A Mixed Bag Round-Up

I've been a bit distracted this month, so it's been a full 2 weeks since my last post.  But with April coming to a close, it seems like a good time for a quick round-up of recent events.

Let's go back to April 16th, which is the Danish queen's birthday.  It's traditional for her to step out onto the balcony at her palace here in Copenhagen on her birthday and wave at the gathered masses.  A girlfriend of mine who I met my first module of Danish classes wanted to go see, so she and I took my puppy, Wooster, and joined the celebration.  It was a perfect day for it:

That's the queen in the red jacket on the balcony.  Wooster was, as you might expect, quite impressed:

As far as Danish class goes, it's been a bit of a mixed bag.  One of the main issues this module is that the "textbook" that they're having us work from is what appears to be a not-yet-published version of a future textbook.  So we've been receiving each chapter as large stapled-together packets.  It's chock-full of errors and missing information and incorrect page numbers, making for a lot of confusion.  Not only that, but the DVD that they handed out to go along with the "textbook" was a burned DVD with a hand-written title, and which we were asked to download onto our computers and then return.  In addition, the track titles on said DVD don't match the names of the assignments in the book, so it's a bit of a guessing game to figure out which video to watch.

Our Monday/Wednesday teacher actually seems to have gotten his act together a bit.  Instead of just assigning a ton of homework and spending class time going over the answers to that homework, he's now having us work on more interesting, varied, helpful assignments during class.  He still hasn't prepared enough to actually know all of the correct answers, but at least he's moving in the right direction.

It seems, however, that we are going to have a mid-module teacher change.  The new course schedule came out this week, and it looks like our Monday/Wednesday guy is going to be replaced by a Monday/Wednesday/Friday guy (with Thursdays remaining with our other teacher) when we move to module 4.2.  We've been told that this new guy has been teaching Danish for a long time and is very good.

And finally, today is my birthday.

The big 3-2.

Happy birthday to me.

The New Years Look-Back of Awesome!

It's the end of the year, so it's time for the ONLY LOOK-BACK THINGY YOU'LL EVER NEED!

That's not true.  I just lied.

Let's be honest, no one actually needs New Years countdowns/looks-back of any kind.  But since we're here, and you've already read this far...

As far as years go, this one has been a doozy.  I have the pictures to prove it!

One year ago, I was working in Boston, living in Cambridge, and seriously stressing out while planning a wedding.  Shockingly, said wedding went off without a hitch.  It's true!  Photographic evidence, exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

We'd expected to move to Denmark in August, but found out just days after the wedding that we had to move at the end of June, just weeks after the wedding.  We did manage to fit in honeymoon in New Orleans, though.  Here's a lovely 'gator that we met there:

We arrived in Copenhagen on July 1st, and it was the perfect time of year.  It looked like this:

I've spent the majority of time since then learning Danish, but I've spent the last 2 months also looking after this little heathen:

Well, now you're up to date.  

As far as New Years in Denmark goes, it seems to start a few days in advance.  At least, it sounds that way based on the fireworks that we've heard for for the last few nights.  We have two options as far as plans go.  We may go to our local pub, or we may stay home and have a quiet night in.  The latter is the most likely, but... we're mysterious and won't decide until the very last moment.

Maybe we'll have an adventure!

But even if not, happy New Year to you from my husband and I!

The Week of Worry

What a week!  Where to start?

It has been a week of worry, on various levels.

Starting with the largest:  I mentioned in my last post that Hurricane Sandy was heading straight for most of my family.  Sunday through Tuesday were spent trying to get updates from anyone who still had power, and finding out if everyone was okay.  Seems that they are all fine, thank goodness.

Then there was Monday's module 2.1 Danish test at Studieskolen.  The teacher had sprung the news of the test on the class on Friday.  I happened to be out sick on Friday.  Of all of the days that I decide I need to take my first absence...  I had nightmares about the test the day before.  It was a long test (took an hour and a half), but it was mostly a formality.  It seemed she only gave it to get a reading on who was still following the course, and if anyone should repeat module 2.1 before continuing to 2.2.  My test was full of minor mistakes, but she met with us individually afterwards and told me that I was fine and that I was clearly taking the class quite seriously.

And then, of course, there's the puppy.  Ladies and gents, meet Wooster, our 8-week-old papillon.

I picked him up yesterday out in Strøby.  Did you know that puppy training is exhausting?  I certainly know that now.  He wasn't especially happy overnight, so I didn't get much sleep at all.  Even when he was quiet, I was wide awake worrying about if and when he would cry again.  His little cry breaks my heart, and I have to learn to be less of a pushover.  Puppy training is shockingly tiring.

I think all of my worry over the past few days hasn't helped him to be less nervous about his surroundings, so I'm working on staying calm now.

So far so good.

Puppy update!

Last week, I very excitedly made plans to have a friend drive us out to a breeder west of Roskilde to pick out a puppy.  My husband had called and made an appointment and everything.

He mentioned, however, that part of what made the conversation difficult was that there were loads of dogs barking in the background.  This worried me a little bit, as did the number of dogs they appeared to have on this farm in the pictures on the website.  So, I did some googling.

While opinions of the place varied really widely, and a few people seemed perfectly happy with the puppies they'd picked out, there were far too many negative reviews to make me comfortable.  People saying that they'd bought dogs from there that got sick within the first year or two and died, or dogs that had genetic issues that the breeder had never bothered testing for.  Plus, several reports that this woman has somewhere between 75 and 100 dogs that are kept in unhealthy conditions.

As much as it kills me that I can't go and rescue every single one of them, I just can't bring myself to support a puppy mill like that.

So, we shifted our thinking a bit, and did some looking at breeders approved by the Danish Kennel Club.

Readers, it looks like I'll be picking up this gorgeous little man next week:

He's a papillon, and will be 8 weeks old when I pick him up on Tuesday.  His name is still under consideration, and we are open to suggestions.

Yay!