Freeeeezing

It hasn't been above freezing here since we got back from holiday. The wind is coming from the East bringing all the Siberian cold with it along with some rather nice sunshine. There is still ice in the sea and the wind is betterly cold.

On the plus side, it seems that I have won the war with the supermarket over my parking ticket and they will refund me the 590kr (£60 or $100) fine I got before the holiday when I forgot to set my parking timer. On top of that I have the satisfaction of knowing that I have inconvenienced several people at the shop. the shopping centre and the car park company in the process as well as copying my initial letter to the local paper.

Will this change anything? I doubt it, but it feels good!

Shustoke's new coffee machine

Note the new shelf and anti gravity function.

Healthy house

We are in an unusual period of good health in the house. J's chicken pox is gone, DK is eating considerably more than usual (so he will probably grow 5cm this month) and the grown ups are just a bit tired from the usual running around, but otherwise in good health.

I was supposed to be away tonight in Århus, but the workshop was cancelled by the customer so I had an unexpected working from home day today. It seems, for the time being at least, that everything is fine and dandy over here except for nobody wanting to buy our house...

Zermatt

As I mentioned yesterday, we had a great time in Zermatt. I also wanted to let you all know that we had some great skiing too. Once we had figured out that the piste maps were unclear and the signage unreliable, we just used common sense, memory and gravity to dictate where we went.
The first couple of days MK had some serious problems with squashed toes. We have no idea why her boots were suddenly too small, but some skilled guys in the boot fitting shop heated and stretched the outer shells and made them fit her again. A good result especially as they didn't charge for doing it.
My new skis were excellent, I can now telemark reasonably gracefully down red pistes without undue fear of death and was even able to link together several turns without having to stop and catch my breath.

MK and I decided that we liked the place and are considering it as a summer holiday destination for some time in the future.

Home Again

We have had a fantastic week in Zermatt with MK's family skiing and relaxing. We drove down after work on the Friday arriving just before lunch on Saturday and spent the whole week skiing, relaxing, eating and enjoying some good weather.

Zermatt sits right under the Matterhorn and we agreed that we had never skied anywhere with such magnificent views. MK and I got to work on our telemarking and J made really good progress learning to ski. Next time we will put him in a ski school so that he get to ski on some real slopes with some real lessons, but we were all proud and impressed with his progress.
Unfortunately I forgot the charger for the video camera and after filming this little clip or J skiing when it was -6C, it didn't have enough juice for anything else.
On Friday MK and I skied over to Italy in the morning and had a wonderful lunch at a small restaurant at the foot of the Matterhorn where they raised their own sheep - cured lamb, lamb chops, lamb sausages and lamb free tarts for pudding.
We drove home again on Saturday arriving at 3:30 on Sunday morning ready for bed and a relaxed day unpacking and getting ready for work and nursery.

We have to say a huge thank you to T&B for inviting us on holiday, it was truly one of the best skiing holidays I have ever had.

School trip

We took J to see his new school this morning. He will start there in August and he seemed to enjoy looking around although his new found habit or whistling all the time is getting somewhat tiring.

After all the criticism I received for saying that I wanted a Paul Smith bag with a mini on it, I decided to refine my searching a little.

I can get this one that matches my wallet with 25% off

But what I really want is this one which is not reduced at all:

There will be an interuption to normal blogging next week whilst I try out my new skis.

Paul Smith

I love my Paul Smith wallet that MK bought me for Christmas.

I am now longing for a matching bag...

Biker

A couple of weeks ago J declared that he wanted a leather wastecoat. Apparently he has seen someone who was a rock star wearing one on Bølle Bob (I don't know either!) and this makes them the epitomy of cool. This disturbed me more than a little because it immediately cunjoured up an image rather like this:

But not wanting to ignore his request I did a bit of online searching and found one for sale on eBay that looked OK. It's a Harley Davidson Kids waistcoat which was brand new and I guess probably cost someone a lot of money at some point, but I got it shipped to Denmark for £11 so I was happy. The greatest relief is that he absolutely loves it, it fits and doesn't look that bad.

Copenhagen 6 day race

For those of you who don't know, during the winter there is a series of 6 day races held around Europe's velodromes. Originally the races were 6 days long and the person who went the furthest won but over time it has changed to 6 evenings of different types of racing in pairs with a winning pair decided over the 6 evenings.

I was invited to go to the Copenhagen race on Friday evening and had a good time watching the different races from Derny races paced behind funny motorbikes to time trials, sprints and madisons (named after the Madison Square Gardens venue where the race was invented)

Film Reviews

Fantastic Mr Fox

This is an animated (stop motion rather than cartoon) version of the Roald Dahl childrens book made by Wes Anderson with George Clooney as the voice of Mr Fox. Whilst I think it was marketed as a childrens film, I don't really think it was a childrens film as the script was somewhat grown up with jokes about existenctialism amongst other things. I absoluetly loved it, it was fast paced and witty with great animation which was somehow reminiscent of Wallace and Gromit whilst having a really unique style. If you have the chance then I would really recommend seeing it.

Our other film of the week was The Karate Kid with Jackie Chan and Will Smith's son Jaden. My expectations were not high, but both MK and I enjoyed it and I don't regret having watched it unlike some of our more recent films from lovefilm. Last week we had I Love You Man with Jim Carey and we gave up after about half an hour.

Woops

Well the strict austerity measures didn't last all that long.

I got an offer mail from Telemark Pyrenees this morning telling me that there was at least 30% off Atomic skis so I thought I'd take a look and sure enough they had something just right for me!

So after a couple of phone calls to find out about bindings, shipping angetting permission, I pulled the trigger and ordered some Atomic Snoop Daddys.

Ken Follet

Shortly after Christmas I stayed up rather late for 4 consecutive nights to watch the Pillars of the Earth on TV. I quite enjoyed it and have subsequently considered reading Ken Follett' follow on book "World without end". I haven't made much progress on that as I don't have a copy and I have been finishing Saturday by Ian McEwan in the meantime.

At the supermarket on Saturday there was a book sale and I picked up another Ken Follett called Nulkoden. As you can maybe guess from the title, it is in Danish and I can see that progress will be slow. However, I have made a start and I am now a whopping 4 pages into it. My aim for our skiing holiday is to finish it. (Also to ski and drink irish coffee in that order)

iPad

Did I mention that we got an iPad last week?

This is the first time I have used it for blogging so we'll have to see how it works out for that but it is really convenient not having to turn on a pc every time you want to check mail or loom something up and it is a lot more convenient than using your telephone.

In other news, I interviewed 2 people in Danish this morning. It should have been 3 but the last guy was Swedish so we had to switch to English.

Fingers falling apart

When  I started playing the guitar I had some problems with the ends of the fingers on my left hand. They got quite sore from holding the strings down, but after a short while I developed some hard skin on the ends of them which solved the problem.

However, I have not had much time to play over the last 2 weeks and now all of tha hard skin skin is falling off my fingers and snagging on odd things. Last night I payed the guitar for a while and the thin strings helped to remove a lot of the lose stuff...

I am planning on playing some more over the weekend and getting my F chord a bit quicker and slicker so that I can learn some more songs to not sing out load. Maybe when I have got the Danish out of the way, I'll take some proper lessons.

Working out

I was too tired to train on Tuesday evening after several days of consecutive riding, but had planned for a session last night. The problem was that I had to take the train to work yesterday for an early meeting in the centre of Copenhagen which mean that I spent 2 hours getting home in the evening. The result was a late supper after the kids were in bed and no time to train. I will have to do a good session tonight to make up for it.

Making cakes last week

Just to cheer things up a bit.

Flash Back

This morning we were back at the end of last week again. J was up during the night with ear ache again and MK has conjunctivitis in both eyes. I just hope that DK and I can avoid all of this sickness whilst J's antibiotics and MK's eye drops do their business.

Kartoffelkur (Potato Diet)

Since Christmas we have decided to metaphorically tighten our belts a little (oddly enough mine had literally tightened itself during Christmas anyway) in order to prepare ourselves for a potential house move.


Having sifted through our bank statements for the last half year, we could see where we spend our money and I was pleasantly surprised that I don't actually waste as much of it as I thought, but we do get through a lot of stuff. As a result we decided to cancel the expensive vegetable deliveries and get rid of the cleaner (although MK can't bring herself to do that for some reason!)

Another concession has been to start shopping in Netto for what we can and then going to the other "normal" third world supermarket for the things we can't get in Netto.

The most boring part of it though is that I know that I can't buy anything frivolous even though the sales are on and I have developed a longing for a new work bag. The ones(s) that I have are all somewhat un-grown-up and I have decided that I should have a more grown up bag now that I am out seeing more customers.

This is the one that I really want if anyone is interested:

Ear Ache

It's been a nice relaxing weekend.

We had friends visiting us for dinner on Saturday evening but otherwise little planned. I went for a very cold and alarmingly slippery bike ride on Saturday morning. The studded tyres helped a lot, but eventually I had to abandon the smaller country roads in favour of the safer main roads. I managed 2 hours of riding and it did me good to blow out some more cobwebs. The training regime is sticking and I have managed to ride on 8 of the last 10 days.

The guests didn't manage to leave on saturday night. Their car was making "funnyt noises" and my reasurances that it was just a small hole in the exhaust pipe wasn't enough so all 4 of them slept in our living room and called a tow truck on Sunday morning. To my smug satisfaction, the guy toild them that it was a small hole in the exhaust and that they were perfectly safe to drive home.

J had a bad night on Saturday complaining of ear ache. That went away to some extent on Sunday morning when his ear drum burst and releaved the pressure. He is home today with MK after a trip to the doctors but seems to be well on the way to recovery after a day on the sofa with a fever.

This was the outfit for the gala party at the nursery last week. Apparently he attracted a lot of female attention with the pink/purple tie. It's odd that it never worked that well when I wore it...

Never ending month

January seems to have been going on for ages already and there is still another week to go before we get paid again.

We heard a couple of days ago that the owner of our estate agent will cease to be the owner with immediate effect. Apparently that won't have any effect, but we are getting rather tired with the whole house moving project and beginning to wonder if it is worth the effort and expense involved. I suppose time will tell, but our conditional contract on the house we want expires at the end of March and we are not going to extend it again as the bank guarantee is costing us a fortune and we don’t seem to be getting anything in return.