Toward Wonderland

We’re rushing toward Christmas vacation as I pull this post together, just as we were rushing toward Thanksgiving as I worked  up the last one.

But before we get to that, I want to give a shout out to #33, who has so far been as delicious on our plates as she was obnoxious on the pasture.  We haven’t any high end cuts yet, but we’ve had a lot of ground beef and round (chopped into strips for fajitas).  So far, so good.

Earlier this fall, when Didi went into heat and needed walks instead of romps, I’d gotten into the habit of walking Didi as soon as I “clocked out” of work each weekday, usually heading out around 15:00. We have a nice little route, on dry days, down to the lake, along its path for a bit, then up to the streets and home.

These pictures are already a month old, and were probably taken around 15:30.  If I took the same pictures at that time today, they’d be nothing but darkness.

We celebrated Thanksgiving the Saturday before the actual holiday this year.  This was done on purpose to set it further apart from Maddie & Mormor’s birthdays and First Advent.

Our only guest was Moster Mette.

I sous-vided the turkey again this year, and once again it came out beautifully:

The dark meat was perfect: one wing and one leg per bag, along with some thyme and sage and salt and pepper, bathed for 15 hours at 64.5C.  It’s not very appealing when you take them out of the bath, but 15 minutes under the broiler (after warming them back up in the bath as the white meat finished) made them perfect. The white meat was also juicy and delicious, but I didn’t put any herbs or seasoning in with it, so it was kind of bland.

As for the skin, that gets peeled off the bird at the very beginning, then tossed in a bag and thrown in the fridge until show time.  Then you just press it out flat between sheets of baking paper, with some weight on top to keep them flat, sprinkle a little salt and pepper over it, and roast for 15-20 minutes.

Unfortunately I gave the skin just a little more time than it should have had in the oven, maybe one or two minutes too much, so it had a faint carbon taste to it.  Not enough to ruin it, but enough to make it not be the ambrosia it was last time.

So the menu was pretty basic: the turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy,  Stovetop stuffing (purchased in Estero last February), and green beans.

I made sure to get a shot of every guest at the table.

Pumpkin pie and apple crumble for desert.

Did you notice the burned crust on the pumpkin pie?

You can’t get pie crusts here like you can in America–you know, the foil tin with a frozen crusts ready for action.  I’ve tried many different ways to get a good crust, and none have worked.  This  year’s effort was to crumble Danish crackers that are kind of like graham crackers with a bunch of butter and use that as a crust.  This is apparently something Danish cooks can manage, but I can’t do it without the butter from the crust bubbling over and burning hell out of everything.  If I use less butter, the crust doesn’t hold together.  So I get dusty crust, or burned crust.

So I give up: from now on I’ll use the prepacked pastry dough I can get at any Danish supermarket.  It’s not right, but it’s not wrong either.  And it’ll have to do until Denmark discovers the Graham Cracker.

I don’t remember what’s going on in the next two pictures, but I love the sequence.

That’s a wrap for Thanksgiving. 

We nowmove on to a Home Maintenance note for the permanent record: this is how we clear the pipe to the garage for the winter once we turn off the water: one of us pumps like hell from fyrrumet while the other stands by the garage and watches the water being forced out of the garage faucet.

On November 23 we went to see a Chris McDonald event downtown.  He’s written a couple of books about achieving and maintaining balance in life (my interpretation, not his own), drawing on physiology, neurology, and the behavioral sciences.  Trine had bought the tickets ages ago, and had been talking it up to us for months. We were all a little wary, but he was the rarest of birds: smart, funny, entertaining, and genuinely insightful.  The girls were rapt through the whole thing: I sat next to Maddie, and her attention never wavered.  Neither did Molli’s: she even suggested she might be interested in reading his book.

After the event we crossed the street for dinner in Tivoli, which is  still hauntingly empty.  (And abruptly closed for the season about a week later due to Denmark’s corona situation, so although we didn’t know it at the time this would be our only visit of the Christmas season.)

It may seem indulgent to include so many pictures of the weirdly depeopled Tivoli, but as I’ve said on our previous 2020 visits: it’s so unnatural that I look forward to someday being able to scroll back to these pictures whenever I grouse about how crowded it is in Tivoli.

You can’t really tell, but that’s Maddie and Molli about six or seven rows behind me.  The irony is, when they asked why I was sitting so far ahead of them, I said it was so I could get pictures of them.

Oops.

I’m astonished at the quality of pictures I get out of my new(ish) iPhone.  I don’t know what kind of balancing magic it’s doing with those three lenses, but the way it captures the moon peeking through the clouds over the bright lights of Tivoli at night is astonishing, at not something any amount of expertise would have let me do with the Olympus.

Even the city outside of Tivoli was deserted: here’s a view looking back at the entrance from about 100 meters away.

And see the city streets around Vesterport Station:

Out of the blue one day at school (while she was still physically attending school) Maddie asked me for “a copy of that pictures of you and mor that used to be in your old bedroom, and I can’t tell you why.”

So the pic was on my phone’s camera roll, and I include it here as… a reminder of how much weight I have to lose.  Sigh.  (It’s from our first summer in Denmark.)

Weirdest event of a weird month: I encountered this one morning in late November while I was working at home and everyone else was at work or school:

I later asked Maddie why she had left her boots in Didi’s bed.

She hadn’t.

I asked Trine and Molli if they’d done it as a joke, or out of anger or something.  Nope.

Didi had apparently brought both boots into her bed independently.  Something she’d never done before, and hasn’t since.

Weird.

And speaking of Didi, on November 26, 2020, she finally noticed a deer before I did.

Now we’re up to Mormor’s birthday.  I’ve got a mix of iPhone and Olympus pictures.  I’ll present them without commentary because not much is needed.

Oh, okay, hold on.  A little explanation for the following series: we played a trick-based card game that involved bidding matchsticks.

I should also note that the evening was divided into two distinct portions: an early segment where it was just Mormor, Jørgen, and the four of us, followed by a dinner with additional guests (who need no introduction here).

There was a bit of a lull between segments.

Once again, I took a selfie on the off-chance it would be the only picture of me (once again, it was):

Another note for the permanent record: this was an excellent single malt, and on the low-end price wise:

We had a tease on November 29: just a couple of days from Maddie’s birthday (on which snow is always fervently desired), we had the first flurries of the year:

Unfortunately, as of this writing, it was also the last snow of the year.

The 29th also happened to be first Advent:

December first was a Tuesday, and since those are Trine’s day off I took advantage of the car being available to go into the office for part of the day.  It was my first time there in… a long time.

What a ghost town!

It was great to be in the office, though, and with a little lobbying I managed to arrange that I could start coming in once a week until things opened up a bit more.  (We apparently forgot it was 2020, but we’ll get to that later.)

Meanwhile, thanks to Didi, peace among pines.

I love this next shot of the denuded oaks:

Ladies and gentleman: Maddie Marie Kammer Nagan, age 12:

It was another lousy corona birthday: the night before, Trine got a call from the handball coach: the guy she’d been sitting next to at the judge’s bench for Maddie’s handball game on the previous Saturday had tested positive.

That meant she had to isolate herself from us, get double-tested, etc.  It meant Mormor & Jørgen couldn’t attend Maddie’s birthday dinner.  Also, Molli had to work on Maddie’s birthday.

So Maddie’s birthday dinner on her 12th birthday was just with her father and her (masked) mother, whom she couldn’t even hug.

We did everything we could to make it as nice an evening as possible (and quickly scheduled a birthday lunch for that Saturday, on the assumption that Trine would by then have her negative test in the bag).

Maddie took it very well, although she could have showed a little more enthusiasm for her presents.  (That was a joke.  As you’ll see, she almost definitely could not have.)

At the birthday girl’s request, cake was waived in favor of build-your-own-sundaes.

Happy twelfth birthday, sweet Maddie Marie! And look on the bright side: out of all your relatives on every side of the family, you’re the most likely to have a normal birthday in 2021.

Before we get to Maddie’s birthday lunch that Saturday, let’s take another deep breath with Didi.

To  keep things simple and stress-free, with the birthday girl’s blessing we ordered madder for the birthday lunch, and they were beautiful. Fish filet, roast beef, and flæskesteg sandwiches.

And thanks to Trine’s negative tests, Maddie was able to have her full complement of guests. We even timed it so Molli could participate and still make it to work on time.

For the permanent record: I love the vacuum & shred function of our leaf blower. Look how nicely it tidied up the evening terrace:

That Monday, December 6, Mette Frederiksen put 38 kommuner (the entire capital region, plus the Odense and Aarhus areas) into partial lockdown: Maddie and Molli were done attending physical classes, and my “once a week in the office” was over before I even got my second Tuesday.

From Didi’s perspective, I guess 2020 is the best year ever.  She’s almost never home alone.

It was like March all over again, except now we all knew from experience how to handle at-home learning.

For the historical record: thanks  to covid, it took Nana & Pop-Pop’s birthday card three full weeks to make it from Estero to Værløse.

Trine and I had to run some errands downtown one afternoon.  It was “crowded” by 2020 standards, but in a normal year you’d only see Strøget looking like this in December if a neutron bomb had gone off a few days before.

Jørgen issued a “challenge” to Maddie on her birthday: he had a picture and suggested they both do a painting from it on same-sized canvases and then mount them together.  I haven’t yet seen Jørgen’s, but Maddie recently finished hers and I’m sort of floored by the quality, especially her perfect coloring (they’re acrylic paints, so she’s mixing the colors herself):

Note for the canine record: it’s the last few weeks that Didi’s developed a horrible habit of running way too far away while romping in the woods (she’s the little white smear against the building top center):

Behold our 2020 Christmas tree!

We bought it at Silvan this year, instead of the place in the woods, and as of this writing it’s already so dry that we’ve decided not to risk lighting candles on it. We did hang the candles as usual, but they’ll never be lit. The living room is sprinkled with pine needles. Traditionally I take the tree down on January second, but I suspect this tree may not may it to 2021.

Ah well, as you’ll see in the next post, it’s very pretty anyway.

And now we’ve reached third Advent:

Guess who got an anti-acne mask for Third Advent?

This year’s Christmas Calendar of choice was, by the way, Julefeber.

It’s a complicated story that I won’t try to summarize here, involving ballet and homelessness and elves and identity theft, but it’s been very cozy watching it at 19:30 every night of the month so far.  Maddie, Trine, and I are fully engaged.

Here on the brink of launching her own (part-time) private practice, Trine’s computer became so hard to use as to be essentially useless.  So we had to get her a new one: a Lenovo Yoga C740.  Here’s the grand unpacking:

Out of the blue one day I noticed the one-way signs had been resurrected down by the lake.

And just a day or two later, Mette Frederiksen put the whole country into a hardcore lockdown. The details are tiresome (it’s all tiresome), but basically she shut down all malls and indoor shopping centers, and all retail from Christmas through January 3, and closed down children’s institutions for the young (4th grade and under) that were still attending classes.

So forget about covid and lockdowns: here are Trine and Maddie making sugar cookies:

A day or two later, Maddie made oatmeal-cocoa “cookies” for her class, which was of course online, so I’m not sure where they all went. Maddie did however rush down breathlessly to the basement one day to tell me, “oh my god, they are so good with a little peanut butter!”

(And by god, she was right.)

This blog has featured many pictures from many crazy julefrokoster over the years.  Here are some shots from my December 18 “corona equivalent” event this year: online Christmas Bingo with our director calling the numbers on a 250-participant Microsoft Teams meeting.

I never stood a chance:

# # #

So here we are: today is the 21st of December. Shortest day of the year: we get more light every day for the next six months.

I’m moonlighting a little by finishing this up while working from home; Trine’s already off on her last work day of the year; Molli and Maddie are snoozing away upstairs. (Molli has classes today but not until later in the morning.)

It doesn’t look like we’re going to have a white Christmas: the forecast is for low enough temperatures for snow, but no precipitation.

The infection numbers have been dropping precipitously the past couple of days, from a high of about 4500 new cases on Friday to 3500 Saturday and 2800 Sunday. It’s dramatic enough to be suspicious, but if the numbers continue dropping, even at a lower rate, maybe we can go into the new year with a little more normalcy. Vaccinations will be starting later this week, so there’s hope we’re finally on the way out of this crap.

In any case, we’re ready for some time off. Merry Christmas, and here’s to the end of a horrible year!