Pregnancy, it’s a gas!

Oh, I seem to have written that title incorrectly - it should read, “Pregnancy, it’s all about the gas!”

Seriously, why are you always hearing about the swollen ankles?  I mean, I’m sure I’ll complain about the ankles if and when they arrive, but for now I’d like to be able to go about my day without embarrassing gaseous emissions.

Yes, I *am* responsible for global warming.  Methane, you see.  Cows have nothing on me.

It’s been said (yes, by THEM the ever-present THEM that lurks on the internet and spreads conventional wisdom) “you get over being modest once you are pregnant.”  As if modesty were something like the flu, which one needs to “get over” in order to become better.

You don’t “get over” modesty.  You lose it, like virginity.  Hopefully it happens with someone you love, in private, because it often leaves you both slightly uncomfortable and kinda embarrassed.

And there ain’t no way back.

It all began when I announced one day to my husband that he was simply going to have to hear about my poop and that this sucked but I was not going to suffer in silence.  At first he was cool, after all, it was me who insisted on quality alone time in the toilet with the door closed and locked.  It was also me who would flee the bathroom at the first hint that somethime more serious than urine was about to be evacuated from him.

But within a week I think he realized that this was something slightly different.  I wasn’t letting him into the bathroom during these delicate private moments, but I was explaining to him in excruciating detail why I was making such horrible noises while in there.

In a word: constipation.

Why do they not tell girls about this in sex ed?  Why do they not give us all little pills that stop us up for a week so we can enjoy the true miracle of bringing another life into the world?  This should go for men too, who get off far to easy in the reproductive game.  And this is not the only poop-related surprise that pregnancy brings - do not make me talk about labor right now!  We’ll cover that exciting poop-related bit of information once we are closer to D-Day.

Why is it that you hear about glowing skin, thick luscious hair, swollen ankles and food cravings?  Seriously?  Food cravings?  I’ve had to stuff myself with fruit and fiber instead of all the delicious things that I could see dancing before my eyes BECAUSE IT HURTS DAMMIT!

That’s when you start praying for more gas.

And you already have A LOT of gas.  Half the time that you are rushing to pee it is really the fear that the gas cloud will escape while you are surrounded by friends or classmates or colleagues or completely innocent bystanders that makes you scurry.   And the slightest movement could knock it loose!  Bend over to pick up the mail *bam,* reach for the dictionary *bam,* hit “send” on your email *bam!*

You fear the embarrassment, but you also fear losing that precious pressure because you NEED it.  You need it for that long awaited bowel movement.  With enough gaseous build up, it’s possible to expel part of last week’s bran muffin.  Without it… well, there are tears and recriminations, but often not a lot of relief.

But after a while your body starts to even out.  It discovers that you aren’t about to undergo a major famine and that not every last ounce of liquid and nourishment needs to be wrung from lunch before you can pass (heh heh) onto dinner.  The constipation eases (by which you go from hemorrhoid inducing to simply painful) and you no longer break into sweats of terror when looking at a toilet.

But you are still left with the gas. 

And if you are as lucky as I am, then you not only have the embarrassing “we are not going to acknowledge what just happened here and you aren’t going to get angry as we all find somewhere else to be for the next 10 minutes while the air clears,” you also have the “wow, can you say the alphabet too?” burps.

Since my husband thinks that burping is a greater social faux pas than gas, this is the one that drives him up the wall.  Thankfully, I’ve always been a champion burper and have demonstrated this great gift while tossing back beer.  I say “thankfully” because we’ve gone from “Oh my god woman, you did NOT just do that at the table - I DON’T CARE IF YOU SAID EXCUSE ME - that was just disgusting!” to “Feel better?”  The difference is that I now get the burps like some people get the hiccups.  Hours of non-stop burping.  For no particular reason.  I burp when I’m hungry.  I burp while I eat.  I burp for hours after I’ve eaten.  Sometimes I can’t sleep because the pain in my gut grows and grows until I consciously and with great effort, burp.  Which of course causes the Danish Boy to awake from his beauty slumber and with a deep sigh, shuffle off to another room to get some sleep undisturbed by loud intermittent belches.

My explanation, although completely unfounded on facts or even by THEM, is that it’s the baby jumping up into my stomach.  If the baby kicking my bladder like a soccer ball causes me to pee (as THEY say), then obviously burping is caused by the baby playing volleyball with my stomach.

Strange and twisted logic - another great gift of pregnancy.

A lot of homes for Alot

So I live on this small island, right?  Where everyone knows everyone.  So it was only a matter of time before we finally discovered where Alot's real home was.  'Cause, you know, going down and knocking on the door of the house we suspected had us both a little shy.

The following conversation did not take place, but totally could have.  Almost all of these statements have been made regarding the cat situation at one time or another.
DB: Why don't you go, you know more about cats.
AG: Dude, I can't call and order pizza, why would I be able to go knock on someone's door to ask about the cat?
DB: You talk to random people in the supermarket!
AG: You are a journalist, talking to people you don't know is what you do!
DB: I'm waiting for the right opportunity.
AG: Maybe I'll write a nice letter.

Anyway, because I know a woman who knows our two-doors-down neighbor, she acted as the go-between.  It's fine that Alot hangs out with us, but we need to stop feeding him.

1) He's getting full meals at one house already, we're going to over-feed that cat and kill him, since he's not the kind of cat that stops when he gets full.
2) She doesn't really want to lose her pet permanently to us, so if he has to come home from time to time, she at least gets to see him.

Not feeding Alot means we have a noisy cat doing his best to impress upon us the gravity of the situation.  He's STARVING!  Look - WASTING AWAY!  Which would be believable except that during the week he was eating at both houses he got quite the gut.

He's also developed this interesting technique of dragging himself around by his front paws, while the rest of him is stretched out flat on the floor.  He also rolls onto his back and pulls himself along the bottom of the radiators and the couches with his front legs.

I'm pretty sure this is his "I'm so weak, I can't walk - help me, I'm dying!"

I'm not falling for it and I'm not stopping him.  It's the best way of dusting under the couches and radiators that I've ever seen.  And the entertainment value is incalculable.

When he's not begging for food, he's happy to be pet and be played with.  The Ikea paper bag we have lying on the floor is The Best Toy Ever!  He's also really taken to cuddling, so he often lays on me when I'm sitting on the couch and will lay there for hours if I rub his belly.

Nope, it's pretty easy to not be a cat owner.  No food bills, vet bills, litter boxes (which I can't empty anyway, hehehe), etc.  He's just my cuddle buddy.  And free entertainment.

Archaeospawn

You ever have one of those posts/emails/novels in your head that you just keep tweaking and so never get around to writing down?  Or have days where you are full of brilliant wordage and then you blerg all over other people's blogs and FB and write emails to other random people and use up all your brilliance instead of working on the ONE THING YOU MUST REALLY WRITE?

Yeah, this is that post.

Oh the showers I have spent working on this post.  Shall it be serious?  A discussion of decisions I have made in my life after careful reasoned logical thought... and then chucked out the window because I decided to... well, I don't know what the hell caused me to change my mind.  Could be the hormones.

In fact, I think that's what I want tattooed across my belly, in Hindi ('cause it looks cool and I have my shallow moments), "I blame it on the hormones."

Or should I be defensive - all right you lot, this is me and who I am and what I decided to do and so BACK OFF!  I'M HAPPY DAMNIT!  SEE?  HAPPY!!

Did I mention the hormones?  Totally to blame here.

Or should I go for funny?  Funny thing happened about three months ago.  And if you don't think sex is funny, well, you are reading the wrong damn blog, bub.

But while I slaved away in the endless file cabinet that passes for my mind, other things were going on that I wanted to blog about.  Like today, today could be all about the stupid F-16 that keeps buzzing my house.  Where the hell do you think I am, jerkoff?  Israel?

Seriously, if I *was* in Israel, I'd be turning on the news right now to find out if Lebanon has been invaded again.  What the hell is this?  Germany, is that you?  What do you want, we already send all of our organic produce to you, leaving only the questionable meat products to be sold at Netto.  Poland?  I swear to god we sent the plumbers back.

It's probably the entire Danish Air Force circling the country.  (You know, one F-16, repeat fly-overs every 5 minutes because it's a small country?  I made a FUNNY!  LAUGH DAMNIT!)

Hormones, remember?

I could have written this blog post last week and spent this week writing about cognitive bias (ah hah! that's the term I was looking for all week, thank GOD someone finally wrote a post about it so I can stop rocking back and forth in my chair trying to remember the group psychology stuff I had to force into my head a few years back) or even Random Danish Class Stories.

Things like: Did you know there are still people on the planet who do not know about Disney?  I find this hard to believe, since the people in question have children and half of Danish children's TV is American based, ie Disney up the whazoo.  And that it's really hard to explain the Industrial Revolution in baby-Danish.  And that when teaching Danish to asylum seekers from Burma, trying to amaze them with stories about how back in the old days Danes used to have 5-10 children and live in 20 square meter apartments and wasn't that just CRAZY?  Yeah, not going to go as you thought.
Teacher: Five to ten children!  Back then they didn't have birth control.  Now one or two is normal.  Can you imagine, 5 to 10!  How many siblings do you have?
C (from Burma): Eight.
AG: LOL!

But I can't write those posts, not until I get this one done.  See, I set these goals for myself, so that I will accomplish what I need to do before I do what I want to do.

This seems to result in a lot of procrastinating and unwritten blog posts.

I may need to rethink my strategy.

After all is said and done, none of the posts that I was intending on writing have been written and this post was not brilliantly thought out while in the shower.  Or over a peanut butter and nutella sandwich with a side of curried rice pilaf.  Instead it's made up as I go along.

Kinda like my life, really.

And all I really wanted to tell you was that the Archaeogoddess and the Danish Boy are having an Archaeospawn in about 6 months and that this blog might get a bit disgusting with "weird shit my body does to me" and "it can't be any worse, I'm already pregnant" posts.

So mix a cocktail and raise it on high on my behalf... because someone ought to be drunk during my pregnancy, and alas it can't be me.

Pet adoption

I am all for pet adoption.  But you will probably never find me in a shelter looking for a pet.  There are two reasons behind this.

1) I will take every single furry body home with me, regardless of age, sex, political association and whether or not I can afford it.  I'm a total sucker for animals.  Ask me about my soul crushing experience working in a pet store and I'll tell you about how I ended up with a pet ferret who was deaf.  I still miss his fuzzbutt.

2) Pets find me.

Yeah, I think we may have been adopted by Alot.  We didn't really object - heck we bought cat food so we'd have something to give him as a treat (seeing as he's going to drink us out of milk, the hairball).  He likes to come over in the early morning and if my husband is up, he'll let Alot in.  He'll feed the cat and talk to him and play with him until I get up and then it's my turn and somehow I get left with chucking the cat out into the rain before I go to school.  There seem to be no hard feelings, however, because the cat often returns in the evening for more food and love and a place on the couch to sleep while we watch a movie or a TV show.  Sometimes he goes out by himself and sometimes big, mean, Archaeogoddess has to chuck him out the door while sweet innocent Danish Boy looks sad and apologetic.

I still can't imagine that he doesn't have another home.  After all, when the weather is really awful we aren't visited by Alot all that much.  If we were his only refuge, he'd be howling at the door when it rained.

But I think we are holding a close second.

Today he turned up early and instead of only wanting a little bit of milk before laying down on the couch for a nap, he ate 2/3 of a large can of cat food.  He then slept for several hours in a variety of locations, the last being the box of paper we have for the fire, before deciding to go back out in the world to do whatever it is he does when he's not here.

Probably kill birds and roll around in their blood.

I just hope he cleans himself up before he comes back tonight.  Cleaning blood off of a cat is not my favorite meal-time activities.  But you have to do it, right?  I mean, what if he was injured?!  You have to check these things!  It's only after you've parted matted hair and gotten the clotted blood out from between the toes of a loudly purring cat can you start admonishing him on his behavior.

Yeah, the Danish Boy is a sucker for Alot, and so am I.

Goals (and not the sports kind)

"Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the stars!"  I used to like that quote because, hey, moons, stars! It's what girl geeks decorate their rooms with.  Raise your hand if you have an inflatable space shuttle decorating your room!

*crickets*

Okay, glow in the dark stars!

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about!  Y'all my girls! (And geek boys - you be stylin' too!)

Right.  Anyway, the inner geek in me googled this quote so I could use it in this post and then realized, it's a totally stupid quote.  The moon is waaaaay closer than the stars.  If you are aiming for the moon and miss, you better pray you are lucky enough to have fuel for a return trip to earth, otherwise you're going to be drifting in space for a REALLY LONG TIME because stars are REALLY FAR AWAY and as they are VERY HOT SUNS you don't really want to "land among" them.  Really.

But this post is not about astronomy, it's about goals.  And the importance people put on you having lofty goals.

To which I call bullshit.

See, you can have lofty goals, but if you never attain them, well, it's like running a marathon that has no end.  Where's the sense of accomplishment?  Where's the bit where you can pat yourself on the back and say "way to go, you!"  This is why they came up with the "it's not the destination, it's the journey!"

"They" being the folks in middle management that have the inspirational signs hanging in their offices.

There's a special hell for those people.

You're welcome.

Aim lower!  Win every now and again!  Instead of having a list of 20 things you need to do and only accomplishing 10 and then trying to convince yourself that you did your best, make a list of one thing to do and do that one thing (or not, cause why do today what you can do tomorrow?) and then rest on your laurels!  Just don't eat your laurels.  I hear they are poisonous.  Or bits of them are poisonous.  Or maybe they aren't poisonous at all because we do use them in cooking.  So maybe you *should* eat your laurels.  You know what?  Do whatever you want with your laurels.  I won't judge you.

Currently my life goal is to make my husband laugh so hard he cries.  Without resorting to tickling.  'Cause I accomplished that goal already.  (I'm now working on the smaller goal of "touching my husband without tickling him" and it's harder than it sounds, Danish Boy is TICKLISH.)

I had great success a few nights ago when I told him "Denial is a large river in Egypt."  

Sometimes, marrying someone who completely lacks all of your culture references is fantastic.  All those old puns and jokes you have heard since birth?  Oh, yeah, it's like a never ending gold mine of mirth 'round here.

He was not nearly as entertained by my "where I grew up 'debate' is what you stick on your fishing line."  

AG: You know, debate.  De bait.  The bait.  The stuff you put on the hook at the end of a fishing line.  To fish.

DB: Yeah, I got it.  Um, heh heh.

AG: (ooooh shot down!) Moving on...

Like any good comedian, you gotta know your audience.  Only I never claimed to be a good comedian and my audience, as you can see from above, is fickle.  I got a pretty good laugh out of him once for explaining why mosquitos vote for DF (the Danish Peoples Party - think American Tea Party, only with actual power in government).  

So imagine my surprise when I had him sobbing with laughter the other night, by simply reading my very dull Danish class work.  IMPORTANT NOTE: He was NOT laughing at my Danish.  

The set-up is this: boring day in class.  Our assignment for the hour - "Imagine a new student sits down with you in the cafeteria.  What questions would you ask him or her?" Seriously?  A minute ago I was working on possessive pronouns (mine, mine, it's all mine!) and questions in the simple past-tense using inversion (did you take my bike?) and you want me to regress?  To "what is your name?"  Snore-fest!  Bore-apalooza!

Here is my list of questions (English translation in parenthesis):

Hvad hedder du? (What is your name?)

Hvor gammel er du? (How old are you?)

Er du gift? (Are you married?)

Hvor kommer du fra? (Where do you come from?)

Hvor bor du? (Where do you live?)

Hvor længe har du boet i Danmark? (How long have you lived in Denmark?)

Hvad laver du? (What do you do?)

Er du studerende? (Are you a student?)

Hvad læser du? (What do you study? - really "What do you read" but it means study in this context.)

Hvilken sporg kan du taler? (Which languages can you speak?)

Har du familier here? (Have you family here?)

Hvad tænker du om Pia K. og Danskefolkparti? (What do you think about Pia K. [think Sarah Palin, but MEAN and OLD] and the Danish People's Party [mentioned briefly above]?)

Vil du gerne har en kop kaffe med mig? (Will you like to get a cup of coffee with me?)

Hvor købte du den sød jakke? (Where did you buy that sweet [as in "cute"] jacket?)

Hvorfor du løber væk? (Why are you running away?)

Kan du ikke lige mig? (Don't you like me?)

DB started laughing at "Pia K." and promptly died over the "kop kaffe".  Was it the juxtaposition?  Is there a slang meaning here that I don't understand?  (Like asking for a bread roll can be a euphemism for asking someone for sex.)  Or do I have to just accept that I will never understand what is funny to a Dane?

Oh who cares!  I made my husband laugh until he cried!!  I WIN!!  GOAL!!!

Disastrophy in the kitchen... a delayed reaction

I am not a fruit person.  I prefer jelly to jam, I need my juice to come without pulp, and apart from apples, I think fruit looks best in paintings not on my plate.

That being said, I am fully aware that I need to eat my fruit and that putting jelly on your toast does not count towards the several servings you are supposed to have every day.

So I also eat an apple every day.

Yeah, I am the very picture of health.

It's berry season in Denmark.  Or so I read on everyone else's blogs.  Everyone else living somewhere where there are berries.  I'm sure my husband will read this (I show up in Google Alerts - he gets it in his mailbox, I suppose it saves him from having me bookmarked, but where's the romance?) and point out that there are berry bushes all over the island and I'll have to point out that I mean tame berry bushes that don't have thorns and bugs and things.  ANYWAY you'd be expect there to be fresh berries in the supermarkets, right?  Right?

I live on a tiny island at the ass end of nowhere.  It's a lovely island, but not known for it's variety in produce.  Any berries, I imagine, end up on Copenhagen.  

So I acquired frozen raspberries (and by "acquired" I mean I told my husband to go to Netto and not come back without them, he's very good at procuring vittels) so that I could make Red-Gooseberry Clafoutis, but with raspberries.  I used the recipe from Eating In Denmark unfortunately I followed the recipe exactly except for the bit where it says "put all the remaining ingredients into the food processor and blitz" because I don't have a food processor.  I just popped it all in the mixer.  I mean, they both mix stuff right?  Same same!  This turned out to be a major error.

It turns out why food processors and mixers are not the same thing.  Same same but DIFFERENT.

There is a reason you mix the liquids first and then add the dry mix in most recipes where you use a mixer.  Because in a mixer the dry mix will stick to the bottom of the bowl and not become mixed into the batter and you will not discover this until after you pour it into the pan.  You will then have a very terrible mess on your hands because you will at this time also discover that this recipe makes waaaaay too much batter and now you have a pie without enough flour and a pie with too much flour.  Oh, and not enough fruit because I took 12 oz. of fruit to be a weight and dumped them all into one pie pan and not a volume, which I think, in fact, it was supposed to be.  Damn.

So I used the rest of some strawberry jam that I had lying around as the fruit for the second pie.  There were strawberry chunks in it, okay?  It's called thinking outside the box.  Only, because I was in a rush I didn't put it in the pan and heat it up first and this turns out to be important, I think, because while the berries floated in the first pie, the jam stayed at the bottom in the second.

Despite all this the second pie was the better of the two.  But neither were what I wanted.  I wanted something a bit between flan and cheesecake, with a custardy taste.  This did not seem to quite be it.

The final judgment is only evidenced this week - the clafoutis are molding in the refrigerator.  They may have been edible, but that doesn't mean we actually wanted to eat them.

Was it the recipe?  Incorrect assembly of parts?  Or that clafoutis is just not my thing?

I'm going with the third and I think I'll keep my fruit in pies from now on.  And if I want a flan/cheesecake with a custardy taste I'll make flan, cheesecake, or custard... but without any fruit.

The grass is always greener

If you are ever without a topic in conversation in Denmark, may I suggest the weather?  Of course it will follow a set pattern, but this is handy when you have had too many drinks at a party (and by party I mean any get-together of more than two Danes) and find yourself forced to make small talk with the person sitting across from you.  It will go something like this:

Dane: This summer has been better/worse/hotter/colder than last year.

You, the Foreigner: Yeah, what is it about Danish weather?

Dane: Sometimes we have very beautiful summers.

You, the Foreigner: Ah.  (Pause.) But they aren't very long or hot are they?

D: But one year it rained the whole summer.

YtF: Ah.  (Pause.) You've got some pretty long dark cold winters.  February is particularly grim.

D: There is no such thing as bad weather in Denmark, only bad clothing choices.

YtF: Oh, I'd beg to differ.  I'd go so far as to say a summer without a single sunny day is by definition a whole lot of bad weather.

D: This is why we leave our children outside to "air."  You will get used to it too.

At which point you flee for the bathroom and as you stare at the blurry reflection above the sink, it occurs to you that the weather conversation was pretty one sided and that it could have gone like this and no one would have noticed: 

Dane: This summer has been better/worse/hotter/colder than last year.

You, the Foreigner: I think frogs are pretty cute.

Dane: Sometimes we have very beautiful summers.

You, the Foreigner: But I don't know that I'd kiss one.

D: But one year it rained the whole summer.

YtF: So it's a good thing I'm not looking for Prince Charming.

D: There is no such thing as bad weather in Denmark, only bad clothing choices.

YtF: Hell, I'd settle for Prince Ready and Available For Rent.

D: This is why we leave our children outside to "air."  You will get used to it too.

If you ever want unsolicited advice from a Dane regarding clothing choices or how to get used to the horrible seasons in Denmark (laughingly called "spring," "summer," "fall," and "winter" but are really "cold," "not so cold," "cold again," "holy jesus it's cold AND dark"), just turn to the Dane and say "gosh, I'm cold!"

Me, I've been cold since mid-August.  As a foreigner this means I get Danes telling me, "oh, you aren't cold now!  Wait until December!"  Pshaw!  I've been through enough winters in DK to tell you, December is NOTHING, it's February you have to watch out for, fool!  Also, I'm not some noob who's brand new to this cold weather stuff.  I've lived in New England.  It starts snowing there in November and doesn't melt until April.  But just because it's colder there does not make me any less cold RIGHT FREAKIN' NOW, MAN!

'Course in New England they have this odd concept of time.  There's a saying, "if you don't like the weather in New England, wait five minutes."  From experiencing New England's weather, I can tell you that those"five minutes" takes approximately three months.  This must be why New Yorkers freak out if you tell them that another subway will be arriving in 10 minutes.  I mean good God, that's really half a year from now!  They also like to say they have "real" seasons in New England.  Yeah, really bad ones.  There's "still cold," "horribly hot and humid," "hey, those were a nice two weeks," and "blizzards."

California has two seasons, if you can call them that.  There's "hot" and "not hot."  Or "not raining" and "raining."  The exception is San Francisco.  While the rest of California is experiencing "hot," San Francisco is having "what lovely weather we are OH SWEET MOTHER OF GOD IT'S COLD."  This is The Fog.  The Fog is why so many people around the world have San Francisco sweatshirts.  No one who lives outside the city is ever truly prepared.  The Fog is insidious and rolls up and over the city like a glacial steamroller.  It is damp.  It is cold.  It is unescapable.  It happens in the season we in the Northern Hemisphere expect to call "summer."  It is the reason you see all those who live in the city walking around during the sunny summer afternoon with fleeces tied around their waists.  The Fog is coming.

Of course, take a Dane to these locations and they will snort at the weather and insist that really, you just have to get used to it (except when it's hot, because then they collapse and die because they keep drinking beer instead of water and dehydrate - true story).  If human evolution had been left up to Danes, we'd still be living in caves and without fire.

Lene: I am kold.

Ole: It not kold now.  You wait til snow kom.  Den it is kold.

Lene: I could invent fire.

Ole: Stupid woman.  You get tough now.  Or go move south with Sven.  

But since I've been blessed with a higher intellect, when cold, I build a fire.

Yeah baby, that's what I'm talkin' about!

One last hurrah!

The weather has been less than conducive to me leaving my home of late.  And when I do leave it's with long underwear, heavy coat, mittens and a knit hat.  But Saturday was one of those sunny days where if you stand in the sun, it feels rather pleasant and since there were few clouds, it did seem that the day would be one to be out and about in, minus the winter gear.

We went to Ærø Naturpark and "took a little tour" as they say in Danish.  Only with Danish words.  Usually.  Sometimes they'll say it in English, a direct translation of a saying in Danish and sometimes this makes no sense.   Although the saying "fit for fight" is apparently something the Brits say and the Yanks do not, so my confusion is sometimes completely cultural and I resort to the smile and nod and slowly back away.

Right.

The Danish Boy and I took a picnic and as we packed it my dear husband looked at what I was making and sadly said, "I should have just asked you to make mine for me."  This is because he fell back on his Danish upbringing and made a "food pack" - regarding which the non-Danes living in Denmark will all agree is a travesty unto culinary science.  I meanwhile whipped up a salami-cream cheese-jalapeño sandwich, apple, green olives, bag of popcorn, and cookies.  I didn't have time to boil any eggs, alas.

I then distinctly remember saying, "honey, could you grab the camera."  However, when I turned to him at the pond where the frogs were being so cute and photographic and there he was standing there with the picnic bag but NOT the camera... I cut my loses.  He had, after all, remembered to take the food.  Priorities people, food always trumps all in my book.

But it was a lovely day.  We hiked up and down hills, over some fences, through some fields and was molested by nary a cow.  There was a distinct lack of cows, in fact.  But cow pats we saw a plenty.

DB: Watch out, there's poop right here.
AG: Ummhmm.
DB: Oh, here's some over here.  And some right there.  Look, right there.  Watch where you step.
AG: Well it IS a cow pasture.
DB: I'M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU!
AG: OKAY!
*pause*
AG: But it IS a cow pasture.  Cow poop is everywhere and you don't need to point it out to me.  I'm already on the look out.

May I remind my gentle readers that I grew up in the country and he grew up in suburbia.  If anyone knows cow poop in this relationship, it is I.

After lunch we picked up some asshat's beer cans some asshat had left behind.  Hey, Asshat - it's a nature park.  Pick up your damn trash!  Besides, those cans would have been worth a few kroner if you hadn't smashed them to hell and back!  Asshat.

We then came across a large wood pile.  The DB tried to figure out how we could sneak our Volvo into the field in the dead of night and make off with the wood.  He had to give up the plan, there's no way the surrounding farms would not hear us trying to maneuver the car into position.
AG: You're too close.
DB: I am not.
AG: You're going to hit it.
DB: I have loads of space.
*clunk*
AG: I told you you were going to hit it but OH NO you never listen to your wife and who's always right, I'm always right.
DB: I barely touched it!

So instead we found ourselves some nice walking sticks.  And if they were 6ft/2m tall and as thick as your upper arm... well, they were just really SERIOUS walking sticks.