To Bake...or...not to bake

I’m getting used to changing how I cook and bake…or not bake. Last night, I made a lemon cake with lemon glaze. I modified the recipe a bit and made it in a bundt pan rather than a round cake. It was quite tasty – lost of lemony flavor and tart! I used the smallest bundt pan I could find, just in case it is a flop. Although, Chuck will eat just about anything, so it doesn't go to waste. What a good husband...supporting even my bad baking!

I’m getting used to baking from scratch. It takes a bit more work than ‘doctoring a box cake mix’ but it is quite rewarding. I was once told by someone that my baking was fabulous and I ‘missed my calling’. Kind of a compliment, but also an insult because I was working hard to be a great department head and future city manager...and I thought I was doing a good job as a supervisor!

I used to bake at least once a week and it was usually something chocolate. I haven’t been able to find chocolate chips here and the brown sugar is much sweeter and has a molasses taste to it, so that alters flavors a bit. They do, however, have some great chocolate bars, so I think I’m going to try and just chop the chocolate.

In the scheme of things, such a trivial problem…chocolate chips!

Feliz Cumpleanos!

Happy Birthday Dad! Hope you have a wonderful birthday! Here are some pictures I could find on my laptop. I didn't get a chance to finish scanning in a lot of my older pictures, so here's something a little more recent.

St. Thomas - Kasey's Wedding - Dominican Republic

Our road trip is planned...despite rising gas prices

Gas prices continue to rise. I just read that two states already hit $4 a gallon. Well, we're paying just under $9 a gallon for diesel and gasoline is about the same price. It's a good thing our new (2005) Hyndai Elanta gets about 38 miles to the gallon. Cars are very expensive in DK. There's a 180% luxury tax on top of the car price. So, we opted for an inexpensive car while we're here. Inexpensive is a relative term. Our lease for a very basic car and insurance is about $1,000 a month.

Despite the price of gas, we're still going on our 19 day driving tour of Europe later this summer. We were going to do a combo plane/train, but after doing the calcs, driving gives us more flexibility and is about 1/2 the price than the plane/train option. Some of the sites on my list (yeah, you all know I'm a list-maker) are Auschwitz, Mt. Pilatus, Neuschwanstein Castle, Interlaken, and the Cologne Cathedral. I'll post pictures and stories when we return.

...more yard work

We were busy this weekend trimming, picking weeds, and hauling away debris. ...And now...we are both sore. Why is it that every year when you do yard work or walk for the first time on an icy sidewalk, your legs ache for a few days? I wonder if there is an exercise to keep those muscles in shape all year 'round. So, I digress.

Here's a link to some before and after shots of our 8 hour marathon of yard work. There's still more to do, but here's what we've accomplished so far. Doing landscaping brought back memories of our house in the midwest. We would spend days trimming, pruning, raking, and spreading 20 yards of bark. Oh, what fun...I really loved that house. Had I not been 'gently forced' to move, we'd still be there and probably not in our new little town in Denmark.

A working weekend.

...for Chuck, that is. I had my first real day of manual labor in awhile! We spent about 8 hours working in the yard on Sunday and have quite a bit left to do. I've been snapping pictures of before and after to post. Here's the first few to post. There is a beautiful upside down tree in the back yard. The branches had grown all the way down to the concrete patio and it looked more like a bush than a tree.

Conscious Choice

When Chuck and I traveled to Seattle last year for Memorial Day weekend, we picked up a copy of the Conscious Choice and then had it delivered to our house. Conscious Choice is “an enlightened urban lifestyle magazine focusing on social, green, health, food and spiritual consciousness.” We enjoy the magazine and it is available online, if you’re interested. Those that know me well, know that one of my biggest irritants is the inequities between women and men. It’s 2008 and there is still a glass ceiling (and what can really get me going is acknowledgement of the glass ceiling then paying lip service to attempts to change it). So, I digress. Here are some interesting facts presented in the article What Counts? in the January issue of Conscious Choice. Read the other facts on the website.

• 67 - Percentage of the world’s work that is done by women
• 10 - Percentage of the world’s income that is earned by women
• 1 - Percentage of the world’s property that is owned by women
• 76 Million - Number of girls in the world who have never received a single day of schooling
• 50 Percent reduced rate of HIV infection among young women in developing countries who attend at least six years of school
• 3 - Number of additional children unschooled women are likely to bear, as compared to their educated counterparts
• $35 Cost of sending an Afghani girl to school for one year
• $10 Billion - Amount it would cost each year to send all the world’s children to school by 2015 (less than the annual amount the world spends on ice cream)

So, why is this on my mind? The Copenhagen Post had a little blurb called Gender Gap. Danish women earn 3% more than their male counterparts in the public sector, according to the newly released 2008 Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum.

Sources: Potentia Foundation, International Women’s Health Coalition.

UPDATE: I could only find the 2007 Gender Gap Report, so perhaps it was a typo in the Copenhagen Post and the most recent report is 2007.

May is National Bike Month

The League of American Bicyclists is promoting Bike-to-Work Week from May 12-16 and Bike-to-Work Day on Friday, May 16.

Keep on riding, Chuck!

Danish Lessons

I will start off by saying that I can spell a lot of Danish words. And I can read a lot of Danish words. I cannot; however pronounce any of them correctly. Hanne, our tutor, visits with us on Mondays and Thursdays. Which reminds me, I have a homework assignment to finish for tonight. The lessons are going well and we concentrate on pronunciation, which is a good thing because it’s the area that I’m having a hard time grasping. I find myself looking at the Danish word, saying it in English, then translating it to Spanish, then hmmm, do I know the French word or Italian word, it must be similar…and then finally I try to pronounce it in Danish. Ha. It is quite humorous (silent h, just as Ray Romano says it)!

Another bit of humor is watching and listening to Chuck attempt Danish. It’s kind of cute, actually. Being the great engineer that he is, he uses equations to remember vowel sounds. I write things out phonetically and he writes out equations. Humorous to see us as a team.

Team building

Chuck returned from his 2 day team building exercise with the guys from work. Paintball was on the agenda and Chuck was rewarded with 19 welts on his arms, back and legs. Huh, I wonder what everyone else looks like!?!?!

Long weekend in Berlin

Monday was Ascention Day in Denmark, so Chuck was off. We decided to drive 4.5 hours to Berlin and spend a long weekend taking in a history lesson or two. The pictures are posted and here's the recap.

Saturday - We stayed at the Berlin Hilton hotel, located on the Gendarmenmarkt, which is a central plaza in Berlin. An early morning of driving, meant we arrived in Berlin by 8:45am. We spent the morning at the 'toothpick' or 'tv tower' and had lunch in the revolving restaurant. Off for a quick boat tour on the canal, passing by museums covered in scaffolding and cranes. It looks like the whole city is in the midst of a major facelift. We spent the afternoon walking through the Tiergarten, which is a huge lush park filled with locals having cookouts. No invitations to join them, so we kept walking. We waited in line to enter the Reischstag or government building. We took an elevator up to the top floor and then walked on spiral ramps in the glass and mirrored dome. Then, we were off to the Brandenburger Tor or Brandenburger Gate, which is the entrance to the Tiergarten.

Sunday - We had coffee (tea for me) at a cute little bageri (bakery) off Gendarmenmarkt, then walked to the Jewish History museum and Checkpoint Charlie. Chuck decided that he had to get his passport stamped with all the stamps from the timeperiod. Sometimes he's like a kid in a candystore. It was cute. We hopped on the tourist 'hop on hop off' double decker open air bus and toured the city for 2 hours. It was a welcomed rest for our weary feet! At the end of the bus tour we went to Potsdammer Potz and saw the Berlin Wall, then a short walk to the Holocaust Memorial and a visit to the museum.

Monday - We were up early primarily because we were going to stop at Ikea and CITTI on the way home and had a 4.5 hour drive ahead of us. Well, apparently all stores are closed on Ascention Day, so no shopping for me. We did; however, stop at Schloss Charlottenburg, which is a beautiful palace just outside of Berlin in what appeared to be a suburb. We walked the gardens and enjoyed spending the morning in a very beautiful and peaceful park-like garden.