biking with vikings

The Hot Spanish Sun

it’s more African sun really (as most Canarians might agree) but we’re off to Tenerife for 8 days tomorrow… can’t hardly wait!  I’ll try to post some snaps while there, apparently there is interenet access in the lobby of our hotel.

In the meantime, those of you who long for the salt and sunshine can amuse yourselves with beautiful snaps of Oaxaca in Mexico from our friends Alan and Elizabeth…

How to drink vodka and stay sober (Russian Blog)

Why couldn’t they tell me this stuff before the party season started ?

Russians are renowned for drinking a lot of vodka staying sober. That’s not something to do with biological inheritance but with the way we drink. Russians believe that foreigners don’t know how to drink. They don’t eat while drinking. They mix cocktails. They sip vodka instead of taking shots. They drink vodka with highly carbonated sodas. In short, they do everything to get drunk from the minimum amount of alcohol. May be it has something to do with innate Western avidity or expensiveness of alcohol.
Russians, on the other hand, do everything to stay sober while drinking as much alcohol as possible. How do we do it? We try to neutralize alcohol as long as possible. I try to outline the basic principles of vodka drinking for uninitiated.

http://konstantin2005.blogspot.com/2005/09/how-to-drink-vodka-and-stay-sober.html

Tillykke Shannon and Richard!

congratulations to new parents Shannon and Richard in England on the birth of their daughter Madeline on Monday December 19th – Almost right on time!

Now I wish we’d saved more baby stuff from when Malcolm were a wee bairn…  

link to their site

Jul and Julefrokost with friends

Forgot to post @ Christmas – How embarrassing.  We had a nice Christmas this year.  I did miss the fact that we didn’t spend Christmas with family, but it was still relaxing and enjoyable.

We had a nice julefrokost with friends on the 17th and with Steve, Sarah, Zoe and Kai on Christmas Eve:

They’re heading back to Seattle, alas.  We’ll miss them but hopefully we’ll see them again in Seattle sometime soon – godt rejse!

It was Malcolm’s first Christmas where he grokked the whole Christmas/Santa thingy.  He was so excited about the whole thing he could scarcely contain himself!

As you can see there is a spiderman theme going on and still stuff about guns and such.  That alarmed us a bit at first… it is highly-ironic, given that we’re such typical, anti-gun liberals, but c’mon: He’s a 3 year-old boy.  What interest him is what interests most 3 year-old boys: power.  That means cars, guns, super-heroes (he’s since moved on from spiderman to Sky Captain) and the like. 

He’s also keenly interested in ‘good guys versus bad guys’ and right versus wrong in general.  I assume it is because he is figuring out his place in the world and society, the rules, who is a friend vs. who is a threat, and so forth.  I also assume that this is all completely normal, esp. for boys as these things (superheroes, cars,guns) are perenially popular with young boys and have been for ages.

That’s a lot of assumptions, but since we only have one kid, we have to guess what is going on most of the time .

Christmas snaps are here.

Festival of Light / Santa Lucia

Malcolm’s børnehave had a Lucia’s Day concert at Lynge Præstegård today, very sweet. The kids had a traditional Lucia processional and sang songs and the parents had cookies and gløgg and took lots of pictures !

Afterwards we went to the julemarked (Christmas Market) in Helsingør, went on some rides, had some hot chocolate laced with rum (yum!) and even saw a brief, free circus!

 

 

julefrokost 2

this guy was amazing: first he rode a giant unicycle and juggled flaming torches and then he crawled into a giant balloon (here) and rolled around and stuff.  Call the circus!  This one has escaped :)....

julefrokost 1

Fun julefrokost / family christmas party at my work this afternoon!

 

If I didn’t know better, I’d say Santa was giving me the finger in this picture.  I wasn’t *that* bad this year, was I?

As you can see, julemanden/Father Christmas/Santa Claus was there and a fire-eating juggling guy who crawled inside of a giant balloon (more on him in the next post).  Malcolm had a great time and all the kids got a present.  Malcolm got a soft, furry hedgehog who he promptly named ‘Bumble’.

All in all a fun weekend.  We saw our friends on Friday night for Vietnamese food in Copenhagen (man we miss good Vietnamese food, this one was alright), got in two sorely-needed spinning/cycling workouts, Susan baked some outstanding brioche and rye breads and I even hacked around a little with getting metadata out of my WMA music files using C#.  Between all that and the party, very relaxing!

Also I put up some christmas lights on the little evergreen tree (more of a shrub, really) outside of our door but they looked pathetic.  I’ll take a snap after I’ve “spruced it up” a bit .