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!!

My Home: enter at your peril...

So lots of "want photos!" come my way regarding the house.  And I ran about taking photos here and there and then there was the usual hysteria on the couch where I tried to figure out how to put all of these in a post that wouldn't be a complete disaster and then it came to me.  Like the Virgin Mary, speaking words of wisdom... only it was Bill Bryson.  Or maybe not, because I haven't actually read the book yet, it being brand spanking new and I not having money for random books of bliss...

I seem to be wandering.  Where was I?

Oh, yes.  We are going to do a home tour.  Room by room.  Or maybe more than one room on some occasions.  Screw it, folks, we'll do as many damn rooms per post as I freakin' feel like, okay?

So without further ado: the entry way.

 

This is the front door.  Is this not an awesome door??  And yes, my house is yellow with white trim.  Strangely enough, a vast majority of the houses I've lived in have been yellow with white trim.  My mom has an obsession for yellow houses with white trim, especially if they have green shutters.  Someone, please make my mother's day by bringing her 16 green shutters for her house?  Oh, and while you are at it, you may want to finish painting the trim.  Bring a ladder.  Oh, and repaint the house... it's faded a lot over the years.  Especially on the south side, facing the sun.

Going in through this door, which is RIGHT ON THE STREET, because front yards happen to other people not living in this town, you enter my vestibule.

If I were to be staging a house to be sold, I obviously would have cleaned.  If I had not been worried about being hit by a car while I hunkered down on my front stoop to take this photo, I would have at least moved the jackets so you could see the newel post.  You'll just have to trust me that there is a newel post and not a small child under all of that mess.

Anyway, the door on the left leads to the parlor.  Which we just found out will be stocked with a large dining set that we are getting for free from the inlaws.  In fact, all the furniture we had "bought" is now "free" and we aren't paying a dime apart from the cost of getting it from there to here.  Seems that attempts to sell it for a small fortune were undone by a Danish public obsessed with Arne Jacobsen egg chairs, who are all noses up at heavy wooden country-style furniture.  I WIN, Denmark!

The door "straight ahead" is to the kitchen.  Just to the right of that door, hidden by the staircase, is another small door to a tiny bathroom.  Not a half-bath, but one fully equipped with shower.  And hidden closet to utilities.  Oh, and a blocked up doorway to the world's smallest courtyard.  All ahead on "My Home"!!

Standing in the door from the kitchen looking back at the door that is now CLOSED!!  You are trapped!!

You decide to approach the tiger saying "nice kitty kitty," wishing you had a steak in your pocket.  Turn to page 83.

You decide to claw at the door and cry like a baby.  Turn to page 15.

You decide that the tiger is a figment of your imagination and stride boldly towards the next door.  Turn to page 106.


I sucked at "Choose your own adventure" books.  I just thought you should know.

So welcome to my home.  Toss your jacket over the rail and kick off your shoes.  I'll bring you a gin and tonic and we'll wander into the next room...

Adventures in Gardening

We purposefully set out to destroy a plant in our yard this last week.  We don't know what it is, but it's wicked spiky and it is trying to kill the rhododendron.

At least *I* think it's trying to kill the rhododendron.  I tend to anthropomorphize plants.  Actually, I tend to anthropomorphize everything, but I like to think it's part of my charm.  A small quirk of my overactive imagination, if you will.

You can't see it in this picture - but it's totally beating the crap out of the rhododendron!!

The spiky plant had to be brought low.  And it was, with help from some garden sheers.  But it will be back, oh yes, it will be back.  I fully expect it to become my nemesis.

There was a plant just like it back in my parents front yard.  Both myself and my sister have tried to kill it.  One time I completely chopped it up, dug down, and poured paint on its evil tap root, all in an effort to poison it completely.  Water-based paint being the most dangerous thing I could get my hands on at the age of 12.  My parents were careful people who were obviously two steps ahead of their possibly dangerous children.

Anyway, the plant wouldn't die and now that my dad has landscaped the yard to the point where we can't get at the Satan Plant, it is happily thriving.

But back to the garden I have now, not random patches of scrubby grass I have had in my past.  The New Satan Plant will continued to be attacked, the rhododendron will be nurtured and I have learned the great secret of gardening.

***SOMETIMES YOU PULL OUT THE WRONG PLANTS***

Oopsy-doodle.

I would now like to tell you about the lavender plant that I have.  It's not a rosemary bush like I thought.  But I am happy to report that I think it will survive and I'm glad I almost killed it discovered it was a lavender bush before I tried to cook with bits of it.  I'll make sure to say nice things to it whenever I pass by.

Meet: Alot

Alot is not mine. 

*snicker*

Alot wandered into my back yard the other day *heh* while my husband and I were gardening.  Until this point, he wasn’t known as Alot.  *guffaw*  He was known as the-cat-that-wasn’t-the-ginger-cat-or-the-little-black-and-white-one.  After a five minute description of the cat THAT WE WERE BOTH LOOKING AT just to say, “and he’s very friendly, this cat,” that I suggested we give him a name.

I mean, we simply could not go on this way and the cat was certainly settling into our garden with intent.  Intent to loiter.  Intent on being cute.  Intent on entertaining the Archaeogoddess with his little fuzzy butt antics.

“Why not ‘Alot’,” said my husband, who is still reeling from the humor of Hyperbole-and-a-Half’s brilliant Alot post, even though I read it to him over a month ago.  Mind you, it *is* genius.  I laugh every time I read it.  My husband, who thinks puns are possibly the highest form of humor, secretly harbors a desperate love for Allie.  At least I think he does.  It's okay, I harbor a not-so-secret desperate love for David Tennant.  We all have our little quirks.  Anyway, I suggest you read it, not only because it's ridiculously funny, but also so that you’ll get the ongoing joke in this post and realize that I’m not stupid, I know an a lot from an Alot. 

But dude, I’m telling you, we named the damn cat Alot.

*bwahahaha*

This let to all kinds of hilarity in the yard.

“Honey, look, there’s Alot in the car!”

“Is that Alot in your jacket, or is it just happy to see me?”

“Oh my god, Alot just fell into the pond!”

Alas, I didn’t get a picture of Alot falling into the pond.  Even if I’d had the camera and been pointing it his way, I would have collapsed in hysterical giggles without ever firing a shot.

I knew it would happen.  I was pretty sure it was going to happen a few days earlier when Alot and the black and white cat, who has of yet no name but I’m leaning towards “Heck” so I can yell “It’s a Heck and Alot!,”  were bounding around the garden chasing each other, their own tails, and the various flying bugs that frequent my yard.

But nope.  Alot’s downfall came when trying to stalk my husband’s hoe-thing.  Hoes will lead you astray, man, every time.  So while Alot was trying to sneak around behind the Danish Boy, he headed towards that nice flat green patch, beyond which the bushes offered a safe location from whence to pounce.

Imagine if you will, dainty cat feet.  Dink-dink-dinking across the ground. 

Dink-dink-pause-dink-dink-pause-dink-dink-plop-plop.

Up to his armpits in algae. 

He withdrew to a safe distance to try to salvage his dignity. 

And we laughed a lot at Alot.

Yesterday Alot wandered into the house, causing my dear Dane to exclaim, “Alot scared the crap out of me earlier today.”  Today we almost took Alot with us to Århus.  One of the great things about Alot is his ability to do things that let us maximize the punning potential of his name.

He’s obviously not our cat.  He does go home, wherever that is, in the evening.  We don’t usually see Alot out at night.  He’s well fed, well groomed, and very friendly.  He’s not neutered, which I think adds to his roaming nature, but so far he’s not treated our yard like a giant litter box.  As far as my husband is concerned, he’s the best pet ever - the kind that costs nothing and gives you hours of entertainment and joy.

We like him, Alot.

This is that post...

I've been waiting and waiting to use this image (unless I've used it already, but I'm not going to go back through all my posts, no sir-ee-bob) and this is that post.

From Pictures for sad children.  I'm pretty sure John Campbell isn't Danish, or married to a Dane, or have had any reason to sit through a Danish party, and yet he really nails the experience.

This post may be a bit touchy, so I'm putting a break in it - continue reading after the jump.

It's not just me!!

I'm not the only one to see the inherent evil in ducks.


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I didn't caption this photo, I swear!

If I have different favorite colors every few years, does that mean I have schizophrenia?

Totally stole this from All About Me and A Bag of Chips.

I am very attracted to the color beet - but my toenail polish is currently lake.  Make of that what you will.

In the garden of evil... baby....

I've been a very good girl and taken pictures of my garden for you all.

This is my garden from my bedroom, right before spring errupted.  Across the road is the duck pond, where the nefarious Ducks of Doom await and plot world domination.  Then there's the harbor and the sea beyond that.  My uninterupted sea views are, in fact, interupted by the harbor.  But come Fleet Week, I get a great view of both ships.

BWHAHAHAHA!

Actually, we did have two small navy vessels in port a few days ago.  It was a little dark to take a non-flash photo and I only take military photos when I am sure no one is going to catch me because I don't want to get shot, thankyouverymuch.  So you'll just have to trust me that we had sailors in town.

*Insert seaman joke here*

Of late I've been suffering from insomnia.  This is partially exasperated by having my husband rush off back to Aarhus to make money as a taxi driver until his job here beings in July (more specifically, until his first pay check is deposited) and I just kinda forget to go to bed.

I'd forget to breathe if it wasn't a subconscious act.

But it means I end up getting to watch the sun rise over the duck pond.   Once I even managed to photograph it!  I love sunrises.  Provided that I've been up all night to watch them.  I'm very unfond of seeing sunrises because I've had to get up early.  I like watching the sun rise and then going to bed.  I also like wandering around town after everyone else has gone to bed.  But taking pictures in the dark is a little difficult - I would need to find the tripod, learn to use a camera properly, and have patience.  Posh!  The point of wandering around in the dark at night is the wandering around in the dark at night!

I hear tonight is a full moon.  I'm so tempted to go out and wander around in it.

Anyway, my garden.  I didn't plant it.  According to our landlord, he spent a Great Deal of Money on it and we must take care of it.  This would be much easier if I knew anything about plants.

Like this plant.

I like it.

It's all spiky and the red flower thing is even more red in real life, but I'm not a fabulous photographer and I lack photoshop.

And I have no clue as to what kind of flower it is.

There is also this flower that's growing in the gravel and nowhere else in the garden.  This suggests it's a weed, but it's pretty and I want to keep it.

Then there is this flower.  Bush.  Flower.  Bush.  Flowerbush?

It's got spiky thorns like a rose, but it doesn't look much like a rose.  I was going to lean in and sniff it, but I'd have to step on some things that may or may not be baby plants and possibly grasp another spiky plant-bush thing in an effort not to fall on my face into the flowerbush and that would just suck.

This picture also shows how much lusher my garden has gotten since I took the picture at the top of this post... just a few days ago.

I also really like this plant.  It's a purple plant.  Has little bitty flowers that remind me of a plant back home that I used to think was Fox Glove, but now I know is not.

Oh, you say, I thought you said you didn't know about plants?

Yes, well, I am sort of a nut for poisonous plants used in murder mysteries.  And Digitalis is one of the fun ones.  But I did just learn that it's considered a weed by the USDA.

Then there is this little yellow flower growing right next to my ornamental pond.  It's got leaves that totally scream "weed" or possibly "romaine lettuce" but a quick wikipedia trip doesn't tell me if lettuce has flowers.

Because of the whole Fox Glove thing, I tend to not eat random plants in gardens.

That and my mother liked to tell us kids the story of the boy scouts who went camping and then used Oleander sticks to roast marshmallows and DIED!

Speaking of the ornamental pond...

Here is a picture, with a newspaper for scale.  Or perhaps I've kidnapped this pond and this is a proof of life photo.

It's about two feet across and probably about that deep.  It seems to be made of a cement ring, sunk into the ground, with some solid bottom keeping the water from leaking away.

And it is full of dead leaves.  Topped by small green plants that do not seem to be algae and perhaps are meant to be there.  Not really sure on that one.

My husband is at a loss as to it's purpose.  In my husband's world, things have purpose.  I like things to have a purpose, and in my house, if you don't serve a purpose (which sometimes just has to be "entertain the Archaeogoddess for half an hour) you don't get to move with us then next time we change addresses.  It's a harsh old life in the Archaeohousehold, but it makes it easier to move from house to house.  However, I recognize that sometimes we don't need to know the purpose of a thing to appreciate and like it.

That being said, the ornamental pond creeps me out.

I went and fished a plastic bag out of it the other day and I thought, just for a minute, that I was about to fish a foot out as well.

A human foot.

I mean, come on, doesn't that pond just scream "body dump" to you?

It would have to be a small body.

Which just makes it all the more creepy, doesn't it?

Don't worry folks, if I was going to go about killing people, I would definitely not put them in my ornamental pond.  Because putting the body in your own backyard is how they catch you.  There is also the problem of size.  My pond is just too small.  To fit a body in it I'd first have to cut it up and deep fry it until it was crispy and then run it through the wood chipper, and if you are going to go through that much trouble you might as well just dispose of the body somewhere else, like the fertilizer ponds that are all over Denmark.  Your victim could be spread out all over Samsø without you having to lift a finger.

Then there is all that business about pig farms.  Lots of pig farms in Denmark, you know.  This country is just crying out for a crime syndicate and a mob boss.

So it seems...

So it seems that the only way I am going to graduate with a PhD is if I cut out everything that I was even remotely interested in and focus entirely on bits I specifically did not want to write about.

And for what?

So that people can call me "doctor"?  That's a bit pompous.  Was I going to use it for anything other than slapping it on a business card?  I'm not planning on going into scholarship or academia.  I get physically ill at the thought.  Teaching is great, it's the rest of it I can't stand.  I might get paid a bit more as an archaeologist.  Except that experience is very important when hunting for a job in the field and of course, I can't get any more experience while I'm supposed to be finishing this thing.  (I had to use our extreme poverty as an excuse to go and work in Qatar and I've been going against my advisor for years when it comes to my digging in Israel and Jordan - if I listened to my committee I would never dig until after I got a degree.)   I might have better opportunities for jobs, except that having a PhD is a requirement for the jobs I don't want and not a requirement for the jobs I do.  It might help others get better grants.  And while I do love my colleagues very much, I'm no good to them if I have a complete mental breakdown over this.

I managed to finish a draft after hours of pain - tears, cramps, headaches, nightmares, bit lips, chewed off fingernails, stomach aches, nausea, acid reflux, heart palpitations and sleepless nights.  I shut off the bits of my head that told me what I was doing was pointless and stupid and wrote the biggest piles of poop I've ever written.  I can't actually read those chapters.  I have full on panic attacks when I think too much about them.

Those are the chapters my committee wants me to keep, of course.

The chapters I wrote, that I slaved over, the ones where I worked on the sentences until I can proudly step back and say, yes, I wrote that and I think it's pretty good.  The chapters that I can read without getting that horrible feeling in my chest... those are the ones they want me to throw out.  "Pointless" was one, unforgettable, comment.

I brought this up to my advisor, because I was rather upset about the whole thing and he told me to stop whining and complaining and that he should have thrown the book at me long ago.  Thanks, that was really helpful.  I'm glad you're here to advise me.

Can someone tell me why I'm doing this again?

Oh, yes, I wanted to be an archaeologist.

Wait a minute - I *am* an archaeologist!

I'm a PAID archaeologist!

Why the hell am I turning down opportunities to go do what I love to do so that I can sit at home surrounded by post-it notes, sobbing hysterically and clutching a German-English dictionary?!  Why do I keep having to send apology emails to my advisor because I'm miserable and need help and it's "getting on his nerves"?

What about my nerves?  I'm a wreck when it comes to this thing!  I'm sitting here sobbing NOW and all I'm doing is talking to you lot about it.

I don't need to prove that I'm smart.  I know I'm smart.  I don't need to prove anything.  Especially that I can write hundreds of pages of crap that I cannot defend.

(But it would be a funny defense.  Any question my committee would ask would have to be answered with "because you told me that if I didn't put it in here, I wouldn't graduate.  I personally think it's wrong and stupid, but what do I know?")

There's the usual, oh, but my dear, you've spent the last 10 years of your life working on this!  You can't just walk away now!!

If I'd spent $50,000 trying to get a $2,000 car working, you'd say I was an idiot, right?  And you'd tell me to stop throwing good money after bad, right?

I've got one life to live here, folks.  One life.  Every year I spend doing what I hate, and paying to do it, mind - we've been paying to keep me enrolled for 5 years now - is another year gone.  And I will NEVER get it back.  Money is just money.  This is my life I'm spending.

Instead of sitting in a library, trying to find every last different meaning for representations of fish in the 3rd century CE (there are a lot, and by the way, I think that there is an interesting relationship between images of acquiring food and images of food itself and that someone might make a really interesting dissertation out of it... I'd rather kill myself that write it, but if you are interested I will totally tell you all about it and *you* can write it), I could be out trying to get jobs in the field.  I could be going to conferences and meeting up with people and making contacts and exploring other things I may be interested in.  I could be enjoying life EVERY DAY instead of just the days I decide that I can't possibly be asked to try to work on this horrible horrible pile of crap.

I remember feeling like this before.  It was in my last marriage and every conversation we were having about why I was unhappy had to do with me not trying hard enough and not compromising enough.  All I did when we were together was cry.  And feel stupid and unworthy of his attention.  Leaving him was the best thing I ever did.  I learned that love is about loving the person that you are and the person you are with for who you and they are RIGHT NOW.  Not who you want to be or who you want them to be.

That was sort of a non sequitur, but that was also major depression that resulted in some heavy medication that gave me the courage to just go off and do what I really wanted to do for once... still non sequituring.... but the point being, I don't want to be that depressed again.  It sucked.  And it's starting to feel like that again.  Not the marriage.  The current marriage is great.  Graduate school, folks.  Graduate school is depressing.

If I'm so unhappy in graduate school, working on this dissertation, that all I do when even thinking about it is cry, if working on it makes me feel stupid and unworthy of a degree - WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WASTING MY PRECIOUS TIME ON IT!??

I know I'm not stupid and I'm not unworthy of a degree - but I don't need to get a degree to tell me that!

In many respects, grad school has been great.  I really enjoyed the first few years.  I met people I really needed to meet and without it I wouldn't be here today.

I mean that in every sense, by the way.

But I'd really like to go back to being able to look up stuff I'm interested in, read the things I'm interested in reading, think about the things I'm interested in thinking about without feeling guilty.  I'd like to not feel nauseous in my office.  I'd like to stop having heart palpitations when I check my email.  I'd really like it all to be over.

That's it.

I'm done.

Let me out.
Let me off.
Let me go.

And if I could just get someone in my department to email me back it would be fan-fuckin'-tastic.

Island life...

So I may have mentioned that I moved to an island who's name I cannot pronounce, to a city who's name I cannot pronounce, to a street who's name I cannot pronounce.

This is the joy of Denmark, constantly being unable to ask people how to get home because you can't tell them where you live.

I think this is the real reason they invented identity cards in this small nation.  How else could the Copenhagen police know which train to put west coasters on?  It's not like you can understand the words that are coming out of their mouths.  I mean, jeez!

And at some point you *will* need help getting home.  Maybe because you've had too much to drink, but it's just as likely that you'll discover that the bus stops have moved and the buses have been rerouted and suddenly you shouldn't be taking the 15, because that no longer goes by your house, or stops anywhere near your house. In fact, the 15 now goes to Hamburg.

Which is in Germany.

And we don't go to Germany.

Unless we are buying ridiculous amounts of cheap snacks and liquor which would have cost us the same amount if we'd just gone to Bilka because we used half a tank of gas to get us to Germany and will use half a tank to get back, and petrol is viciously expensive in Denmark, but going to Germany to load up on crap reminds us why we fought the war.

Oh, and we go to Germany to visit Berlin.

But as we all know, Berlin is not *really* Germany.

So OTHER THAN THAT, we don't go to Germany.

Speaking of Germany, if I went to the south side of my island I might be able to see it, on a clear day.

Thus giving me enough foreign policy experience to run for Veep.

*hurried whispers* What?

*stressed whisper* Oh.

Apparently, my associates tell me, I live in a foreign country and have worked in several other foreign countries, thus giving me OODLES more foreign policy experience that some people who have, in the past, may have run for certain public offices.

Moving on...

This island.  Under 7000 inhabitants.  Which still makes it a larger community than what I grew up in, shockingly enough.  You can only get here by ferry boat.  There are three ferry boats leaving from different cities and arriving in different cities.  This does mean that from time to time you race from one end of the island to the other trying to get on a ferry boat.  Important note if you ever visit me: make a reservation for your car.  We get weekenders.  *scoffs*

I have lived a good chunk of my life in tourist destinations.  This is because I share my parents philosophy of "why just visit a lovely place when you can freakin' live there!"

(They probably wouldn't put it that way, or they'd point out that they have other, more important philosophies like "be kind to others" and "please don't bring the car back without any gas this time" - but they did decide to move us all to a charming town in the country rather than raise us in suburbia because it is way more awesome to live in a beautiful place all the time, instead of living in a sucky place and only going to pretty places when you can.)

So I tend to have a bit of impatience with tourists and a certain smugness when it comes to where I live.  Add that to my irrational hatred of summer homes... and well, I'm an islander by nature.

My husband and I have had oodles of fun exploring the island.  We've been beer tasting at the local brewery, we've gone in search of the butchers so that I can get a shoulder of pork (not a common cut in Denmark, by the way) and we've been antiquing (which is very touristy, but also a great way to find out if you can afford to decorate your house... and the answer is NO).  We've found out that although we live on an island and a huge number of people living here are fishermen, you cannot buy fresh fish in any stores.  But some fishermen may be keeping some fish from their catches, which they aren't supposed to do, and these men may be willing to sell you some under the table, which they aren't supposed to do, but of course, no one really knows if this is *really* so...

For those who wonder, yes, there *is* a hospital on the island.  Somewhere around here.  I just had it a minute ago, must have set it down somewhere... forget my own head next...

We've discovered that we can get just about everything we used to be able to get in Århus, except some American foods (no SuperBest here) and I'm having an herbal issue, where I keep buying potted herbs and then eating them instead of planting them.

I feel strangely guilty about that.  I mean, I buy my chickens pre-dead, cut and packaged for my dining pleasure - why can I not get herbs the same way?  Having me buy herbs in a pot forces me into some big lie about how I'm going to take this potted herb home and care for it, give it a good life, nurture it.  When the reality is, I'm going to go home and pull it's little leaves off!  The herbs even come with little tags telling me how to care for the plant.  I tell you, it's just sick.  Now if I bought a bush of mint, it might last - although the care tag tells me that mint is not meant to survive in northern Europe and therefore needs plenty of sunlight - ohmygod, set me up for failure why don't you!  Denmark, sun?  WTF?!  But a small, scrawny mint plant is just not going to hack it in my house if I'm making a Jamie Oliver risotto (ever notice the man asks you to throw in handfuls of everything?).  The guilt is compounded by the similarity between the scrawny mint plant and the Christmas tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas special.  I feel like I should be swaddling the mint in a blankie and singing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" at it instead of systematically stripping it of the ability to photosynthesize.

If you are also wondering if you remembered correctly that I get seasick... uh, yeah, I do.  Does this mean it's really rather silly that I live on an island that can ONLY be reached by BOAT... uh, yeah, it is. But I also hate flying and yet spend a lot of time traveling long distances by plane, have allergies and yet spend a lot of time outside, suck at learning languages and yet live in Denmark, etc.  If I avoided things I do not like or make me uncomfortable, I'd have to live in a lab somewhere in Kansas.  And never leave.

Boring!

I shall now leave you with two photos of the town in which I live that I did not take.  Alas, the photos I seem to have taken of this island SUCK.  I'm going to have to do something about it, but not now.  Not while it's so cold the ducks have frozen to the sidewalk.

What volcano?

It snowed today.  In fact, it may snow again.  And it's April.  Freaking April!!

Isn't there a statute of limitations on winter?

I spent 5 months, count 'em FIVE MONTHS in the desert avoiding winter.  I do not want to be experiencing it now.  Especially when we should be having spring.  I don't want to hear about how it can be spring in Denmark and still snow.  I follow a strict philosophy when it comes to the seasons, one in which snow = winter.  I'll admit I was a little hesitant to join my fellow inhabitants of Denmark in celebrating the coming of spring.  The majority of the trees and bushes in my yard and lining the street on the way to Netto are still as bare and dead looking as they appear in the dead of winter and thus did not say "OHMYFREAKINGGODITSSPRINGYO!" but rather "uh, y'all celebrating prematurely" and while I am a bit better with nature than my husband, I am no Grizzly Adams.  So I bought into the idea that it was getting warmer.

Fool.  FOOL!!

Because it snowed today.  Big ol' puffy flakes of cold wetness drifting down upon the knit cap of our heroine.

Or would have drifted down upon her cap, expect she is NOT going outside in this.  Nope.  She's got toilet paper and pastrami and leftover frikadeller and some mushrooms, she doesn't *need* to go outside.

Except that if she keeps referring to herself in the third person, she may have to seek outside intervention.

But as the weather continues to confuse, confound, and generally obfuscate my life (like right now: brilliant sun... seconds ago I was trying to turn on a light, but failed because it was too dark to find the switch), I look for something to blame.

I mean, someone has to take responsibility for the this weather - I won't have it being an act of god.  I won't.

I'm blaming the ducks.  The ducks in the pond across the road from my house, specifically.  I'm sure they are up to something.  They certainly aren't your normal quack-waddle-quack ducks.  These guys are organized into an effective gang of duckishness.  Just yesterday our next door neighbor was a little slow in getting out to feed them and they sent a duck into his yard to remind him who was in charge.  Meanwhile the others milled about on the bank, quietly quacking amongst themselves.

There's something afoot here.  I'm sure of it.