My brief flirtation with wildlife photography

My Dane often does not understand me.  He's entertained, most assuredly, which works for me, because then I have someone to vacuum my floor and wash my clothes and remove spiders post haste and I can always say "yeah, but I make you laugh" when questioned on my usefulness.  But frequently he's left standing on the sidelines while I make a run for the crazy.  At least he cheers me on.  I should buy him pom-poms!

Anyway, yesterday I saw Alot in the yard, sunning himself on this random cement table-like thing in the garden.  I call it table-like because it's small, in front of a bench, but has this weird circular cup in the center.  Like I should put a potted plant in it.  Only that would be stupid, because then when you sat at the table you'd have a face full of plant.

Oh my god!  I know what to do!  I need a small palm tree.  Because then it would be a face palm!

Badum-dum-ding!

Hey I'm laughing - and like they say, "laugh and the whole world laughs with you" - so laugh people!  I command it!

Ahem, as I was saying...  Alot on the table in the garden.  But I had NO camera.  This was the problem outlined in the previous post.  But I am SO DETERMINED to be a wildlife photographer I grabbed my computer and tried to use the built in camera to take the picture.

It didn't work.  Look at my frown on concentration, though!  And the weird thing is that this camera takes pictures backwards.  That's my garden in reverse.  And my left eye, not my right.  I noticed this first when I was trying to photograph myself with a hand written sign.  I had to write the damn thing backwards.

Somebody is going to point out that I could have popped it into iphoto or picture viewer and flipped the photo around.  Yeah, I know that NOW, where were you when I was carefully writing backwards!!

See, I *can* do it.  Not the writing backwards, the flipping of the photo!

What was I talking about again?  Oh yes, Alot.  Not really visible in this photo.  Note to Apple (© ™ ® and maybe §) - could you all make a zoom feature on your little camera thing?  Or you know, send me another digital camera.  One with video, cause that's really handy to have when you are at the Dead Sea.  In fact, just send me another camera, the Canon PowerShot S90 would be very handy.

I was pondering the options when my husband came home with the camera.  Ah!  Success!  And where the hell were you when I needed to photograph my mostly clean office?

Taking the camera, I began to stalk my prey.

---

Here he iz (all wildlife photographers speak with funny accents or are later replaced by a David Attenborough clone, true story).  In hiz natif habitats.  Ay zee him.  He not zee me.

He slips.  The slip of de innozent.  De soft slip of youth.  Ay admire hiz peace.  Hiz rest.  Hiz peaceful rest.  Ay will move closer.

Across de gravel Ay creeps.  He slips.  He hears me not.  Ay must be silent.  Silent as a duck.

Dis is difficult.  De Dane he keeps laffing at my aczent.  Ay tells him to zip it.  Ay am a highly acomplished vildlife fotografer and he cannot even say veil correctly.

Ah no!  He avakes!

Eiiiiiiii!!

---

I can only assume that the wildlife photographer was brutally maimed and died later of injuries sustained in the field, which is fine since a David Attenborough clone turned up later that day for additional filming.  Or maybe it was the clone that maimed the photographer.  Clones do that you know.

Or maybe the photo-shoot quickly dissolved into LOLcats.

I'm on yur pedestal.  Feel free to wurship me.

The grand plan...

The grand plan was to proceed through my house room by room, with me photographing each room when it was slightly-more-clean-than-usual and at least sunny.

Bwaahahahahahah!

The alignment of three things: sun, cleanliness, and availability of camera when married to a journalist who takes his own pictures is sort of like Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter all aligning with Earth - very rare indeed.  And don't be all "oh, well, why don't you wait for the weekend?" If it's not cloudy on the weekend (oh, Danish weather, you scamp you!) I am all about trying to get out and see new stuff.  Have car, will tour, that's me!  I really hate staying home and cleaning on the two days I'm stuck with enjoying the company of my husband and his Fascist cleanliness tendencies.  Since lounging around and enjoying our house and garden is seemingly beyond him (unless he can AT THE SAME TIME watch the news, balance the checkbook, and research the going rate of 1986 commemorative 10 kr. coins - current value, less than 10 kr. because it's no longer legal tender), we resort to the Archaeogoddesses surfire way of enjoying a weekend. 

Go see old stuff.

We went to the museum up the street the other weekend, because it was having a free day and we're a bit poor until payday, at least poor enough that money should be spent on food, not entry fees.  It was quite nice.  Lots of old stuff.  And we learned what these funny small stone buildings were that we see all over the island.  Sorry, there's no photo.  Lemme see if I can describe them.

Imagine a dog house-sized stone structure with a flat tin roof.  The walls are very thick, thicker than the walls of most houses (medieval castles aside) and there is one small door in the front.  This door may be made of iron or it may now be missing.  Also often missing is the roof.  The roof (when present) is slightly sloped from the front to the back.

It drove me nuts.  What were these small buildings?  While they were dog house sized, why would you need a dog house that had walls that could withstand months of siege warfare?  Was there something especially violent about Danish chickens that they had to be housed in a bunker?

The museum gave me the answer: they held white sand used to clean floors.  Yeah, I'm also having a WTF kind of answer is that? But at least it's an answer.  Now some investigation can be undertook.  Something along the lines of, why does everyone in one town have a HUGE sand house and no one else?  Do you really need that much sand to clean your floors?  What The F*ck?

Okay, so when I'm not driving around the countryside yelling at my husband "what do you mean you don't know what these small houses are for?  Don't give me that 'you grew up in suburbia'!  I demand answers!" I sit in my office and write blog posts.  Or google.  Or read WAY too much wikipedia.  And then cross check it with Encyclopedia Britannica.

This is the desk in the office that I inhabit.  Through the double doors you can see the dining room.  The photo was taken while standing in the door between my husband's office and my own.  Just trying to orient you.  Speaking of orientation, the desk, violently purple couch and TV are all angled oddly to keep anything from being up against the radiator or the exterior wall and to make maximum use of my desk, which has shelves and drawers on the front AND the back.  I also can still get a lovely view just by turning my head and yet I also get to keep my back to the wall.  Wild Bill Hickok taught me a trick or two, you see.  Since I scream like a baboon if startled, and I startle easily, this is the best defense against punctured ear drums.  

This is the view from my desk.  Obviously not the one out the window and into the garden.  Now there are fewer boxes (two less, yay me!).  The door seen there is the one to my husband's office.

And if you sit on the violently purple couch, you can see into my husband's office (to the right), the dining room (to the left), the kitchen (although not in this photograph) and sometimes the parlor, if the doors are open enough and you tilt your head back just so...  Behind the violently purple couch is another bookshelf, not nearly so tall as the one you see before you.  It's also full.  We need more bookshelves.  We also need file cabinets, which I am *so* getting the next time we're in Ikea.  With money.  Very important distinction there.  No point in being arrested for trying to shop-lift a large organizational device from Ikea.  That's just sad.  

Conversations With My Husband or Why Facebook Saved Our Marriage

AG: Our anniversary is on Monday.
DB: I know.
(Pause)
AG: Facebook told me so.
DB: I thought it might have.

It's not cat pee

AG: You know, science has supposedly proven that women have a better sense of smell than men, but are worse at spacial reasoning.  But seeing how I'm a whiz at parking...
DB: I know, I know, more proof that you are the man and I'm the woman.
AG: Well, you'd better hope so, otherwise you are having olfactory hallucinations.

My husband is insisting that one of our mattresses smells of cat pee.  I have sniffed and sniffed and all I smell is that chemically fresh mattress smell.  I keep telling him that if a cat had sprayed or peed in the spare room WE WOULD TOTALLY SMELL IT!

I'm half tempted to lock Alot in one of the rooms until he pees just to show my husband that cat pee is a smell unto itself.  A powerful one-two punch that can only be outdone by the +80 rats that the rat catcher has racked up in the basement of the building in Århus.  (Seriously, the rat catcher sends the DB texts every week with the latest numbers.)  Cat pee is not a slight scent that one can catch from time to time.  It assaults the nose, makes the eyes run, bleaches carpet.

To top it off, the man has never owned a cat.  His father hates cats and instilled a fear and distrust of cats in my husband at a young age.  Seriously.  He finally confessed to me that there was a neighbor's cat that used to follow him home from the bus stop.  It would run in front of him and sit in the road and my husband would have to CROSS THE STREET because if he didn't he *knew* the cat would "get him."  It would often sit at the end of the driveway and he'd have to dash past it to get safely home.  I now feel slightly bad that I subjected him to my family's cats without any warning, but how did I know he was uncomfortable around cats?  It does also prove how much my husband was determined to make a good impression on my family.  He let our cats sit on him.  (To be fair to the cats, you try to keep a 20 lbs cat off you.  The hubs had pretty much no choice on that one.)  It was years before I found out about his discomfort.  By then my family's cats had slightly desensitized him.  I mean, how can you fear a drooling cross eyed cat who puts out a paw and asks "merow?" before climbing into your lap?

Anyway, his only knowledge of cat pee was once when he stayed with a relative who had a cat and that cat peed on his duvet.  He was 8 or something.  It was further proof that cats were evil monsters in fur coats, as far as his father was concerned.  But does not change my opinion that the DB has NO IDEA what he's talking about in regards to cat pee.

There is NO cat pee smell.

IT'S NOT CAT PEE!!

Some randomness for your day

For my "text" I used the Geek Quiz blog post from last week.  I'm rather tickled.  I think I need a stuffed Cthulhu for my desk.

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I risked life and limb for you today

I went and took a picture of my husband's office.

No, it's not some Bluebeard thing where I'm now going to be killed by my husband for trespassing on his private realm.  It's just incredibly messy.  Only I cannot tell him that without him getting all defensive.  He lacks time to organize blah blah blah... and I'm all, well, dude, that's why it's messy, right?  I'm not making personal judgments here, I'm not saying you're a bad person, I'm just sayin' the office is a death trap and someday you won't be able to find me because I'm buried under the gazillion printouts of EU laws and statutes.

He tried to "organize" the other day by trying to get rid of old research on grinding stones.  Ha ha, very funny, trying to "clean" by telling the archaeologist in the house that you are going to throw out old ARCHAEOLOGY RESEARCH!  That shit is so not happening.  He is apparently not going to part with all the journals, reports and newspaper articles regarding harbor projects in northern Germany.

Not that I'm making value judgments here.  Oh no.  But if it crushes the life from this very proportional and damn sexy body - WHO'S GOING TO WISH HE'D JUST LISTENED TO HIS WIFE??

So once again we are left with the problem of not enough book shelves and a complete disregard for the proper priorities in this house.

Meanwhile, in the living room....

You can see the parlor through the door.  I'm standing in the corner by the windows, which is why you can't see them.

Now I'm standing in the corner pictured above.  See the curtain?  That was one of the floor-to-ceiling curtains in my old Ebeltoft apartment.  I should really hem it so that it's not brushing the radiator, but I like seeing the whole length.  It reminds me that I have wicked high ceilings.  It also reminds me that these windows are some of the oldest in the house and lack a secondary window on the inside.  One pane of glass separates me from the weather.  And the tourists.  In the winter I fully expect to abandon this room as well as the parlor.  Or I'll pull an old Rhode Island trick where you tape plastic wrap (yes, the kitchen kind) over your window.  But for now we are serenaded every night by the Night Watchman who gives tours.  We aren't on the tour, but the building across from us is.

Heh heh heh... how does it feel to the attraction now, suckahs!

Finally, from the corner by the other window, you can see the tiny little door in the wall.  All the other doors are well over two meters tall, yet this little one is about 5 foot 9 and a half inches or 176 centimeters.  My husband is 190 cm.

Can you see how this will end?  In tears, every time.

And thus we now know that we will never be able to live in one of those cute little 17th century homes with low ceilings.  Because he just does not remember to duck.

If you duck through that little door, you find yourself in...

My husband's office.

I find it rather amusing that the tall man has to go through the short door to get to his office.  But that is just how it is.  He has an office at work, so he doesn't really need all that much office space at home.  Or so I insisted we decided.  There are three desks in that office.  THREE.  The white one is my old desk, there's a natural wood one made of two pillars of drawers topped by what may have been a door at one point, and a green teacher's podium.  Every surface is covered with something and there are three banana boxes of stuff visible in the photo and another four behind those and then three more behind the door just visible on the right.

That door leads to my office, and yes, it is a normal sized door.  When he remembers, he goes through my office.

We've now made it one quarter of the way through my house!

Sweet Mary mother of god, my house is too damn big.

Middle Eastern Cooking

You'd think that since I spent five months in the desert eating food from the Syrian restaurant down the road, I'd be hankering for Chinese or Mexican or something and would shy away from Middle Eastern for awhile.  But that ain't the way this stomach rolls.  No-siree-Bob.  My stomach was all "BACON!" for a week and then it was back to "where's the Fattoush?"  So every now and then I whip out the old Middle East Cookbook the Dane got waaaaay back in the day and throw something together.  Usually a lentil soup, because no one does lentils like Semitic speaking peoples.  One of the other great things about lentil soup is that it is cheap and versatile.  Okay, that's two things.  But if you have lentils and an onion, you have soup.  If you have more stuff, you can fancy it up.  Me, I had a bunch of lemons in the house the other day.  I whipped up this soup and then made lemon bars for desert.  This house is free of scurvy, but we may all end up with cavities.

In this recipe, the lentils called for are dried red lentils.  They are little tiny red beans and they rock.  No soaking, no precooking, chuck 'em in boiling water and an hour later: SOUP!  You find them in Denmark as røde linser and when they show up in Netto at 10 kr a bag, I stock up.  They never go bad as long as you keep them dry.  You can find them at the other major chains in DK, often in the organic aisle.  You could probably get away with using brown lentils/grønne linser.  Lord knows I'll use any damn beans I can get my hands on.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups red lentils
6 cups meat or chicken stock or water
1 medium-sized onion, grated or really finely chopped because my grater was dirty
1 tsp ground cumin (spiskummen in Denmark)
salt
freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp lemon juice (aprox. half of a lemon, keep the other half for making lemon wedges to serve along side)

For topping:
2 large onions
1/4 cup olive oil
1-2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped.

Directions:
1. Rinse your lentils.
2. Bring stock or water to a boil in a large pot.  Add lentils and onion.  Return to a slow boil, cover and simmer over low heat for 45-60 minutes.  Do not stir during cooking.
2b. While the soup is cooking, prepare the topping.  First halve the peeled onions lengthwise and slice thinly to make semi-circles.  Heat the olive oil in a pan and fry the onions over medium heat until golden brown.  I basically caramelized the buggers because I got side-tracked while baking lemon bars, and it turned out fantastic.  Add the garlic and cook a minute longer.
3. At the end of an hour, the lentils and onion will be very soft, but if you want a finer soup, use a blender.
4. Add cumin and salt and pepper to taste.  I didn't need to add any salt because I used bouillon cubes.  If a thinner soup is desired, add water to achieve desired consistency.  Stir in lemon juice and heat gently until bubbling.
5. Serve in deep bowls with the onion topping, called ta'leya.  Have lemon wedges and olive oil on hand in case someone like me wants a bit more citric acid and oil in their diet.  Also, a nice loaf of French or Italian bread, heated up in a 425 F/220 C oven for 10 minutes wouldn't be culturally appropriate, but would be damn tasty.


This particular recipe supposedly came from Egypt, but you'll find a gazillion of lentil soup recipes throughout the region and everyone's mother-in-law insists hers is the best.

Julius Reubke totally took the Tardis to the 24th century!

Quick "Geek Test" - Choose the following that best fits your thoughts after reading the title of this post:
A) WTF?
B) Gotta wiki Reubke
C) I understand that Reubke was ahead of his time, but what, pray tell, is a "Tardis"?
D) Dude I *so* know!

If you answered A, congratulations, you are a normal human being and I commend you for living, what is for many, a completely normal life.  On the other hand, it may be a bit dull as you are missing a great deal of pop-culture and classical artistry.  You have earned no cool points.  It is likely that you are completely divorced from the period in which you live.  If you counter this argument by pointing out you watch "The Hills" regularly, you loose 100 cool points.  You may give yourself one cool point if you have ever participated in a Glee sing-along.  You may award yourself 10 cool points if you participated in a Glee sing-along without knowing it was a Glee sing-along, but just because you simply could not help breaking into spontaneous song and dance.  The AG recommends a steady dose of Blackadder and Star Wars (Episodes 4, 5 and 6 - ask a Geek for help on this matter) to rectify your deficient cultural awareness.

If you answered B, congratulations, we are probably friends.  Very likely close friends.  You are also a total geek.  One hundred cool points to you!  Give yourself an extra 10 points if you have ever argued with someone over the continuity of the Terminator movies.  Give yourself 5 more points for every time you used the terms "space-time," "continuum," and "chaos theory."

If you answered C, congratulations, welcome to the internet.  It is a strange place and I think you may have become lost at the Google.  The Google is the starting point for all searches on the Internet and it has become both a noun and a verb as well as a place name and probably some poor child's Christian name.  We use "google" to refer to any search from any web-host, including Yahoo.  I doubt Yahoo likes this very much.  If you came to this web-site via Netscape, you may have fallen through a hole in the space-time continuum and I beg you to return... and buy me stock in Google and Apple.  When we meet again in the time line, I will award you 50 cool points.

If you answered D, congratulations, you are my new partner in Trivial Pursuit.  How random are you, anyway?  I'm not sure if I should be awarding you cool points or be kinda creeped out.  Unless you are a classical music enthusiast with a penchant for sci-fi, I am a bit concerned that you may have followed me to the organ concert last night.  It was a pretty awesome concert though, am I right?  I mean, how often do you get a free, intimate organ concert by Denmark's top organist?  The guy plays at the Copenhagen Cathedral!  For the Mo-Fo Queen!  He totally rocked the Bach and Hayden!  And the Reubke - I'd never heard of the guy before, but was that one messed up dude or what?  I mean, who the hell writes a sonata for the 94 psalm?  But did you see an epic space battle when you closed your eyes?  It was like someone gave John Williams downers and put him in front of an organ.  Totally awesome!  I award us both a million cool points.

Sometimes I wonder what other people think when they overhear our conversations

I just wonder, mind.  I'm not agonizing over it.  I'm not worried that people think I'm weird or that people don't think I'm weird.  Okay, I'm a little worried that they secretly hate me and will go home and pray that I'm struck down by a weird disease but that's only because these are STRANGERS we are talking about and we all know about "Stranger Danger"!

Actually, you might not know about "Stranger Danger" if you didn't grow up in Paranoid America.  You can find some awesome videos on YouTube.

Anyway, moving on.  The following conversation took place last night as we strolled about town.

Danish Boy: (exasperated because we have again stopped to take a picture) Can we do this later?  I thought we were on a walk!
Archaeogoddess: What, I can't stop and take a picture of cool stuff?
DB: But it's going to be dark soon and I wanted to go for a walk.
AG: Good god, I didn't know that when you said "walk" you meant "Bataan Death March"!

At which point two teenage girls rushed past, fearfully looking over their shoulders.  I doubt they know anything about the BDM and half of me wanted to shout out the historical reference I was making and the other half wanted to shout out "and no I will not use my indoor voice" because my husband was making that uncomfortable-face, the one he makes when I'm embarrassing him but he knows that he can't say anything about it without me REALLY embarrassing him, which I can do without batting an eye.

DB: (as we walk past the harbor) shhhh... not so loud.
AG: What?
DB: I said shhhh, not so loud.
AG: I can't hear you.  YOU HAVE TO SPEAK UP!
DB: I said "not so loud."
AG: WHY THE HELL NOT!?  I CAN'T GODDAMNED HEAR YOU! FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! YOU TALK SO DAMN QUIETLY!  SPEAK UP!!

I'm pretty sure that the universe has a horrible sense of humor and I'll end up going deaf, because that would drive my soft spoken mumbling husband absolutely insane.  At which point I'm going to start wearing underpants on my head, 'cause that'd just be funny.  Yup, I was put on this earth just to drive him mad.  Completely round the bend bonkers.

DB: (As we stop again) *le sigh*
AG: You know, when you take pictures, I have to stand around waiting for ages while you take a gazillion shots FROM THE EXACT SAME PLACE of the EXACT SAME THING and do I complain or force you to hurry up?  NO I DO NOT.  All I ask in return is the same common courtesy when I stop to take one or two very quick pictures of something before moving on.
DB: mumblemublemuble
AG: What?
DB: I SAID I'M SORRY!
AG: Jesus, baby, you don't need to yell.  I'm not deaf you know.

Totally hereditary...

In case you've ever wondered if I was dropped on my head at birth... well, my mom is suspiciously mum on the matter.  But if you've ever met my dad, you'd quickly know where I got my sense of humor.

The following excerpts were taken from emails my dad sent me.  The brain he's referring to at first is his old Day Planner organizer.

 <= it looked like this.

"Yes, your Dad bought a  Blackberry.  President Obama had one.  If it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me.  It has replaced my old brain.  The old brain was wearing out, was large and cumbersome.  Now my new brain is smaller and fits on my belt and vibrates when it gets a message.  Somewhat like my real brain.  Except for the part about the belt.

  Today we have a man installing an irrigation system at our house. ... I enjoy the solitude of watering plants, but we have so many plants now that it is more time consuming than I'd like it to be.  Even though many of the plants are dead.  Watering dead plants is just not what it used to be."  

"If tourist season only begins in mid-June does that mean you have to wait till then to shot them?  Is there a limit?  Is Sarah Palin aware of this?  Dick Cheny?  When does tourist season end?  Have you seen many tourist tied to the hoods of cars?  Do you see many tourist lying on the side of the road?  Send us a picture."

Here's a thought for the day...

If my husband dies, I have until my visa runs out to leave Denmark.

If I die - even though I am enjoying the benefits of temporary residency in DK (/sarcasm) - my husband has two years to apply for permanent residency in the US. Even though he doesn't have any type of visa now.

Alive, all I have to do to get him a permanent residency in the states is to sponsor him, that is, make over $20,000 a year.  Or ask my parents to sponsor him, since we'd all be living there until I got a job anyway.  As long as they make over $28,000 a year.  Not a problem there.

He will not be required to prove active participation in society by joining a club or being on the board of an organization.  He will not need to acquire 100 points.  He will not need to apply for an extension every year no earlier than three and no later than one month before his visa expires because it won't fucking expire because it's a GOD DAMNED PERMANENT VISA!

Yes, it's that time of year again, folks.  Time to extend my visa.  *Whoo-hoo.* Time to again check the little boxes saying I've been a very good girl and not taken any money from the government I support with my taxes, that I have not broken any laws, that I still live in a house bigger than 40 sq. meters.  Then my husband gets to sign that the conditions of his current residency permit have not changed (causing him to yell at the paper, "oh my god, I'm a citizen for Christ's sake, I was BORN here.  God I hate this country.").  I'll turn it in and then wait three months for my visa to be renewed.  Which means that for at least one month, possibly even two, I will be here without a valid visa in my hand.  So before it expires, I'll ask for a paper saying that they are reviewing my application and that I can stay in Denmark until the final decision, because I'll need to be able to prove that I can legally stay here and work when I need to fill out work contracts.  And they'll tell me I don't need them and then I'll say, YOU TELL THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN THAT THEN.  Then before I leave for Qatar, because I won't have gotten my residency card yet, I'll have to get a re-entry visa that will expire before I can reenter Denmark because they are only good for three months and I work for five.  I'll also have to provide documentation to the ministry of integration so that they know why I'm taking five months off of Danish class.

When not being bugged by the government, we are very happy with our lives here.  Just go away and let us be!

Strawberry Shortcake

Oh, it rocked, my dessert!  I am ever so pleased.  I have no idea why I haven't made this before, especially for the in-laws, who I am always trying to impress with my cooking skills AND force them to experience my culture.  Heh heh heh.

But I'm not completely culturally insensitive to my Danish palates (not to be confused with Danish pallets or palettes).  I altered the recipe somewhat, mostly by decreasing the sugar.  Also I substituted creme fraiche for sour cream, because I can't get sour creme in Denmark, but it's practically the same thing.  I'll give you the recipe as it is offered in my Better Homes and Garden's cookbook with my changes in italics.

While you can absolutely make strawberry shortcake with pound cake or angel food cake, I love biscuits.  Therefore this recipe begins with making some biscuits...

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup of sugar in this case, I did use 1/4 cup of sugar because it's for baking the biscuits
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. baking soda (called "natron" in Danish)
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/3 cup of cold butter (aprox. 75 g.)
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 1/2 cup dairy sour cream or 1/2 creme fraiche (I used 9% and it may have affected the dough which was a little wet, but it tasted lovely)
• 2 tbsp. milk
• 5 cups sliced strawberries I measured 5 cups of strawberries before I sliced them and had enough
• 3 tbsp. sugar or 1-2 tbsp because I had fewer strawberries and they were pretty sweet on their own
• sweetened whipped cream made my own by whipping 1 cup heavy cream (piskede fløde in DK), 1 heaping tbsp of powdered sugar and 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions
1.  Preheat the oven to 400 F/200C.  In a small bowl, slice strawberries and sprinkle desired amount of sugar over them; set aside.  Lightly grease a baking sheet (or use baking paper); set aside.  In a medium bowl stir together flour, the 1/4 cup of sugar, the baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  Using a pastry blender, cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.  In a small bowl combine egg, sour cream, and milk.  Add to flour mixture; stir with a fork just until moistened.
2.  Drop dough into 8 mounds onto prepared baking sheet.  Bake in the preheated oven for 12 to 15 minutes or until golden.  Transfer to a wire rack and let cool.

Mine came out a little flat, I think this may be because the dough was very wet, possibly because I used a low fat creme fraiche.
3.  Meanwhile, in a large bowl combine 4 cups of the strawberries and 3 tbsps sugar unless you did this already.  Using a potato masher or an egg beater because you don't have a potato masher, mash berries slightly; set aside.  Make sweetened whipped cream.  To serve, halve shortcakes; fill with strawberries and sweetened whipped cream.  Top with remaining sliced strawberries or not because this makes no sense.

YUM!

Summer finally makes an appearance

I have got to buy an outdoor thermometer, because this is silly.

*This* being the state of affairs where I am wearing shorts, but then I see on the interwebs that it's something like 27 C which is something like 80 F and that's all well and good except that at NO time in my life have I ever thought that 80 F was shorts weather.  Therefore, it must not be 80, it must be slightly warmer.

Notice I keep saying "warm"?  That's because I may be wearing shorts, but it sure as hell isn't hot.  Yesterday might have pushed "hot" but only because I was wearing too many clothes.  Once I changed into shorts then it was perfect.

If I have somehow accidently acclimated to Danish weather, someone kidnap me and mail me somewhere really hot.  And deserty.  And full of antiquities.  Or at least pool boys and Mai Tais.

But I do believe that I can now say with certainty that summer has finally arrived in Denmark.

It will probably only last a week.

Typically, the grill isn't here, it's in Århus.   We tried using a disposable grill we had lying around.  Did you know they go bad?  Two years in a box in a dank basement and you just can't get the charcoal to burn.

Okay, the dank bit probably didn't help either.

In other news, because it's summer, my Danish class will hold a summer party... only we can't call it a party because we have Jehovah's Witnesses and they don't party.  So it's a sommerhygge.

Totally off-topic spat of hilarity - the link above leads to a wikipedia entry where it describes Jehovah's Witnesses as being "a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination" and I was, like, "wait, I don't remember there being anything about hats!" And then I caught my mistake.  But that led me to thinking, "wait that's a brilliant idea - hats!  If JW's start wearing hats, I can tell them apart from Mormons!" 


So a sommerhygge... we'll all be bringing some food from our homelands.  There will be dishes from the Philippines, Germany, Honduras, and Burma.  And of course, the US.  


This is where I had quite the pickle.  Because I wanted to make something that:  

1. was American but did not conform to the fat-American stereotypes - i.e. nothing fried or meaty or full of fat or loaded with sugar
2. was good to eat at 10 in the morning - i.e. nothing really heavy
3. was something people would want to eat
4. could use local produce (y'all might be shocked, but the cornerstone of Californian cuisine is that it is made of local, in-season produce so there *pbth*)
5. all of the ingredients could be purchased at Netto (cheap chain of grocery stores), because that's what I've got (if you'd like me to cook with specialty cheeses or meats, you'll have to bring them with you)
6. and something you probably will not get anywhere outside of the states

The first thing I pondered was apple pie.  Because the saying does go "as American as apple pie" and you can cut the sugar WAY back and go more savory - but apple pies are rather large and more of an autumnal dish than summer.  Then there was some free association...


apple pie - too sweet - maybe savory - or even tart - ooh good pun - tart - apple tart - fruit tart - berry tart - strawberry tart!! - strawberry shortcake...


Wait... strawberry shortcake.  


Now obviously Strawberry Shortcake may be heavy on the fat and sugar if you let it.  But it fulfills the other requirements (even though shortcake is basically the same as a scone and strawberries are found everywhere, the earliest Strawberry Shortcake recipe is found in an American cookbook and it tends to be more of an American dessert) and I can adjust the sugar levels very easily to make sure it doesn't get out of hand.  Best of all, it's now Strawberry season here in Denmark and you are required by law to eat your weight in strawberries and the only way Danes eat strawberries is with cream and sugar.  In a bowl.


It's alright, but dude, there are so many other things you can do with strawberries.


I hear they are good with balsamic vinegar.


Anyway, does not Strawberry Shortcake sound like The Summer Dessert or what?  The husband thought so and is now requesting I make a trial run tonight to see if it works.  Well, if you are going to force me to make and eat desserts...


I'll let you know how it turns out.

It's midnight on a school night and I am still up...

WHY AM I STILL UP??

This is the question I ask myself quite often on weekends.

Especially on Sundays, when I *know* I have to get up at some point on Monday.  In this case, I am due to get up in 7 hours so that I can have my coffee before staggering off to Danish class.

The rest of Denmark has vacation now and I am not for another two weeks.

Well, it seems like all of Denmark is on vacation, I'm sure plenty of you are reading this at work RIGHT NOW!  Haha!  You cheeky sods!

Germany is also having vacation as we speak.

This I know because I seem to have gone to sleep last weekend in Denmark and woke up in Germany.  It looks the same around here, but for the last week no one is speaking a language that I can communicate in other than order beer and ask for toilets.  Even my Danish teacher was getting confused and sometimes spoke to me in German.  Then my brain does this little jig in my head as it frantically looks for the proper vocabulary in the Danish file, then swaps to Languages-Currently-Not-In-Use and whips something out.  It is guaranteed to be wrong.

C'est la vie, non?

Staying up late on school nights is certainly not going to help my fragile language abilities.

But is nice about staying up late in Denmark during the summer, regardless of what language you may encounter the next afternoon morning, is that you can appreciate the sunrise at a respectable hour.  Like 3 AM.  And then go to bed and still get some fairly good hours of sleep.  Provided you are like me, part vampire, and sleep happily through the day.  And provided you don't have Danish at 8 AM.

It's the only time of the year I can pretend to be a morning person.

Just look at that sunrise!  How lovely.

Morning people love to talk about the sunrise.  About how it heralds a new day all fresh with no mistakes in it.  I'd like to point out that I always start my day without any mistakes in it... only I start later in the day to minimize the number of mistakes that can occur before the end of the day.  Forward thinking, that's me.  I also like my days like my wines and cheeses, slightly aged and mature.

But I do like sunrises.

Which would leave me with a problem if it wasn't for Danish summers.

More Adventures in Gardening

***EDIT***
Damn it, I hit post instead of preview a few hours ago, so you may be getting this again.  And again.  And again.  This is the one with all the pictures I could muster.  I'm just going to go bang my head on the table now.  Sorry Kelli, I deleted your comment when I deleted the old version of this post.  Thanks for liking the last photo!
***END EDIT***

The adventures continue in our garden.  Two things worth mentioning...

I am not a gardener.

Neither is my husband.

While most things we'll research to death before attempting (just ask my husband about his ongoing probe into trailers - we haven't the money to buy one, but when we do... oh my will we be prepared), for some reason "gardening" is not one of them.  We own at least seven books on wine, including grape varietals and regional production, numerous cook books and recipe collections, more books on the archaeology of the Middle Bronze Age in the Southern Levant than you could possibly want and not one single book on plants.  Neither care, nor maintenance, nor varieties (unless you count the grape book, but it notably states that growing grapes in Denmark for wine production is a foolish venture undertaken by nut-jobs with greenhouses - or words to that effect).

This has worked out fine because we ended up with some very lovely roses without doing a darned thing.

This is one of two large (taller than I am) rose bushes.  I think it's a little sick, there are black spots on the leaves.  But the roses are HUGE and AMAZING in their abundance.






See?








Then there is this white rose bush.  There's a hammock in this picture that my husband temporarily strung up.










White rose on above mentioned bush.

We also have a red rose bush that looks pretty sad, apart from one beautiful rose and a few possible buds.






This is the last rose bush, it's got rather wild-looking roses, but absolutely no rose smell.

Look at THAT!  Pink and orange and the flower is about the size of my hand with fingers outstretched.  I LIKE this rose.  And since I have allergies, I shouldn't go around sticking my nose into roses to smell them anyway.





Then my husband got a large clipper for his graduation present.  And he got a little excited.

This was once on a bush.









This is what remains of that bush.

Since this was my favorite bush in the garden, I'm a little peeved.  Okay, I am REALLY peeved. [Deep calming breath.]  I know it will grow back.  At least I hope it will grow back. [Deep calming breath... again.]  But can you understand that I'm less than excited about his assertions that he can prune our rose bushes without killing them?

To be fair, I don't think that the bushes in our garden had been pruned in years and were a bit of a mess, but he's insisting that apart from one or two little slips, the branches had to go because they were "all tangly."

Would someone else like to explain to my husband that nature is often "all tangly"?

If only the garden had not been so over-grown!  Well, it's certainly not now.  Except for the rose bushes, who got a last minute reprieve by blooming so well.  I really don't want to cut them back as much as I know the Danish Boy would like (and now that he's got big manly clippers, he can).  *Sigh* I expect there to be a bit of a row over it in late summer after the blooms fall off.

I did insist that the lavender stayed as it was.  We compromised and he got to cut off one random branch, rather than the pruning he wanted to do.  Whoever planted the lavender planted another lovely plant RIGHT NEXT TO IT so now both are all up in each other's faces.

I'm rooting for the lavender.

I also absolutely love my foxglove plant.  I wish a had oodles more.  Did you know that the first year they don't bloom?  Means we probably pulled a bunch of them out thinking they were weeds.  Drat.









While my husband worked on de-vegetating the garden, I managed to get some good Alot photos...

Isn't he cute?

This one screams "lolcat" - I mean, WHERE IS HIS HEAD??

But this is my favorite.  I managed to catch him because I was sitting here at the table working on this G*D*MN*D F*CK*NG POST FROM H*LL when he decided to take a break on the chair.  He came in when I went out to get a few more garden pictures, he had been lurking in the (now much smaller) bushes, probably just waiting for the door to open.

Every time he comes in the house, he does the same thing: tours the house (including every window sill), scratches the carpet in front of the door, lounges somewhere for a few minutes, then wanders out a little while later.  I have a lot of Alot butt shots on my camera.  Sometimes I can get him coming at me, like the first shot.  Only if I can't get the camera to focus in time I end up with a close up blurred shot of his nose.

*** Post script to this post ***
I had a horrible time trying to get the images into this post.  Hours spent swearing and clawing at the air and pulling hair.  The reasons are two-fold.  One, there were so many photos, that it made the post ridiculously long and so I tried to do a flickr slideshow WHICH DIDN'T WORK - hours were wasted there, and secondly I had a very hard time getting the pictures to be placed where I wanted them to be and they kept wanting to turn into "links" and refused to let me write text next to them without dragging them down from the top of the post where they mysteriously moved after I de-linked them.  Leaving them as links did seem to work sometimes, but not others.  Not only that, but each picture took forever to upload.

I guess that's three-fold, not two-fold...

Either I need to post fewer photos or I need a different platform or I'm doing this all wrong.  Is there an idiots guide to blogger that I should know about?  Any suggestions on how to make this easier on myself?  I spent all day today on this post.  ALL DAMN DAY!  And now I'm hungry and have to cook myself something.  If you'll excuse me, I'll just go wallow in self-pity in the kitchen...

Sometimes I even amaze myself!

It's really not that hard to impress me.  I find lots of things that normal people take for granted absolutely AMAZING!  

Then again, I find lots of things that people think amazing completely normal.

My life, for example.  Totally normal.

People who go to work, the same job, day after day, who go home at night and leave the job in the office?  People who save up money for vacations and go to concerts and know where they'll be in three days, three weeks, three years??

WEIRD!!

Anyway...

See this?  This is amazing!  This is me being wicked impressed at myself.  

I flipped that crepe.  That and about 10 others.  Not a single one ended up on the floor.  This is the second time that I've flipped crepes.  Second time in my life.  How did I learn?  I uh, saw it on TV.  Oh and a read a description in a book.  And once I saw someone do it... well, I kinda saw it.  I wasn't really paying attention at the time.

Anyway.  Then I just tried it, figuring "what was the worst that could happen?  Breakfast ends up on the floor and I scramble some eggs and I have a great blog post."  And then I was suddenly able to flip crepes!

Only if I try to show someone, like, say, my husband, it doesn't go so well.  Thankfully he's not home this weekend.  The kitchen floor remained as clean as it was before I started making breakfast.

By the way, don't eat off my floor.  Not this week.  "Clean" is sort of relative in this house.

I had a bit of trouble the last time with the melted butter you are supposed to use in the "dough" and when I tried it again today it is still a problem, so I think I'll swap it out for vegetable oil.

But baring the bit with the butter, it was fantastic.

Pimp my Parlor!

Welcome to "Pimp my Parlor."  Today we visit a small island in Denmark to visit a large house with an interesting problem.

There are too many rooms and not enough furniture.  The fools who live here don't even know what to call the first front room.  It's obviously a parlor, also known as a salon, or even as a drawing room if you want to spend the rest of your life explaining that no, you do not draw in your drawing room, very funny, idiot.

What it is not is a storage room.

Look at this mess!!

The husband in this house was using the room as a temporary office while working on his final project, since the internet is only accessible through one plug in the corner of the room.  The wife, for reasons that we can only imagine, she IS an American after all and we all know what THEY are like, is running cables across the floor and into the next room where she's taken up semi-permanent residence on the couch.


Thankfully, due to some mold, a deep-seated dislike of older furniture, and a last minute display of generosity, the couple was able to score some large furniture from the in-laws for free.  "Pimp my Parlor" was there to see the result.

They acquired the entire contents of the rectory dinning room: a carpet, and a set of furniture that included a table, chairs, and what's known as a "silver cabinet."

There was a total of 7 chairs, one of which was just slightly different from the rest.  There were also three extra seat inserts and it is the opinion of the wife that there were three other chairs at some point.  She even remembers seeing them in the attic.  They were slightly broken.  She's willing to bet that they were tossed rather than repaired.  This makes her feel slightly ill, so we did not press her for more information.  Four chairs eventually went into the dinning room to replace the unsightly chairs previously in use, though at the time of these photos several of the chairs do seem to be standing around looking embarrassed.  The other three chairs, including the odd man out, remained in the parlor around the table.

Since the home owners do not have any silver... well, we're sure they'll find a use for the cabinet.  They do seem to have a ridiculous number of books in boxes around the house.  However, "Pimp my Parlor" doesn't do libraries.

Also in the set was a massive sideboard.  The small secretary on the far right was an earlier acquisition from the same house, but not part of the dinning room set.

We later discovered that the third door to the sideboard was present, just not re-attached in time for our visit.

Really, they have no excuse now for having things laying about.  Like that advertisement sitting on the table.  Sheesh, good thing we aren't trying to sell this house!  You can see the staircase through these doors.  The wife says this may help some of the long time readers of this blog to orient the position of the parlor.  We at "Pimp my Parlor" prefer blueprints, but that set the woman off on this fit of "oh my god, I have been busy!  Danish doesn't learn itself!!" And so we left her alone.

Oh, yes, almost forgot the bench.

Because of the odd number of chairs, the couple has cleverly used a large bench as the seat along one side of the table.

We see the advertisement has moved.  Thanks, overly excitable woman!

There was another smaller sideboard that came with this set, it went into the proper dinning room and resulted in furniture being rearranged in the office.  This didn't make much sense to us, but seeing how the wife was beginning to look a little frazzled, we decided to not make an issue of it, especially after her father-in-law had informed them, AFTER all the furniture was moved into the house, that the dinning room set did in fact come into smaller pieces, which might make it easier for them to move.

Apparently the couple was worried that they were breaking the furniture and so desisted from tugging on various bits and just carefully moved the furniture on rollers.  Across carpets.  Through doors.  (Doors in Denmark all have thresholds, even the interior doors.  The couple doesn't know why, but they are prepared to shoot the architect.)  Onto lifts.  Into moving vans.  Then they drove the furniture to the house on a narrow COBBLED street where, because there was very little room to maneuver the moving van, the couple constructed a BRIDGE out of a BROKEN BOOKSHELF so that they could roll the furniture out of the moving van, onto the lift, and then from the lift onto the bridge, over the front door step and then around the corner into the parlor.  In order to get this furniture, the couple had gotten up at 5 am and only completed all the moving at 2 am the NEXT MORNING.  Too bad there is no video of this event.

So when "Pimp my Parlor" showed up later that day, we quickly took the photos and ran away.  The poor woman was also in the middle of cleaning the kitchen because the chimney sweep had been to empty a chimney full of bird nests, leaving a thick layer of soot throughout.  Meanwhile, her husband had finished his project just before the Great Parlor Trick Move and ran off to do a taxi shift.

At the time this program aired, we were able to interview the woman, in a slightly more relaxed state.  Her husband passed his final project, he's now a Journalist For Real, and the kitchen is de-sooted and getting organized.  The garden is still a shambles and the internet is still only accessible in two rooms of the house, neither of which is an office.  But she is quick to point out, they are only one wardrobe, one bed and two mattresses away from having a completely furnished house.  If only life would slow down just enough to be able to organize it!

A bit of history

So looked up the house in the building registrar thingy.

It says, with some translation work...

"Big city house.  Built in 1875, attic extension 1921.  A pretty "street" house with a large, high facade and large "Danish flag" windows with profiled moulding.^  Beautiful cornice with dentils.^^  Recessed double door.^^^  Fine chimneys.  New windows in attic extension.
Should you with to change this house: The house must remain unchanged in every detail.  The replacement of building materials must be used for reconstruction purposes only."^^^^

So there you have it.  This date of 1875 makes me much happier, because there is NO WAY people were building in this style in 1915 like the owner said.  Also, the property appears in a city plan drawn in 1677.  There are 9 houses depicted on "my" street - and currently there are 20 real homes sitting here.  What I'm saying it that it's not so accurate, this 1677 map, but it *is* a freakin' old street.


^ I have no idea what they mean by "profiled." Is my moulding under suspicion?  Is my moulding *gasp* a mass murderer!!??
^^ Google translate gave me teeth-cut.  Google translate is not up on it's architectural terms.  Google translate doesn't know how to use Wikipedia.
^^^ Anyone know what a "fyldingsdør" is?  Apart from something about a door.   Is it something incredibly stupid, like "full-length" or "folding"?  It has a transom window above it - does that help?
^^^^ This last section sent Google translate into meltdown.  I've decided that this is what the authors mean when they started tossing "ved" around and leaving out words that would have made this all a lot clearer.

Moving through the bowels of the house...

I am going to plunge right in and point out that this post contains absolutely no bathroom humor, or puns, because jokes like that are a drain on my system.  So continue to shower on the praise, folks, because I am surely going round the U-bend...

I wish I could say that that got it out of my system... but I think I may have gone septic.

Oh, I'm flushed with shame.

Ack!  I must go on before this post becomes clogged with OH MY GOD I CAN'T STOP I'M OVERFLOWING WITH TOILET PUNS!!!

I can't even say "moving on" without sniggering.  So mature! But the reality is that we are about to embark on a tour of part of the house you normally don't see on home tours of the rich and famous (thank god no one rich or famous lives HERE) but where, undoubtably, the majority of us spend some quality time.  If it makes you feel better, maybe you should bring a newspaper to read.

Moving through the vestibule, around the stairs, hidden away, pretending to not even be there, is one of the happiest surprises of this house.

A second bathroom.

There were six of us sharing a bathroom in Århus, which is possible but maybe not advisable unless you have an industrial exhaust fan, great water pressure and an amazing water heater.  And patient people who abide by a schedule.  I had forgotten how wonderful it was to be able to go to the bathroom when you wanted and to have complete privacy for the duration because THERE IS ANOTHER FREAKING BATHROOM UPSTAIRS!!!

The door on the left leads to the kitchen.  We are going behind door number two.

*snigger*

It's not the world's largest bathroom, but it is larger than a lot of the bathrooms I've used in Copenhagen (I'm pretty sure the term "water closet" was coined for your bathrooms, my dears).

Sink to the right, toilet straight ahead (a head *snort*), the dark patch in the back is the shower, but we've not put in a shower curtain yet.  I see the benefits of two toilets in the house, but as yet we don't really have any shower issues to work around.  Anyway, the floor of the shower is heated.  That took us a while to work out.  You turn on the floor heat and then wonder why, god, why do your feet continue to freeze while you sit on the throne?  Meanwhile the dehumidifier is getting nice and toasty wheels.

A word about the dehumidifier.  My husband is a feared of the damp.  This is a perfectly rational fear because his father's house was recently declared uninhabitable due to mold and Denmark is nothing if not damp.  Years ago we lived in Ebeltoft, in a very small, newly renovated apartment that lacked air circulation.  Who the hell renovates a bathroom and forgets to put in a fan?  You can't really throw the windows open when the rain is falling (falling? it drops on you like a ninja in the dark!) at a 45 degree angle and just above freezing.  So we bought the dehumidifier to dry our clothes and to prevent mold from spreading.  It's once again at work, although I am not convinced that having it whirl away in a back room while I can push paperclips through the spaces in the window frames and stick post cards through the gap between the front doors means that our house is now safe from damp... but marriage is all about picking your battles and the dehumidifier's gentle hum when the humidity in the bathroom reaches 50% makes my husband very happy.

Same picture, with flash.  Ugh, it's very clinical, isn't it?

Anyway,you can see a bit more of the shower and this mysterious door just on the other side of the toilet.

This small door leads to...

The most difficult room to photograph EVER.

I have no idea what's going on here.  This is a room purposefully? accidently? made by the creation of the bathroom in what was possibly a hallway or pantry.  The water boiler is perched halfway up one wall like some sort of vulture-bat.  What you see in this picture are pipes that run from the water vat, over and around the room like a spaceship film set and then into the kitchen.  The kitchen being a more recent edition to the house.  You can also see a door.  There's a bolt and everything.  But the door to the back of the house, to the old laundry and coal house (yes, we have some really weird stuff going on in some of the back buildings), is in the kitchen.  Where does this door lead?

To the world's smallest courtyard!  The door is really solidly shut here.  If my husband gets his way, the dryer that we will some day purchase will magic itself into the courtyard by way of not one, but two, old and not very well plumbed doors and then fit through this door which will need to be removed by the hinges, to be placed in that little room that kinda freaks me out.

This is because I once removed part of the floor to see if I could find a water valve.  No valve.  Large deep hole.  No one likes to discover they are standing on a plank above a large deep hole.

Anyway, back to my amazingly small courtyard.  It's got a tree, some random pipes and...

Can anyone say AWESOME??

I have a water pump in a courtyard!  In my house!!

Most of the homes in this town have a water pump in the backyard.  There's also two in the main square, one of which works, and tourists love to stand around pumping cold water on themselves.  (Inevitably someone is standing looking up the spout to see if water is coming.)  Mine may work... after a bit of restoration.  The jolly paint job cemented various bits together that should move independently and some bits that should not move at all are now decidedly wobbly.  But Hey! I have a water pump in my backyard!!