Time to go home

The conference is over and it has not been sleep that has been on the agenda. Some of it due to dry air = waking up in the middle of a night feeling like a mummy buried in a desert for 200 years, some of it due to waking EST time, and - well - some of it due to staying up way too late in a hotel bar (without having to pay because those with more fancy careers than mine happily left their credit cards in the bar).

Despite my hate of skiing I actually didspend time outside. On a snow shoe tour. Where it took 3 retired ski bum ladies about 1 1/2 hours to equip 40 people. Sigh. We took the gondola up the mountain right on the rim where any water will either go to the pacific or the Atlantic Ocean depending on what side you are on. And since everyone else took selfies I though I’d better take one too. So I grabbed my phone, pulled my glove off with my teeth, forgot that I was still having a glove in my mouth and ended up with this:

Yay!

But I guess it does reflect my relationship with snow quite accurately.........

In a van full of nerds climbing up the Rockies

Greetings from Colorado, where I just arrived for a scientific conference to take place over the next 5 days with the sexy title of “organ crosstalk in obesity and NAFLD / Bioenergetics and metabolic disease”. I am currently in van a full of nerds (why oh why are we scientists always SO easy to spot when we are en clusters in an airport - LOL). We have filled up the back of the van with poster tubes and not a single set of skis or snowboards are to be found. The chauffeur was quite puzzled.....

I can honestly say that sending me to Colorado in prime ski season is to throw pearls for swine. I have never liked skiing, but since I broke my arm two years ago from slipping on the ice I have a hard time imagining that I would ever put skis on my feet. I do have a plan to go snowshoeing with my Korean colleague though. And I want to convince him to tell me all the crazy stories from when he was in the Koran military.

Otherwise I look forward to hang out with a bunch of former Danish colleagues from Novo Nordisk, to network over cocktails, and to see how intensive it gets this year with the highly competitive project I work on currently. There several pharma companies working on the same protein as me, and it is a race against time for all of them to get a compound developed before everyone else. As I spoiler alert I can add that I was only allowed to bring the least interesting of my data to this conference. Uuuuuuuuuuh

47 hours

...... without any kids in the Frikke household! For the first time in what interestingly enough comes close to 47 months. Last time Kristian and I had more than a few hours without any of our offspring was back in July 2014, where we went to Berlin. And when you have been married for close to 20 years and usually have the longest conversations over practicalities, it almost felt scary to imagine several days with no interruptions. But we are still a good team who enjoys many of the same things and we ended up having an awesome weekend without going out of town.

We have gone on long walks with the dog:

We have found good deals on dessert plates - something we really needed after having used somewhat broken secondhand ones for more than 3 years. We went to Anthropologie to have a look and check this out! They had llama plates on sale for only 3.50$ each. #llamalove

I love having things that makes me happy, when I use them and these plates are most definitely in this category.

We have been going out for breakfast and dinners. I dragged Kristian along to hopcat where they had more than 100 beers to choose from. And even better, they sell them in small tasting samples so you don’t have to confine yourself to just one one. I had salted caramel porter and Belgian beer tasting like “althea bolcher” (a Danish hard candy with an orangy flavor that I used to hate as a child but kind of like now).

And after that we only had to skip across the street to be right at Michigan Theater. Here it is from the top of the parking garage:

It is an old theater with those movies that usually don’t make it to the big cinema complexes full of teens. We had tickets for “The shape of water” and I was blown away by everything in there. The golden ceilings, the red velvet chairs, and the live organ music during the commercials. Seriously a guy walked in and starting playing in the little organ up front:

The film was one of the best I have seen in a long time. Please go see for yourself if you have the chance!

We were sitting next to a couple of college kids and they were audibly gasping when one of the main characters - a power tripping psychopath - gave racists comments to one of his employees, or when there was that kind of beautiful artistic nudity involving non-surgery-modified and quite real human bodies .in some scenes. They have obviously not watched non-Hollywood movies before🙄

And now it is Sunday afternoon. The kids will be home in a few hours and Kristian and I are not quite ready for it yet. We have learned though that we cannot keep blaming the kids for always being late for church Sunday morning..... ahem......

Are you cold?

If any of you ever wake up in the morning and wonder: have I ever felt real cold? Not just cold, but bonechilling painful cold!Well, this blogpost is for you.

If you can answer yes to every single question you are a true cold trooper. If not.... well then you have not lived life to the fullest!

1) have your nose ever filled up with ice crystals within 10 steps of being outside?

2) did your lungs hurt when you tried to breathe?

3) have you stopped noticing how stupid ear flap hats look because you wear one every day?

4) have you ever walked your dog and had to remove icicles from under his eyes upon returning home?

5) did it sound like styrofoam last time you kicked a piece of ice?

6) have you ever been surprised that it was not warm enough for shorts when it sure felt like it? (Aka when temperatures suddenly heats up to just a few degrees below freezing).

Out cold

We are back in Michigan and it is cold! Even by Michigan standards. But we are nowhere near any record breaking weather despite the stories of horrible cold spells flooding the media. As we drove back we listened to Danish radio and the had a story in the news about penguins in a zoo in Canada that had to be brought inside as it was too cold for them.

And I hardly dare to say this - but the cold does not feel too bad....... yep, I am apparently morphing into a true Michigan trooper. Albeit I am not happy about having to leave my cozy bed in a bit to pick up one of Luca’s friends.

My body has been out cold hard though. I woke up with a terrible headache and almost a flu like feeling yesterday. I guess it was from all that time sitting in a car. As far as I remember it is not the first time that the multi day drive back from North Carolina has affected me this way. Luckily school does not start until Monday January 8th, so the kids and I still have time to recover (if one ever truly feels like having recovered anything on the first day of work/school after Christmas break.......). That also gives Ulrik time to work on some more college applications. On December 24th he got an email from university of Michigan stating that his application had not been complete so they had not been able to process it! I was furious. We had receipts for everything and if something was missing, then why didn’t they just let us know sooner? It turns out that we are responsible for having the national test score agency send out the scores to the universities. Sigh. I am apparently still too Danish in my logical thinking that universities would be granted access to national databases without my involvement. And of course it costs money to send the scores, right? Anyways - another deadline is coming up by February 1st, which will be his last chance for getting in this fall. Fingers crossed (and of course he will be applying to other universities as well as umich is quite hard to get into).

Happy 2018

It’s January first and we are steadily climbing our way through the Smoky Mountains towards Lexington in Kentucky. The mountains are not smoking today as they did on the way down:

Instead we are seeing ice coming off the mountain sides:

Luckily we have nice dry roads despite the cold.

Yesterday was a long day filled with good company and beautiful lights.We started out going to church with Doug and Birgitte, who then treated is to an extravagant lunch (Luca ate a brownie the size of a plate with icecream and fudge sauce, and did not ask for additional food until this morning).

We had a quick stop back at the house to walk the dog before we headed over to Kate and John for coffee - fellow Danes who understand concept of “eftermiddagskaffe”👍🏻

And then we tried to squeeze in one last outdoor activity - a visit to see the lights at the botanical garden after dark. It was quite a drive and we were not sure if it would be worth it, but it was stunning. Just being inside a tropical green house when it is dark outside is not something I have tried before. Outside was SO pretty. They had done an awesome job of adding lights to the trees in the garden:

Last but not least (after a sushi stop at Whole Foods for Kristian, Teresa, and I) we went back to Doug and Birgitte’s house to spend the first part of New Years Eve. Luca finally got to play with Ethan (those two are dynamite together - sigh😉) and we got to have some good old fashioned hygge! Very trendy in the US these days........

We went back to our house to watch the balldrop on Times Square. For my own part I was mostly curious to see if Mariah Carey screwed up her show, which she didn’t. But I do not understand how she kept on going wearing some glittery next-to-nothing outfit in that cold...... “Perhaps” she was wrapped from head to toe in flesh colored spandex!

Teresa and Luca decided to jump into 2018

And with 2018 featuring a visit from Teresa’s best friend from Denmark, I think it will be a good year❤️