Welcome to the first family blog post of 2025.
It’s early March as I write this. The long lapse since the last post wasn’t for want of time, but want of pictures. It was a pretty slow winter. Maddie in school, the rest of us at work, the weather horrible: it’s not an eventful or photogenic time of year.
We’ll start with an early January shot of Emma, still recovering in her body stocking.
She’s doing very well now. The body stocking came off probably not long after that picture was taken and she’s been given a clean bill of health. The bald spots around her injuries, where they shaved big swaths of hair off her, are starting to fill in with hair, but she still has a kind of “Bill the Cat” look to her, so out of respect to her feelings there are no more pictures.
Here is a picture of Molli Malou that she sent us from a restaurant at some point this winter. Don’t recall when or why, but it’s lovely and she at least will be able to remember, so here it is.
On January 20, AP Pension moved from the old building across the street from Nordhavn Station to a new one out in the new part of Nordhavn. It’s a little further commute for me—an extra 4-5 minutes by bike, and extra 10-15 if I take the Metro from Nordhavn the single stop to Orientkaj—but the building is brand new and modern.
I took one last shot of my old desk (bottom left) before leaving the old office for the last time:
We had one of our bi-monthly lunches with the Rasmussen clan. I never seem to get many pictures of those: this time I at least got one of the two Carnivores (Holger and Trine):
And the huge hunk of prime rib from our cow being beautifully seared.
(Seriously, that’s how sedate our January was, there are so few pictures of interest I’m reduced to including a food shot.)
This next pic pretty much captures the feel of January.
Trine and I put a lot of effort into the wreck that is our basement. The picture below is from a fairly early point in that period: I’d finally mounted the television on the wall and we’d cleared out enough crap that it could be viewed from the couch against the back wall. (Those are the Christmas socks I got from Molli on my feet.)
Fun fact: the television fell off the wall a week or so later, but by then there were (fortunately!) shelves beneath it, so it just slid down the wall and came to a rest on them. It crushed some cheap plastic crap that had been sitting on the top of the shelves, but that was the only damage done.
We were able to watch the January 20th transition of power in America:
And watched in awe from abroad as “the Trump dance” suddenly became a thing in America.
As I said, the AP Pension move was over the weekend of the 20th. Here’s the view from the desk I use now:
It’s a free seating environment, which I hate philosophically—and which I think produces anxiety and discomfort among employees—but since I arrive in the office before 99.5% of my colleagues, I do manage to get that same desk every day.
Meanwhile, Mormor let us know one of her neighbors had a nice couch she wanted to get rid of and would give to free to anyone willing to haul it out of her house. We paid movers to do it, but the price was only about 10% of the couch’s value. . . and none of us had to risk a serious back injury. (She was in a fourth floor apartment in Frederiksberg and we wanted it down in our basement, so a fall down the stairs was always a distinct possibility.)
Didi had gone into heat around the holidays, as I think I mentioned, so this pic is from what was actually her first romp in the woods since late December.
In February we attended Bebe’s 60th birthday. (Bebe is the wife of Joachim Hagemeister.) I didn’t get many pictures, but these two at least include Bebe herself (the woman just barely perceptible to the right of the piano in back) and half of Trine:
I got roped into a game of hide and seek with Jesper and Gitte’s kid, and he persuaded me to hide in some nasty crawl space on which I bumped my head and cut it open—just a minor scratch, but enough that it produced a really irritating scab on my scalp, so I spent a lot of this winter scratching my head.
We also had a fiber optic internet connect installed (so these next few pics are for the permanent record):
And then we’re right back to yet another picture from yet another Didi romp.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that ended up being the last snowless day for quite a while.
…which wasn’t such a bad thing, given that on February 20 Trine and I took off for Portugal.
The first day there was cool and rainy, so we spent it shopping. This picture is of Trine driving us back to the house from the mall, and was just taken as a shorthand way to let Maddie know why Trine wasn’t answering her phone call.
At the request of my body, which hadn’t been able to bike in quite a while due to the snow and ice in Denmark, I took a hike every morning. I won’t bore you with the excessive pictures I took on those walks—if you want generic pictures of the Algarve countryside, you’ll find better ones on Google anyway—but I thought I’d include a few.
Like this one, of the house next to Morfar’s:
And this one, just for a contrast to the weather we’d left behind—it was only about 18-20C most days (after that first cloudy rainy day), but it felt like 25+ and the sun was searing:
One of my hikes took me to the summit of the hill behind Morfar’s house.
There was some old British guy up there—he was at least 80, probably closer to 85, and he had stopped at the “old windmill” to rest while his (presumably younger) wife had forged ahead down a trail that a local guy just half a kilometer back and warned me explicitly not to follow because “it’s too wild.”
I kind of doubted that, but didn’t feel like taking chances so ended up going back down the way I’d come up. (And I didn’t tell the old Brit about the warning I’d received about the path his wife had taken.)
He was kind enough to save me the indignity of taking a selfie right in front of him:
Here’s the wingless old mill:
And another shot in which the lake out toward Alportel is clearly visible:
Trine and I wondered about that lake, because Google maps didn’t show any nearby. It was only later in the trip, on one of our sojourns into SB Alportel, that we drove by and realized: it’s not a lake, but a vast spread of solar panels.
Pity: a nearby lake would have been so much nicer!
Just a pic I think I sent back to the girls that morning to show that cloudy rainy Portugal had reverted to form.
We made a little trip into SB Alportel one day just because it was nearby and we’d never been there before.
Not the liveliest town at the time of our visit. (Morfar says “in season” it’s actually crazy crowded.)
The real estate postings are always interesting reading.
In the middle of a roundabout in the middle of town there’s a real cork press from the town’s past. (It’s still one of the great cork producing regions of the world.)
It’s not super photogenic or anything, and we all already know about the importance of cork to the Algarve, I just thought it was interesting that they plopped an actual cork press—cork inclusive—into the middle of their roundabout, rather than a statue or memorial of some kind. I guess the Portuguese climate lets you get away with things that wouldn’t work very well in countries with actual weather.
It had a plaque:
I copied that photo into GPT for a translation:
TRIBUTE FROM THE MUNICIPALITY OF SÃO BRÁS DE ALPORTEL TO THE CORK SECTOR
100 years of the Municipality 1914–2014
The history of the creation of the municipality of São Brás de Alportel, in 1914, is closely linked to the cork sector, which at the end of the 19th century had already played a decisive role in the economic and social development of this parish. Men, such as José Dias Sancho, were key figures in the growth of the São Brás cork industry.
Old Cork Press
This machine was used in cork factories to press and bundle cork planks before they were sold.
The cork bundles were tied together in cylindrical packages that could be easily transported.
—(June 2015)—
We couldn’t find a nice café or restaurant, but we did find a “Chinese Shop” that had basically. . . everything. This picture gives a sense of its orderliness, but not of its magnitude:
We bought a bunch of cheap stupid crap we needed, cheaply, and headed back to Casa Verde.
We stopped for lunch on the little rural road leading back, a place called Ze Dias that apparently used to be a disco but is now a popular grill.
Our review: good grilled food at a good price, but noisy and crowded. (For the record.)
We actually had a couple of afternoons so sunny and warm we were able to lie out and sun ourselves—to the extent that, every time, I ended up having to retreat into the shade. I call that a massive victory over winter!
On our way into Almancil for dinner one night we actually had to stop for a train crossing. We’ve crossed those tracks a thousand times, and this was maybe the second time ever we actually had to stop for one.
Before dinner, however, we were having a look at an interesting property.
Case Markus!
Morfar is thinking of making this his new home. It isn’t even on the market yet, but his real estate friend Vincent has been handling the property for its owner, whose current tenant died in January.
The late tenant was a Swede named Ursula who was apparently a bit of a hoarder. (I got to learn a lot about Ursula just idly examining the stuff that had been left behind. Interesting woman.) Unfortunately, the property owner is also a bit of a hoarder, and when Ursula died she asked Vincent to move a lot of stuff she had stored elsewhere into the house. So it had been full to bursting with stuff by early February. Vincent had apparently made some progress hauling some of the stuff out, but as this (wide angle) photo of the living room illustrates, he still had a long way to go:
We ended up paying the property another visit a couple of days later, and we photographed and videoed the hell out of it. I’m not sharing any of that here firstly because at this point it’s just a stupid house with no connection to our family, and secondly because boring.
If it gets more interesting, I reserve the right to dedicate an entire post to all that stuff.
Meanwhile, the girls were (I think) each enjoying our absence in their own way—each with their own Lucas. For reasons I’ll never understand, the main form of communication we got from them through most of the trip came in the form of pictures of their meals.
We had a nice dinner with Vincent at a nice place on the tony outskirts of Almancil called “Republic of Italy.” (In English, just like that, because Almancil is basically a British territory at this point.)
It looked and felt fancy, but at the end of the day its menu was clearly targeted toward British families who like Italian food: a half dozen pasta dishes, a dozen types of pizza, and three meat dishes. Nothing fancy or expensive. But the atmosphere was very, very nice.
It’s harvest time for oranges now.
That’s a picture I took on one of my walks of an orchard just down the road from Casa Verde.
So is this:
That’s a bus stop. It’s different from the kinds of bus stops I’m used to, which is why I took the pic, but you’ll notice there’s a public transportation map on the back wall. I got a full picture of that, but also took a closeup of the area of Portugal we move about in.
(The “Goldra” stop I was at is on the upper red line stretching rightward from the rectangle in the middle of the photo.)
Another picture from the same walk: I’ll never get used to the way the Portuguese just plop their “mini dumps” out on their streets.
Or the number of crumbling ruins on what ought to be prime lots.
(Those last two are the same building, by the way.)
This Sunday walk revealed to me that there was a little café within walking distance of Casa Verde—and that it was closed on Sundays. (I was excited to try it on Tuesday, when it was open, but at 9:30 in the morning its clientele appeared to be limited to local men enjoying their morning beers, so I opted out.)
We took a random drive around the coastal part of Almancil one afternoon and came by these storks in their nest:
More communication from the north:
This next shot is one of the plants in the front yard of Casa Verde. I only took it because I was waiting for Trine and Morfar to come out so we could drive somewhere, I think. But even as I took it, I was thinking: this looks so familiar! But why?
Why indeed:
The Demogorgon from Stranger Things!
The next shot is a selfie: a “before” picture on my way to get my haircut.
(After pictures are coming right up, I swear.)
It’s become kind of a thing for me to get my haircuts out of country. I think the first time I did it out of necessity, the second out of novelty, and since then it’s been habit. But while talking to my Portuguese barber about it (the same guy I went to in November), I realized: it’s because only on vacation to I feel like I have enough free time to bother with a haircut.
Trine was meat shopping in Loulé while I got that haircut. The town was all gussied up for Carnaval.
(Okay, those band statues are always there, but they’re still festive.)
One of these years maybe we’ll have to time a visit to actually check that Carnaval out.
On the way home, we were within about a kilometer of Casa Verde when Trine suddenly burst out laughing.
“Did you see that?” she asked. “That Scooby Dog popping up out of the dumpster chewing on something?”
I had not seen that, but really wanted to, so we turned around to check it out again.
That digusting dog was rummaging around in the dumpster and snacking very happily.
I ask again, explicitly this time: are street-side dumps really a good idea? Are they hygienic?
Here are the after pictures I took—in too much wind, apparently.
Back at Casa Verde, another gorgeous afternoon in the sun:
I think I should sell this next one to Super Bock for advertising:
(Still not a beer drinker anymore, but I will never not think a cold Super Bock by (or in) a pool in the hot Algarve sun is a divine pleasure.)
(. . . even if the pool is low on water and so cold I can barely stand in it.)
Last dinner out of the trip was at Casavostra, a place in Almancil we’ve come to really like.
Note for future reference: the house wine is just fine.
Also for future reference—with apologies for the food shots—Greg will have the clams in broth under pizza dough, thank you (even if its garlicky taste stays with him for 48 hours):
And Trine. . . well, no question what she’ll have:
The Algarve sun is a delight, but the Algarve night sky is nothing to sneeze at, either.
Okay, this is weird: on my last walk of the trip, just a few hundred meters from Casa Verde, I noticed that the weird piles of crap I’d noticed on previous walks were apparently the furnishings for a pack of feral cats.
(Correction: a clowder of cats. I had to look that up. And I also learned that if they’re unfamiliar with each other and just staring each other down, it’s a glaring of cats.)
I know, I know, the pictures are awful, you can barely see the cats. But I tell you, it was creepy the way that clowder kept staring at me.
This apparently stolen car sat abandoned on the shoulder for the duration of our trip:
No more pictures from my walks. Just a picture of the Casa Verde sign on the side of the house, less because it’s an interesting picture than a nice one to have on hand.
Tuesday afternoon Morfar and Vincent invited me to join them with their Tuesday lunch group. We were nine in all. Not a single native Portugueser among us. A lot of wine, and I had a damned good time being shouted at and mocked by the raging liberals of the group. (Only one shouted, but both mocked. Good times! Felt just like. . . the rest of my life, everywhere.)
Here’s an outdoor shot of the restaurant, O Ribeiro in Almancil. (And yes, it was raining.)
Another restaurant picture, taken on the fly out the car window, just because Trine had the clever idea of making a personal catalog of the restaurants we go to and what we think of them so that we can make informed decisions about where to eat on future visits.
We didn’t eat at Piri Piri on this visit, but it’s probably the first visit during which we haven’t in the past few years.
And finally, our final Portuguese sunset of the trip:
And a shot of me that Trine took so slyly I didn’t even know she’d taken it until she texted it to me. By god, I may be reacting to the picture in the picture itself!
That’s actuallyt it. We woke up the next morning, went straight to the airport, were home by about 16:30, and both worked the next two days. And then it was this weekend. This one, right now, the one in which I’m posting this.
So obviously not much has happened since.
As usual, though, a few little random tidbits before this post is really done.
First, an old picture Trine found of her with her cousin Trine. I’m guessing early 80s, based on how old they look and what they’re wearing and how their hair is cut.
Yes, they’re paddling a boat together. (But no, not in Klaus’s pond. “It was just some trip we took,” Trine says.)
My favorite internet image on the month was this one: can you tell where it was taken? I don’t mean the specific place, I mean the type of structure. Some of you, I am sure, will identify it much more quickly than others.
I’m not going to give you the answer right here, because then it might be visible while you’re trying to guess. It’ll be down below, no worries. Keep thinking, if you haven’t figured it out already.
Meanwhile, my second favorite Community Note of all time:
Sorry, it makes me laugh every time. (My favorite community note of all time just isn’t appropriate for a family blog. Even one as half-assed as this.)
That’s really it, now.
So here comes March, and with it my 60th birthday. I’d say I have mixed feelings about that, but I don’t. My feelings aren’t mixed at all. I’m horrified. Sixty is old. It’s not the new 40, or even the new 50, it’s just fucking 60 and that sounds old to me. I don’t feel old. I don’t think I look old. We all know I don’t act old. So why the hell do I have to be old?
Enough about that. I’ll be fine. Like Pop Pop used to say: getting older’s a drag, but it beats the alternative.
Oh—and before I forget: you’ve had enough time to think now so I will either confirm your powers of perception or blow your mind by informing you that you were looking at the interior of a guitar.
See you in my dotage—if I even remember to post!
