Max and Lilja Stories

Leysia's Mom, Carole, asked me to send her some stories about what the kids are doing these days. I decided to copy the stories I sent to her via e-mail and post them here "on the record". I also added a few more that I forgot to put in the e-mail message to her. Enjoy!

Ken

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1. Yesterday I woke up to the sound of a metal object being tapped on glass; I rolled over and opened my eyes and found Lilja holding my eyeglasses with the left side of the glasses (the part that rests on my ear, (which I discovered today is called a "temple")) ripped off and using said part to tap on the lenses of the glasses. When I woke up, she gave me a big smile and said "Hi Papa!" I sighed and said "Good morning Lilja" and spent yesterday not being able to see anything close up. Fortunately, I was able to get a new frame today and I'm back to "normal".


2. As I was getting Lilja out of the car on Saturday, she looked up at the car light on the ceiling of the car and, without warning, said "Bye Bye Light!" while waving at the light.


3. Lilja now likes to have stories read to her (before this she wouldn't sit still for a story and indeed actively worked to get hold of the book so she could toss it aside). She will methodically collect all of her books into a stack and then come find me. She grabs my arm and says "Read! Lilja Read! Read!" or "Mon! Mon! (which is how she says "Come on!") over and over again as she drags me towards the books.


4. Lilja is starting to be able to move very fast; she is already using this speed to keep things away from Max. I've seen her come up to Max who is playing with some random set of toys, grab one of the toys, and then speed away with Max in pursuit. She is sometimes able to keep things from Max for several minutes! (In Max's defense, he is trying to get the object back without unfairly using his size to his advantage; he could just tackle her and grab the item, but he's too gentle for that.)


5. Lilja loves to dance (and she's recently started singing and humming to herself as she plays, just like Max did at her age). I start playing songs on my computer using iTunes and she runs to the middle of the room and starts dancing; she immediately looks towards my computer and starts yelling "Lights! Lights! Lights!" and what she's referring to is the fancy graphics that iTunes can generate while it plays a song. So, I have no choice but to switch iTunes to its graphics mode and start dancing with her! Max joins in as well.


6. Last night, Max was talking to Leysia and Leysia was telling him about a family in the hotel she's staying at that lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. This family has a little boy around 5 years old and a girl around Lilja's age. Leysia asked Max what she should get the little boy as a present and Max said "A remote-controlled robot! That would be cool!" and then he looks at me and whispers "We should get that for me too!".


7. When I was putting Max down for a nap this weekend, I explained that it was for his own good because resting when you have a cold is a great way for your body to fight the cold and help you get better. His face becomes curious and he asks "How?" My usual approach in these situations is to just tell him the answer (as best I know it) without attempting to water it down too much. So, I say "Well, your body has an immune system and part of that system is something called a T Cell and these cells float through the blood stream looking for viruses and other things that make you sick. When they find a cell infected by a virus, the T cells trigger a process that causes the cell to die, thus killing the virus inside of it." Max takes all of that in and nods and then takes his nap. I then go about my day and I must confess that I forget completely about telling Max this story. Max, however, does not, and apparently was thinking about what I said for about a day and finally out of the blue asks me "What happens when a T cell encounters another T cell? Do they try to kill each other?" I was floored, absolutely floored. For about a minute I could do nothing but stare at him in surprise as the memory of telling him about T cells came crashing through my brain; I then regained my composure and explained to him that T cells have a way of recognizing each other and other parts of our body and only attack those things that shouldn't be there. He nods and goes back to playing, and I'm left contemplating how amazing little kids can be!

7 Days and All's Well

I haven't been posting recently since Leysia left last week early Tuesday morning to travel to the U.S. to study how various research issues related to human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work are playing out in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Of course, having Hurricane Rita arrive in the area shortly thereafter has not helped her data collection efforts! However, she is with a good team of people that Morten Kyng helped to assemble in a very short period of time. The team includes a nurse, a doctor, and the police and fire chiefs of the city of Aarhus. He was able to do this because he had the right connections in place due to a sub-project of his Palcom project that deals with IT Support For Accidents.

Leysia and I have been in contact throughout her trip (mainly using video conferencing enabled by Apple's iChat and iSight products) and she and the team have been making smart decisions about where to go and when. As Leysia put it, "I'm with people who are even more risk-averse than I am!" They have been able to gain access to several shelters, to the headquarters of both FEMA and the American Red Cross, as well as with various state and local officials including the police chief of a town that was hit hard by Katrina.

So, for the past seven days, I've been the sole caretaker of Max and Lilja and things have been going quite well! :-) Somehow in the middle of all her preparations Leysia found time to cook six dinners for the kids and I, wrapping them up and placing them in our freezer down in the basement. I just have to remember to go down and pull one of the meals out of the freezer to let it defrost while I'm at work and the kids are at Bodøgården (their pre-school). This past weekend went fairly well, despite the fact that both Max and Lilja came down with a cold that is still lingering today. However, they are much improved since Friday (which was the worst day for both of them) since I made them rest during Saturday and Sunday, which included naps for the both of them on both days. I also had help in entertaining the kids since Niels Olof came over to have dinner with us on Saturday (and brought along his Nintendo DS for the kids to play with) and Tom Moran and his wife Lydia came to dinner on Sunday. If you go to Tom's website and click on his "students" link, you'll see a familiar name. He was on Leysia's PhD committee and Leysia worked in Tom's group at Xerox PARC when she did her internship there in 1996. We were supposed to see Tom and Lydia last week in Paris, because Leysia was planning to attend ECSCW until it became clear that she needed to head to the states to study the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I had been looking forward to that trip, since I haven't been to Paris since 1993 and I wanted to show Max many of the famous sites of that city including Notre Dame (especially the gargoyles), the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and a picture of a certain enigmatic lady that they have in this small museum located there. Indeed, Lydia was looking forward to touring the city with me, helping me watch the kids while Tom and Leysia attended the conference. Ah well, that was not meant to be, but I had a fun time chatting with Tom and Lydia last night and they got a kick out of the kids. (It was their first time meeting Lilja.) Today, I attended Tom's talk that he gave at the department on his current research at IBM and then met with Lydia in the afternoon to visit the Viking Museum in downtown Aarhus and then dropping her off at Den Gamle By before picking up the kids at school.

So, anyway, its been almost seven days since Leysia left on her trip and we are doing just fine, although we miss her and can't wait for her to return! Our biggest worry that Lilja would be up all night crying because Leysia was gone did not materialize! She wakes up once a night, crawls across the bed to determine that I'm papa and not mama, starts crying, and then I sleepily give her a water bottle, and we both go back to sleep!

She leaves the U.S. on Wednesday arriving in Aarhus on Thursday; I'm contemplating taking the kids out of school early that day so they can be home when she arrives!

Ken

My Current Favorite Picture of Max

Below is my current favorite picture of Max. He had been trying to give me one of his "fake smiles" but I did something goofy, which made him laugh, and I quickly snapped the picture and caught his REAL smile.



Enjoy,

Ken

Cool Pictures of Water

Hi,

This blog is normally reserved for our Adventures in Aarhus but I got pointed at a site today that is too neat to pass up:

LiquidSculpture.com , or what I like to call Cool Pictures of Water.

Enjoy,

Ken

In the Top Three...

Not sure how this happened, but if you do a search on the term Aarhus on the newly released Google Blog Search, you will see that our humble blog is listed as one of the top three related blogs!

See the image below for how the results looked today.



Pretty Neat!

Ken

Bon Voyage Ilene!

Yesterday was a sad (but also happy) day as Ilene finally left to return to the U.S. Sad because she's leaving us (we could not have survived the first month here in Aarhus without her!) but happy because she's returning to her family, her grandchildren, and her life in Colorado.

She arrived Friday night from her most recent trip through Norway! She had the time of her life on this trip, especially when visiting a farm that was built by her great-grandfather. The last travel day back to Aarhus, however, was a stressful one since she spent the whole day thinking she had lost her bag containing her travel diary and photos of her great-grandfather's farm! Somehow the bag got misplaced at the Stockholm train station and Ilene didn't notice it was missing until later in the day. Fortunately a kind soul, by the name of Anna Csentey, found the bag, picked it up, tried to leave it at "Lost & Found" (which was closed), took it instead with her to work, and then using the contact information in Ilene's diary called Leysia and me here in Aarhus! We arranged with Anna to ship the bag to Aarhus and we will forward it to Ilene in the U.S. when it arrives. Words can't express how happy Ilene was to learn that the bag had been found!

Below are some pictures of Ilene during our trip, especially her 'Bon Voyage' photos for her trip to Italy, her trip to Norway, and, finally, her trip home.

We will miss you Ilene, or as Lilja says it "I-LEAN", but we'll see you soon! Thanks for being a part of our trip to Denmark.

Ken

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Ilene in Copenhagen with a friend of her son's fiancé

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Ilene heading to Italy

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Ilene jetsetting around Europe

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Ilene heading to Norway

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Ilene heads home

Package Number 1

I'm pleased to report that the first package I sent to myself, the one that had a two week head start but still got beat by packages 2, 4, 5, and 6, finally arrived a day or two ago. Or what's left of it. Put plainly, the package looked like it went to Hell and back. Fortunately, somewhere along the way, it was wrapped completely in another layer of tape in an attempt to preserve its structural integrity. Also, fortunately, all of the books that were inside came through in fine shape.

I'm going to have to find a better way to ship these books back. But that's a problem for next year.

Now the wait begins for package number 3. Where are you package number 3? Please phone (or at least arrive at what we are temporarily calling) home.

Ken

Catching Up: Baby Gate

When we first moved into our apartment, it did not come with a baby gate; this was a problem since our main living area is one floor up from the entrance and we didn't want Lilja falling down the stairs! So, for the first week or so, we had to be on constant alert to make sure that Lilja never got near the stairs unattended.

Fortunately, a quick call to maintenance fixed the problem. The men came out, measured the width of the hallway at the end of the stairs and ordered a baby gate for us. When it arrived, they came back and installed it.

Here's a picture of Lilja examining the gate after it was installed, not realizing, at that point, that it represented a serious obstacle to her ability to move freely around our apartment.



Now she likes to stand next to the gate and stick her feet under it; once she actually slid underneath it, but didn't like it when her head couldn't fit through the space, so she hasn't tried that move again. Fortunately, it hasn't occured to her to try to climb it; as soon as she thinks of that, we'll be in trouble.

Ken

Catching Up: A Day at the Beach

Here are some pictures of a trip we took to the beach back in August. This beach is located a short drive south of Aarhus, where the Viking Moot that we visited our first weekend in Aarhus was held. We like going there because the drive takes you through a really beautiful forest.

As you can see, the kids had a great time (throwing rocks, digging, and getting buried) and Leysia, Ilene, and I had fun watching the kids play.










Enjoy,

Ken

Trip to Samsø: Cancelled!

Today, we were going to visit the island of Samsø but had to cancel our plans because, while we could obtain passage on a ferry TO Samsø, we would be unable to obtain passage on a ferry back FROM Samsø; at least back on a ferry that came back TODAY. Apparently, lots of people visit Samsø on the weekend and all the Sunday afternoon and evening ferries back to Jutland are packed by all those people returning home.

Lesson Learned: Plan Ahead!

Anyway, for those interested, we instead drove down the coast from Hov (if you click the link, start at Aarhus, and then squint and look south until you see the small city of Hov. You'll see Samsø Island off to the right.) through some very beautiful countryside filled with family-run farms (where apparently you can grow anything you want, as long as its wheat!) to the city of Horsens where we had a very enjoyable lunch at a very strange (by American conventions) restaurant. What was strange about it?

Well, first off, it was a gas station.

Second, it had plastic menus across the wall behind the counter showing pictures of the meals you could buy. (This is never a good sign in the states.)

Third, it had a somewhat smokey backroom filled with slot machines and other electronic gambling machines.

But, despite these warning signs, the decor in the dining room was actually nice; on par with an upscale pub in the states, but also with interesting posters up on the wall, like you might see in a Red Robin. And, most important, the food was excellent!

After we finished lunch, we returned to Aarhus, got Lilja down for a nap, and now, in addition to posting to this blog, we're going to start getting ready for the week.

Ken

Diaper Dancers

Here's a movie of the kids dancing to a Danish song from a famous Danish children's book called "Halfdans ABC". Its an ABC book that was recommended by our first Danish language teacher to help us practice the pronunciation of Danish vowels. Danish pronunciation is HARD!

For instance, the word "Åbogade" is NOT pronounced "AHH-BOW-GAW-DEE" but "OOO-BOO-GAIL".

Anyway, enjoy the movie!



Ken

P.S. If you can't see the movies on this blog, you need to install Quicktime on your computer which, despite how Microsoft feels about it, runs just fine on both Macs and PCs!

The Pleasure of Assumptions

Quick post to document an unexpected (yet unsurprising) consequence of finally being able to use our shiny new Visa Dankorts or as we would call them in the US our "debit cards".

I finally was in the position of being able to withdraw cash from our bank account here in Denmark. We got our first paycheck this past Monday and until today I had been withdrawing money from our bank account in the US to live on. When I insert my US debit card into an ATM machine it kindly asks what language I want to use for the transaction and I, of course, select English, so I don't make any mistakes.

Well, all that goes away when I insert my Visa Dankort! Since I have a Visa Dankort, I must be Danish, and since I'm Danish, I know how to speak the language, and since I know how to speak the language, the ATM doesn't need to bother asking me what language I speak!

Ah, the pleasure that comes from not being applicable to someone's assumptions!

Ken

P.S. I was able to withdraw money just fine, but I noticed that the interface options were slightly different than the ones I was used to when using the English user interface. Interesting!

Quick Update

Life is definitely getting busier in Denmark.

Leysia is absolutely swamped with stuff to do. She's been writing papers, writing grant proposals, and participating in some very active research projects here at Aarhus. Things would be manageable for her if it wasn't for the fact that she submitted a very large grant proposal related to the use of communication technologies in disaster situations to the National Science Foundation (NSF) just before we left for Denmark and now Hurricane Katrina has happened and so she's trying to monitor that situation from afar, getting as much information as she can to help her research.

My work at the University if also picking up. I've been getting up to speed on a networking technology called "Peer-To-Peer" to study its use in creating flexible software architectures that can be used to debug highly distributed systems, especially systems that span a range of hardware from traditional servers to mobile phones to small sensors. I'm also looking at the issues surrounding context-aware hypermedia and what it means to monitor a person's work at a computer workstation to attempt to establish their "digital context". Traditional context-aware hypermedia has only looked at a person's location and the time of day and now we're interested in expanding the notion of "context" to include what tasks they are performing on their computing devices, where "device" could be anything from a cell phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a traditional desktop computer.

In addition, I have started attending another Danish language class that meets once a week on Thursdays in the afternoon. (Yesterday was the first class.) Its an intermediate level class that is MUCH harder than the three-week introductory class that I took back in August. But, I'm going to stick with it and see what I can learn. The class was pretty much conducted entirely in Danish, so I spent a lot of the first class with a confused look on my face, but I was generally following the conversation and the teacher encouraged me to stay in the class.

Finally, just to make things interesting, both kids decided to get sick this past Sunday with coughs and runny noses! :-( I stayed home with the kids on Monday and Tuesday to help them rest and, fortunately, they were ready to go back to school on Wednesday.

I've got to bring this entry to a close, but here's a recent picture of me with the kids to hold you over until next time! The picture was taken at Legoland which we visited this past weekend. And, yes, that construction of Copenhagen's harbor behind us is indeed done all in Lego Bricks! (Note: Lilja would have had a better smile but she was busy saying "Cheese" at the time the picture was snapped!)



Enjoy!

Ken

Packages

Before leaving for Denmark, it became clear that we were not going to be able to bring everything that we wanted to bring with us in our luggage. So, I packed up something like 6 extra boxes and shipped them on a slow boat to China, er, Denmark.

I'm happy to report that the last package I shipped arrived first, followed closely by the second package that I shipped.

No sign of the first package that I shipped which had a two week head start on the last package which, of course, beat it here to Denmark.

Sigh.

Ken

Hurricane Katrina

Leysia and I want to express our sympathies to those affected by the devastation left behind by Hurricane Katrina. We've been watching the story unfold on countless blogs and news websites and we keep looking at each other blinking in disbelief; the stories we've seen are heartbreaking.

I visited New Orleans back in 1991 when attending the CHI conference.

I have two strong memories from that trip. One was standing in awe watching it rain one night. The rain poured and poured and I stood there not quite believing it because California had been going through a drought at that time and I hadn't seen it rain that hard in a very long time. (My family moved to California in 1983 when I was starting my sophomore year in high school.)

My other memory was sitting in a bar on Bourbon Street and listening to a Jazz quartet that featured an excellent trombone player (I played trombone for 15 years of my life and so I support them whenever I can!). Sitting in the front row was an elderly women who was quitely enjoying the set. It turned out that she was also quietly waiting for them to finish since SHE was on next. She was the piano player for a Jazz trio (piano, bass, and drum) and she blew my socks off!!! She had to be helped up on stage but once she was seated behind the piano she was in control! She played a version of On Green Dolphin Street that had me near tears, it was so beautiful. Her drummer and bass player were no slouches either. They were two men in their 50s or 60s who had obviously played together for a LONG time. They were coordinating double times and half times and style changes without once looking at each other. They never missed a beat and the lady used that solid foundation to make that stand-up piano simply sing.

That particular memory of New Orleans has not faded after all these years. I can still see those players and I can still hear that music and I suspect I'll have that memory for the rest of my life.

Anyway, if you would like to help out, one of my favorite bloggers has compiled an excellent list of the agencies that need donations to help fund the relief effort. Please join us in giving what you can to help these people out!

Ken

The Use of Commas and Periods in Numbers in Denmark

In Denmark, as in other European countries, the use of commas and periods in numbers is exactly reversed from their use in the US.

So, you see numbers that look like this:

€333.333,33

rather than

$333,333.33

Its a small change but boy does it induce "cognitive load"!

I constantly have to look at numbers twice and consciously change commas to periods and vice versa. And after you do that a number of times in one day, you just feel tired!

Ken

The Cost of Gas in Denmark

Just a quick post on the cost of gas in Denmark. In an earlier post I alluded to the fact that filling up the tank of our car cost about 70 US dollars. We just filled the tank this morning and I decided to do the conversion into dollars per gallon.

Today, we purchased 46.72 liters of gas at 10.10 kroner per liter for a total of 471.87 kroner. 471.87 kroner is roughly $74.21 using today's exchange rates. And 46.72 liters is 12.34 US gallons according to the calculator program that comes with Apple's MacOS X Tiger operating system.

So, gas in Denmark today is roughly 6 dollars a gallon.

Ken