m hating myself right now because we had one of the best Thanksgivings we’ve ever had in Denmark this year, and I don’t have a single picture of a human being or turkey or anything. I believe Molli Malou took a shot of the turkey before it was fully roasted, but I’ve got nothing.
Here’s our table, though.
And wait, I lied, I forgot I had this bad shot with Maddie in it! (We’re just waiting for our guests at this point.)
And here we are ready for desert. (Pecan pie and apple crisp, with plenty of whipped cream, ice cream, and all the fixin’s for Irish coffee.)
I said no human beings. I didn’t say no living creatures.
Thanksgiving was last weekend. It’s November 26 as I write this. Tomorrow is First Sunday of Advent. Monday is Mormors birthday. Friday is Maddie’s birthday. Christmas lunches and parties are popping up all over the calendar. It is time to hunker down for the gauntlet run of December.
So I better do something more productive than blogging…
