January 2004
Well the school is still intact (see last newsletter) but our neighbours had a house fire in November and we didn’t even notice. No need to worry about us. They had an old fashioned kinked chimney which was the problem whereas we have a modern straight one, but we were very surprised to hear what had happened..
Thank you for all your generous gifts for Christmas. Mia told me a couple of days ago that she likes to wear her new clothes constantly. Two weekends ago I was reminded that we had poncho kits to be made so we did that and the results are below. We have had constant snow for the last two weeks though not enough to cause traffic chaos and school closures but certainly enough for snowman building, snowball fights and sledging.
MA finished but I can hardly notice as I suddenly have a lot of other work to do including translating IT training materials from Danish to English even though I have gained most of my computer expertise in Denmark so don’t know all the jargon in English. I was also persuaded to say yes to teaching the wind turbine workers at NEG Micon again. I’m beginning to regret it as they are being particularly taciturn this year. One of the EU projects I am involved with was held at Grenaa recently. Working language English but many of the Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese worked best in French so the night before I was due to give two talks I hurriedly made all my slides bilingual and then had to give part of my talk in French, a first for me. Then my half term holiday is taken up with meetings for the other two EU projects on the west coast of Ireland on Achill Island.
So Tony is planning to have a riotous time with the girls while I’m away. As they’re having major renovations at his workplace and they decided that half term would be a good time to switch the heating off to enable maintenance on the system he is almost forced to stay at home then anyway. Now that Tony is on the BTO Council he will be going to his first meeting in that capacity in the middle of February, only a few days after I return from Ireland. The girls won’t be pleased. They get very cross with our absences.
We have found it very difficult to get nice bread in Denmark. How we’ve suffered these last ten years. Then we thought about a bread-making machine but they don’t sell such things here so the next idea was an import. But that went horribly wrong when the machine wouldn’t work. Finally we inherited a Rolls Royce model from Mum and Dad and we love it. It’s especially brilliant to be woken in the morning by the beep of the machine announcing a fresh loaf ready for use. All we have to remember is not to serve up the bread from the machine to Dad as the reason we inherited the machine in the first place is because he doesn’t like the result.
February 2004
The computer is in such demand all of a sudden that I have to grab it when I can and so this month’s diary might be shorter than usual (huge sighs all round). Mia likes playing games on it and Gwen has even started a website . Better than watching Cartoon Network anyway. Mia has also discovered that she likes ironing, which is handy.
There has been a lot of snow this month, fortunately not the traffic-stopping, stay at home variety but the thin dusting, landscape enhancing type which doesn’t hinder travel.and yet still allows for the building of snowmen. Just before Shrove Tuesday which the Danes don’t celebrate, there is the traditional banishing of evil winter spirits by dressing up in fancy dress and bashing a barrel to pieces festival. Gwen went as Hermione from Harry Potter for the second year running which saves money on costumes and Mia went as a Chinese girl, also for the second year running, wearing the Chinese dress we bought her in China and which allowed her to give full rein to her glamour puss tendencies.
Pester power does not just apply to sweets and fast food but also to tractors it seems. Mia’s teacher asked parents if the class could make a visit to their work place. So the local tractor dealer invited the class over and gave them pop and cake and the chance to roam around the shiny new machinery. Mia, true to her Houfe genes, went round collecting brochures and so we are now deciding which tractor to buy while Mia wears her logo baseball cap, twiddles her logo key ring and plays with her logo balloon. Makes sense I suppose in an agricultural area like this.
As I spent a week in Ireland on the westernmost reaches on Achill Island, Tony looked after the girls during their half term. As his work place is undergoing major renovation and building work and they had decided to shut down the heating for that week anyway he wasn’t very welcome at work. I have a lot to live up to next time I’m in charge as they went to Aalborg Zoo, Randers Rainforest and the Kattegat Center in Grenaa. This helped them to forget how annoyed they were with me for leaving. Normally these meetings are for about four days but this time it was combined with a student trip which for some reason meant that we had to stay for the same amount of time as the students. There I attended my first ever Karaoke night where unfortunately it was compulsory to perform so me and some of the other old fogeys left before our number could come out of the hat. It was getting late anyway If we do what we promised then we have a lot of work ahead in the coming months.
I came back to work to find that I have to prepare 3 online courses as quickly as possible and fortunately I have been pulled from the job seekers malarkey in order to give me time to do this. Tony meanwhile managed to squeeze in a visit to Bracknell on the back of a trip to the British Trust for Ornithology where he was being inducted as a Council Member. He also had a trip to the UK planned for early March to advise the DTI on the placing of off-shore wind turbines but as they refuse to pay for anything regarding the trip he has cancelled it as it doesn’t seem right for the Danish tax payer to pick up the tab when Denmark does not get anything out of it. Otherwise he has a trip to a meeting and conference both in Scotland in the week before Easter. Unfortunately this is once again slap bang in the middle of the girls’ Easter break for which they only get a week. So we will have to decide what to do.
March 2004
Well the days are warm and sunny and long and you have to keep the car window shut to keep out the smell of the pig —- being spread all over the fields. Yes, spring is here and Mia was in tears the first night after summertime began because she reckoned that she wouldn’t be able to get to sleep all night with all that light.
I have finally said goodbye to my NEG Micon groups who had turned into Vestas people by the time the course was over. They never had their minds fully on learning English and who can blame them with redundancies and restructuring the order of the day. I thought they should have an English cultural experience on their last lesson and made them scones and lemon curd. This wasn’t entirely selfless as I do get a yearning for lemon curd every now and then and of course the only solution out here is to make it myself. It tastes delicious of course but the only problem is that it has to be eaten within six weeks because of the fresh eggs and butter it contains which is quite a challenge, much as I like it, so giving half of it away is not such a bad idea.
Tony is on a cake rota at work and made a chocolate cake decorated with an elaborate working model of an offshore windmill as icing. Unfortunately it was eaten before we thought of taking photographic evidence and you’ll just have to take our word for it. His colleagues thought the cake was lovely but the birds depicted on it were flying at the wrong height!
Loyal readers will recall that Mia got her licence to drive a mooncar about a year ago. Well now she’s got a licence to walk from the local bobby after passing her good pedestrian exam. Not content with that she also learned to ride her bike on March 7th. This was an easy ride (if you’ll forgive the pun) compared to Gwen who got very upset about the whole thing. Mia just decided she was going to do it and did it. So the next weekend I took her out to the main road (on the cycle path!!) where she could have a good long run.
The two girls have suddenly become Diddl dealers. You don’t seem to have Diddl in the UK (though we have discovered there is a shop in Bracknell which sells it). Diddl is a cartoon character (German in origin I think) with a lot of associated merchandise, particularly stationery. The new craze is to swap sheets from the various letter and note blocks you can buy. Gwen and Mia have a joint file in which they keep all their Diddl stuff and one of them will often announce in the morning that they want to take the file with them to school as they have arranged to have a swapping session with someone at school. Gwen has a very clear idea of what constitutes a fair swap but Mia is much more impetuous in her dealings which gets her into trouble with Gwen if Gwen feels she’s made a bad deal.
We (Tony and I) were once fiercely berated for having our records (yes it was that long ago!) arranged in alphabetical order far too bourgeois apparently. I wonder what that person would make of Mia’s classification system which is that she has her DVDs arranged in order of scariness. I had no idea until she pointed it out.
And finally but by no means least there are two fantastic Easter website competitions on the girls’ websites. I think Uncle Greg is being far too generous when he gushes about how much he has learned from Mia’s ballet website because there is no getting away from the fact that there is still only one ballet fact there. Partly I’m afraid of copyright problems and veto copying from other websites. But both girls were very keen to increase the fun possibilities on their websites. So there is now the option to draw. The competitions are to draw your favourite animal at Gwen’s website
http://animalandbirdlife.homestead.com and to draw a ballerina at Mia’s website http://ballet.homestead.com Unfortunately you have to be online the whole time you do this in order to be able to save your work of art with a title and your name. You can also click on ‘load’ to assess the competition. Prizes are an optical illusion book from Gwen and your prize-winning design as a window painting from Mia. The deadline for entries is 12 noon BST Monday 12 April and the winners will be announced live on Gwen’s drawing page
http://animalandbirdlife.homestead.com/groupboard.html at 6pm BST on the same day. Look at the bottom of the page at the chat area.
Tony is on a wild goose chase on April Fool’s day. Hmmm! Then he’s off to Scotland for a Very Important Conference the week before Easter. As we only get one week for Easter in the Danish school system I shall take the girls off to a holiday centre for 3 days while Tony is away
