End of Summer

Boy, if you thought we were done with summer after that last post, just you wait!

The summer sun left Harrison feeling entrepreneurial. He and Kaden built a lemonade stand from scrap wood around the garden!

Harrison borrowed some money for his initial investment, came up with his own recipe, and shopped for the ingredients. He made signs, made lemonade, and then made some money.

"Lemonade 6kr god dag!" and "Mobile-Pay [Kaden's phone number] Man kan også betaler med kontant" (which means you can also pay with cash).

He made almost all of his investment back over a few weekends and had a fun time doing it, and of course I didn't make him settle up. He made some good-faith payments and we left it at that.

While Harrison was making lemonade, I was making cordial from our red currant! It was really good.

I had some success with my little tomato plants, and we did use the tomatoes, chives, arugula, mint, thyme, rhubarb, and strawberries. The raspberries were sad this year, which made me sad, and my cucumbers and peppers never really took off.

On the other hand, there were a ton of volunteer potatoes all over the garden because we apparently never dug them all up last year. I do remember the previous owners saying that they had potatoes, but I guess I didn't realize they were still there! They filled in very nicely everywhere that I planted other things, effectively choking out my carrots, peas, kale, and onions. Oh well. We have potatoes!

This isn't even half of them.

Khloe was creative as ever this summer. She and Harrison rode up to the grocery store one day and came back all out of breath and excited. They had found a large armoire on the side of the road for free, and Khloe wanted me to go pick it up in the car so she could paint it and put it in her room.

I was hesitant, but she was so excited about the prospect of scoring this giant cupboard that I couldn't really say no. I guessed it would fit in the back of the Passat with the seats down, so she and I drove up, pulled to the side of the road, and somehow moved a giant wooden piece of furniture to the back of the car. It did fit, but the trunk couldn't close all the way, and we calculated that it was OK because we were just driving a few blocks down the road.

Clearly, we managed without damaging Zac's car. My car has not been so lucky this summer. Zac was driving it to work one day and two rocks smacked the windshield within moments of each other. The big rock did zero damage, and the small rock made a chip that quickly morphed into a w-shaped tri-crack. I was able to get the entire windshield replaced without much trouble, but less than 24 hours later, I was driving down the freeway, a rock flew up, and a new chip marred the brand new glass. We pulled over and put the sticker on it and had it filled again in a couple of days, but seriously...this is the second time I've had my windshield replaced due to cracks from freeway rocks and I haven't even owned the car a year!

We like to take advantage of our amazing town, and in the summer, there's always something going on. There is a really good bakery down by the beach and the castle called Bakeria, and on Fridays, they do a Friday bar where they open up the back patio and serve focaccia pizza and local beers. (They also do yoga and coffee, but it's easier to convince people to meet for beer and pizza.)

Zac and I rode our bikes to the northern harbor after work to meet one of his colleagues for a couple of beers, and then when Jan left, Ann-Louise and Lars drove over to meet us for Friday bar. It was a really lovely evening with good food and good company. They introduced us to the ice cream shop across from the bakery, Frøken Marina. I don't know why we haven't noticed it before!

Walking around Helsingør in the summer is so nice. We like it so much, we barely ever go to Copenhagen anymore, but we made time to go couch shopping! Since "the flood room" is all fixed again, we've decided to make it a little family room with a couch big enough for all of us and a TV. We just needed a couch and a TV to make that happen.

Zac and I set off for the big city with our eye on a very specific couch in a very specific showroom. Since we already knew what we wanted, it didn't take us very long, and then we had lots of time to wander through the city, eat good food, stroll the canals, and buy records.

The couch is coming soon - we had to order it - and we still don't have a TV, but I'm calling this progress.

We did buy an outdoor dining table and bench to match the three chairs I scored a while back. It has already served us well.

After spending money on couches and outdoor furniture, we were disappointed that the washing machine broke. We quickly identified the problem as the door latch, because it has an electric component that clearly wasn't registering, and without the door latch signal, the washer won't go. Zac ordered the part and we waited sooooo long for it, conserving our clean clothing like never before. When it arrived, he replaced the part and it still didn't work. We examined the old part and saw scorch marks, indicating that it had sent energy backward and fried the motherboard. Not a cheap fix. And that, kids, is how we ended up laundering the critical clothing items in the bathtub over the next several hours.

Gross.

The next day, I was leaving on a road trip to Amsterdam, so I ordered us a new washing machine from the car on the way down.

Oh yeah...Amsterdam!

Amanda and Vibe and I planned a girl's trip! We rented an apartment on a beautiful, quiet canal about a kilometer from the train station. Amanda flew in, and Vibe and I carpooled down to meet her. It was such a good time!

We drove through Germany and I laughed at roadsigns the whole time.

The canal behind our apartment was really peaceful. There was a coot family that called to us a lot and begged for food every time we went out to eat pretzels and drink rosé or have a cup of coffee.

We visited the cheese museum and sampled so much cheese. The museum is really more of a cheese shop, but the basement houses some quality educational materials, so we also learned quite a bit about how gouda is made.

Vibe had read about this really fancy cookie store that only makes one kind of cookie because they do it so well. We thought it was probably overrated, but we went anyway and were not disappointed at all. They were delicious.

Amanda read about a cat museum, and we weren't really sure what a cat museum would contain, but we walked there anyway. When we first went inside, it appeared to be just a really old house full of reprints of French advertisements that happened to have cats in them. There were giant ads for shoe polish and hair remover and everything in between. The hallway of posters led out to a garden, which was lined with battered astroturf and surrounded by more reprints of the same posters hung up on the hedges. There was a water dish out there, which we assumed implied that there might be cats around the garden, but we sat on some benches and watched birds hopping around for a bit before we decided there were no cats.

On our way back in, we did see a beautiful tortoiseshell cat, and then once we turned out of the main hallway, the gaudy cat advertisements disappeared and there was an actual art collection. There were cat paintings and sculptures and a ceramic cat pinball machine. There were photos of celebrities with their cats and an old weird animated film with a cat in it playing on a TV in the corner.

The mansion belongs to an older man who lives there with his cats on the top floor and turned the lower floors into a museum for all things cat-art related. It was a strange concept, but it was interesting, and I didn't even take a picture of the phenomenal ceilings, because they were so beautiful I almost stared up the entire visit. Amanda was happy that she found another cat lounging on bench in front of the weird cat movie, and there was a very moving tribute to deceased pet cats in one of the rooms.

There's also a cat sanctuary on a houseboat, but it's only open for visitors during some very short specific hours so we only walked past it, we didn't get to visit the cats.

We went on a walking tour with a former homeless drug dealer and addict who has since rehabilitated himself. He was originally from Suriname, and apparently, since Suriname was a Dutch colony, when they gained their independence, many people from Suriname tried to seek a better life in Amsterdam, which made sense since The Netherlands was the only other place speaking Dutch. He said that the Chinese brought heroin in and recruited them to sell it, so there was a lot of money being made and it was very fashionable. When the police came in and raided all the houses, forcing the dealers out and imprisoning them (including our guide), it left a vacuum, and then the cocaine came in, so when they got out of jail and went back, they started dealing cocaine instead. He said unfortunately, once you use it, the only thing your brain thinks about is how you can get money to get more cocaine, so he told us stories about the awful things he did to get more drugs, and then through the grace of this wonderful "Mother Theresa" figure who wandered the streets caring for the homeless and addicted, he got help from the government aid houses. He volunteers for them now and works with youth to keep them from living the same life he did.

If you go to a big city that offers tours by homeless or formerly homeless people, I totally recommend it. The tour will be different depending on which guide you get, and you'll see the city in a way you never imagined.

What else did we do...? Well, we all went to get walk-in tattoos, for one thing. It was something we casually discussed previously but never actually settled on. Amanda had an idea to get semi-matching ones that would each be a different three-part combination of a fish and a woman. Vibe and I weren't super keen on the idea, and Vibe really only wanted a tattoo on her shoulder of a large star and three little stars for her family. I was down for a tattoo, but after spending like a decade waffling about even having an artist draw the Star Wars tattoo I want, it felt a little anticlimactic to pick a flash tattoo from a book. Finally, I saw a generic dorky flame and decided it was perfect.

If you have spent any time around Zac, you may have noticed this dorky fire tattoo he has around his entire right ankle. It has these generic uniform flames rising up out of a kind of wavy band and we tease him about it all the time. He got it when he was 18 and it's fun to joke about getting one to match his. Anyway, these flames were the same shape as his, so I just got a little one on my ankle to pay homage to his ring of fire. Amanda got a snake with a cat head.

After our tattoo adventure, we walked to a cool brewery in an old windmill called Broujerij 't IJ. The logo has an ostrich in it and all the beer names are wordplay around birds and eggs. The guy who started it was touring in a band and discovered craft beers. He wanted to get into brewing but didn't have a place to do it, so he did it illegally out of his apartment for a while until enough people were clamoring for his bathtub brews that he asked the government to use the old bath house in the bottom of this windmill as a brewery and they agreed. It was a really good story, and it only costs like 2.50 euro to hear the whole thing, so go do it!

After the little tour, we sat and tried a few of their brews and snacks from the menu.

We at so much cheese in Amsterdam.

We made a stop at the skinniest house in Amsterdam. Skinny façades were a form of evading taxes because initially, the owners were taxed on the width of their house, so you could make a really skinny front that opened up in the back.

See the white one in the middle between the brick one and the other white one? It's one window wide.

We also thought it would be cool to do the Heineken tour. None of us actually drink (or really like) Heineken, but the Carlsberg Experience in Copenhagen is so fantastic that we didn't want to miss an opportunity to learn about the history of another big brewing family. Unfortunately, it didn't really meet expectations. We were so spoiled by the Carlsberg Experience, and this one just paled in comparison. There are a lot of opportunities to improve it, but for now, save your money. It's literally a gigantic Heineken advertisement. I did enjoy that every time I saw the word "Cheers," it was arranged in some weird place where all I ever saw was "Chee."

The canal tour was much more educational. We took a more intimate wine-and-cheese tour, so the group was small and the captain was an older Dutch man with a gravely voice who pointed out landmarks and told anecdotes with some dark, dry wit. It was lovely.

There are lots of cool things to see just walking around the streets, too. The skinniest street in Amsterdam is in the Red Light District.

I also found some Santex sticker art! (Santex is from Copenhagen.)

If you thought all that other stuff we did was cool, let me show you the puzzle of Amsterdam we did while we were in Amsterdam and the cockroach we found at dinnertime and played with (until the waitress leaned on it)!

We all roadtripped together back to Denmark with a car full of cheese (via Germany, so, ya know, more road signs...). We took the ferry across the Elbe. You can get sausages with mustard on the ferry. I thought maybe it would be like a Danish hot dog, but it's like a lukewarm hotdog with no bun, a tiny triangle of something resembling WonderBread, and a squirt of regular yellow mustard on a cardboard flap. The portholes in the bathroom are cute.

Amanda stayed with us for a few days in Helsingør, during which time we got the washing machine delivered (thank goodness), bought more puzzles at the puzzle store, explored the Ship Handler's House museum, and ate good smørrebrød.

The animals have enjoyed the good weather, too, and they'll be just as sad as we are when summer comes to an end.

We were so lucky to have a nice, temperate summer here in Denmark. I know many other places were not so fortunate, but we did our best to enjoy it double for all of those who couldn't. If you need refuge from wildfire smoke and scorching triple-digit temps, you know where to find us.