På Beløbet

It’s New Year’s Eve, and the first order of business today is to lay in some provisions. One grocery store in our town is open. The others are closed today, tomorrow, and the 2nd. I’ve been on vacation for a little over a week, and a level of dissipation has set in. We have all been staying up late, waking up late, hanging around too much, reading, watching too much tv, and scurrying out of the house at 2 or so, hoping to catch a few minutes of daylight before the sun goes down.

I have been trying to incorporate more walking in my daily life, so have been doing things like walking to the grocery store or the train station instead of taking the bus. The weather has been pretty cooperative so far — not especially cold or rainy. But these little trips to the store have pretty much punctuated the vacation. I took the kids into Copenhagen the other day, in an effort to visit a museum of photography, and it was closed through the new year, a fact they failed to mention on their Web site. So we walked around the pedestrian shopping streets a bit, checked out the few shops that were open, had a slice of pizza, and went home. Last night we went to see the Golden Compass, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. The kids have been in quite good spirits, and I think for Mabel, this is due to not having to go to school and deal with not understanding, and the boredom and isolation that involves. Nick is happy because he just likes to be home.

I failed to get a good pic of the kids when I tried on Christmas. But here are some nice ones from October, before they became all wintry and yellow, from a walk we took at Fredensborg palace, where Queen Margrethe spends her springs and falls.

Happy New Year everybody.

There have been a number of changes since the last time I wrote — back in the days before John decided to move to Ireland to be near his daughter and stuck his server and other worldly belongings on a freighter that may finally be nearing Dublin. For one, Mabel has switched schools. She’s in full-time Danish school now, with about 23 kids, and little English support. She can walk to school in about 10 minutes, which is a big improvement over the 40 minutes and 2 buses it was taking. So far, the school experience has been “fine.” There are 15 boys and 7 girls in the class, and they have apparently not discovered each other as friends or otherwise. The girls have been very nice to Mabel, but they are very feminine and into horses and she’s not especially excited about those things, and she still doesn’t feel like she’s fluent in Danish.  After the Christmas break, Nick will start at this school too, but his teacher is taking it a bit more slowly because he is anxious about change and because she wants to go with him, and be there to help him the first couple of days, and because when he leaves, there will only be one kid left in the class, Noi, the Thai girl who is his close buddy. Apparently Nick never speaks English at school anymore. That’s great progress. He brings home Danish books from the school library, for pleasure reading, and recently told me that the thing he likes about living here is learning a new language. So in that sense, things are going pretty well. In the sense that his teacher thinks he has ADHD, things are less great.

The other change is that James is working a full-time contract in my group for a few months, which means we are spending a lot of time together. This has its pros and cons. Of course, it’s great experience for him, and he is really happy to be going to work everyday with purpose. And I rather enjoy having someone to chat with during the commute and am ecstatic about the added cash.  We have to escort Nick partway to school, so we are getting to work fresh and early. But I feel like the weeks are so much longer now, and I think it’s because we are gone for about 10 hours every day, with the getting there early and doing a little grocery shopping on the way home. I used to just go to work and come home. Also, we have to do a whole new rejiggering of duties. It turns out I can’t just lie around like a husband from the 60s, with my drink and newspaper, waiting for the wife to finish the dinner and take care of the shopping and the laundry and getting the kids through their homework. I knew this day would come, I wanted this day to come, and I wouldn’t trade it for the financial strain that is the alternative, but as a result, I find myself cooking a pot roast, for about the second time ever. I didn’t purchase this roast, and probably wouldn’t have, but I am not so much doing the shopping as wandering the aisles while James selects the items. Then I find out later what, exactly, I’m supposed to be cooking. I took a look at this slab of beef, then got out the dictionary to narrow it down, and my mom’s old Joy of Cooking that’s coming apart in clumps, and with some heavy sighing and cross referencing and improvising of ingredients and converting of temperatures, got the thing in the oven.

Stan has kindly offered to let me hitch a ride on his server, and helped me get set up. I gave the blog a new name and a new look, and those things pretty much sapped my creative energy. Okay, the look part is a template and so it was a matter of choosing from hundreds. “På beløbet?” is a question you are asked just about every time you purchase something with your debit card here, especially at the grocery store, and means, “on the amount.” I don’t really know what it signifies as the name of my blog, but I enjoy it.

While you are in the neighborhood, I really recommend checking out Stan’s photos of Copenhagen. They are beautiful: http://www.rezio.net/photos/index.html