Mother and Daughter

Here's a great picture of Lilja and Leysia taken on Lilja's 2nd birthday when Leysia was 5 months pregnant.



They sure look happy!

Ken

Before I forget...

One quick post: Yesterday we visited an aquarium in Grenaa Denmark. I'll post pictures and provide more details of the trip in another post, but before I forget I wanted to capture something funny that Lilja did while we were there.

We had just entered an exhibit entitled "Dangerous Fish" and were looking at the first fish in that exhibit, a pair of Red Lionfish. I was telling Max what little I knew about these fish and over the course of a few minutes I must have said the name "Lionfish" about three to five times. I was holding Lilja at the time and she very patiently waited while we worked our way through the rest of the exhibit. Finally, as we were leaving, Lilja raised both hands and said "Papa, where the Lion go?" and then made a show of looking for the lion!

She doesn't know what a lionfish is, but she knows all about lions, and I suspect she had been looking for the lion that we had been talking about for the entire time we were in the exhibit!

Ken

Lilja's Special Birthday Party

Here is a picture of Lilja with a very special person in her life.



This is Katrine and she is a doctor who lives and works here in Aarhus and last October she saved Lilja's life. It was a very tramatic incident and we haven't been able to write about it here on this blog. More important than the details of the incident is that Katrine heard us calling for help, stopped to help us, and literally saved Lilja's life right in front of us.

It took us some time before we were ready to contact Katrine but finally got together with her and her family last December just before Christmas. We had an enjoyable but short visit that day, so we arranged to meet again in late January. As it worked out, we got together the day before Lilja's second birthday and Katrine and her family turned it into a special birthday party for Lilja.

Katrine made a lovely cake for Lilja.



And Lilja and Max were front-and-center at the table as soon as they learned of its existence.



Katrine has a lovely family. This is a picture of her husband, Kristian, and her daughter, Anna. (And there family is about to grow, as Katrine is pregnant with their second child.)



As a birthday present, Katrine gave Lilja some beautiful pink shoes that Lilja just loves to wear. You can see Lilja wearing those shoes in the birthday pictures I posted previously.

We had a wonderful time getting to know Katrine and she loved the opportunity to spend time with Lilja! We intend to get together with her and her family a few more times before we return to the states.

Looking forward to it,

Ken

Fun With Costumes

Denmark has an approaching holiday called Fastelavn which required us to buy costumes for them. Lilja is going to dress up as a fairy and Max will be doing his best imitation of spider man. They will be wearing these costumes at school on Feb. 27th, the day after the holiday is celebrated and they are really looking forward to it. Max keeps telling me that I'm going to have to find some rope for him, so he'll be able to shoot spider webs and swing around that day. I ask him how are we going to make the rope sticky and he thinks about it and then says "Hmm... maybe we should get some glue?"

Anyway, here is Lilja posing in her costume.





And, here is Max resting after a hard day of fighting crime.



Enjoy!

Ken

My first podcast...

While not quite as significant as Leysia's big news, I'd like to announce that a recent lecture I gave at Aarhus has been made into a podcast! I'm sure that instant fame and stardom will soon be mine!

The lecture is part of a 7 week course I'm co-teaching on Hypermedia with Niels Olof Bouvin, and the lecture's topic is classical hypermedia systems covering KMS, Intermedia, and StorySpace. So, if you are currently fighting insomnia, download the lecture and let my voice put you right to sleep!

For techno-geeks, I used the open source system Audacity to record the lecture and do some initial processing on the audio (with Niels Olof's help, of course). This resulted in the creation of a 660 MB .wav file that I sent to Niels Olof. He then converted that file into a 21.4 MB MP3 which he added to his RSS feed for the course, thus turning it into a podcast. I tell you, this MP3 stuff is going places! :-)

Ken

Good News

I have been remiss in posting some big news that Leysia received late last year. She has been awarded an NSF Career Grant! This is great news since Leysia devoted an incredible amount of time and effort into writing this grant proposal last year, submitting it only a few days before we left to come to Denmark. This program is extremely competitive, so its a true honor for Leysia to receive this award and we are very happy for her.

Our department is currently announcing the award with this press release.

Congratulations Leysia!

Ken

Back in Action (Hopefully)

Okay, I'm going to try to get back into the swing of things with a couple of blog posts today. And, I'm going to try to return to my past mode of updating the blog every few days.

Its been tough to find time to blog these past two months. After the new year, we had a busy couple of days getting ready for a trip back to Colorado. We then spent 10 days there (and had a great time!) and then arrived back in the middle of the worst ice storm to hit Denmark since they've been keeping records! The normal trip between Copenhagen and Aarhus is a 30 minute flight to the airport followed by a roughly 45 minute drive from the airport to the city proper. Due to the ice storm, it took us 7.5 HOURS to get from Copenhagen airport to our apartment and we were actually VERY lucky to sleep in our apartment that night. What happened was Leysia managed to hear an announcement for the last bus to Aarhus via a ferry and we got the last four seats on that bus. (We got to meet the Finnish Tae-Kwon-Do team on that bus, BTW.) If she had missed that announcement, we would most likely have been faced with (best case) a hotel stay in Copenhagen or (worst case) a night in Copenhagen airport (both without luggage, of course).

After recovering from that, we've been lost to work, teaching, deadlines, and trying to stay well. The latter is not going so well with at least one member (and usually more) of the Palen Anderson household being sick on any given day since the 20th of January. Most recently we hosted a weekend visit from some Boulder friends, Mark Ringer and Christine Hrenya. Christine received tenure last year and is currently on sabbatical in the UK. Mark was flying out to London to visit Christine and they decided on making the trip to Aarhus to come see us! We had a great time introducing them to Denmark and showing them around Aarhus.

Okay, that's the overview! Now, I'll move on to supplementing the above with some additional details and some other news...

Ken