09:30 Third full day for Lois and me of our stay with our daughter Alison, son-in-law Ed, and their 3 children Josie (15), Rosalind (13) and Isaac (11).
Storm Eunice did a lot of damage to the property yesterday, although not to the house or the people in it, which is nice. And we still have power, which is a bonus, to put it mildly.
More rain is expected from around 11 am, so Ali and Ed go out in the garden to collect fallen branches and put them on a bonfire, and also try and protect, as best they can, the outbuildings damaged by the storm, for instance the carport and the wood-store.
Ali goes back and forth in the 6.5 acre garden, collecting fallen twigs
and branches and adding them to their bonfire pile
10:00 Josie has a zoom lesson with her maths tutor, so the rest of us: me, Lois, Rosalind and Isaac sit down for a zoom call with Sarah, our other daughter, who lives with her family in Perth, Australia.
Earlier Sarah sent us some pictures of the family's first really successful outing on their 18 ft. boat, the one they bought a few months back. The temperature was in the high 30's C - about 100F. My god !!!!!
Avast and belay! CBD (Central Business District)
is on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow,
the CBD's on the starboard bow, starboard bow, Jim!
Our zoom call starts, and today we see the whole family at one time or another during the call.
we start our zoom call with Sarah, Francis and 8-year-old
Lily and Jessica, in Perth, Australia
The big surprise thing we find out today is that the twins, 8-year-old Lily and Jessica, now have weekly lessons in Mandarin Chinese from a teacher on zoom from China. Wow - who would have thought it! And slightly odd, given that Alison's 11-year-old son Isaac is also studying Mandarin, in some sort of so-called "immersion stream".
When I was at school they'd have thought you were mad if you said you were interested in learning Mandarin Chinese!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
11:00 The zoom call ends and Lois, Josie and I go out into the back garden to see what Ali and Ed are doing about all the storm damage. The priority has been to burn as many fallen branches and twig as possible on a bonfire, and cover over the family's collection of wood and timber with whatever is to hand, including little so-called tarpaulins etc.
I'm pleased to see that one of our favourite quora pundits, long-term Norwegian resident Magnus Itland (crazy name, crazy guy!) has been weighing in on the vexed issue of whether the Vikings in Greenland ever intermarried with the Inuit or other native Americans.
It turns out that the questioner's assumptions are wrong anyway, according to Magnus.
Lois and I had forgotten that there is in fact Native American mitochondrial DNA present in the Icelandic population, and that it's been there for centuries. And this DNA was probably introduced, experts think, by just one Native American woman who returned with a bunch of Icelanders from one of the Viking expeditions to North America?
I wonder who that woman was? Nobody seems to know, which is a pity.
"Kutji kutji ku !!!!"
And no evidence of "Viking" DNA has ever been found in North America that couldn't just as easily have originated from later Scandinavian immigrants, so the jury's still out on that one.
Well done, Magnus. Discussion closed we think haha!!!!
18:00 We have dinner, while Isaac watches his favourite soccer team, Tottenham (Spurs) play league leaders Manchester City, and in an extraordinary upset, Spurs win 3-2 on City's home territory.
The result even makes the Danish news under the headline "Crazy scenes" (Vanvittige Scener), as I discover later.
20:00 Lois and I participate in the Ali and Ed family tradition of Saturday evenings watching a film and eating copious amount of chocolate.
There's a bit of an extra buzz tonight, because Alison discovered a couple of days ago that Ocado, the online supermarket, sells the Swedish chocolate bar Marabou, which the family became addicted to during their 6 years living in Copenhagen (2012-2018).
The film that Ali has selected for tonight's viewing is the original Annie film from 1982. Lois and I and our two daughters first watched this film on HBO TV when we were living in the US 1982-85, but the girls liked it so much that after we moved back to the UK we recorded it on VHS tape from TV and the girls must have watched it a million times, effectively wearing out the tape.
So it's nice to see it all again tonight, and the songs still stand up, not like modern musicals, where the songs are instantly bright, fun and entertaining, but tend to be totally unmemorable. The result is that you forget them instantly, the moment they're over and the next one begins, usually something rather like the first one.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
It's nice to see Carol Burnett again as orphanage manager Miss Hannigan, Tim Curry as bad guy "Rooster", and Albert Finney as multi-millionaire nice guy Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks.
Tremendous fun !!!!!
Lois and I recently watched a documentary about the life and career of British actor Albert Finney, but the programme failed to mention Finney's part in Annie, which was a pity, we think.
the documentary Lois and I watched a couple of months ago
Albert Finney as Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks in "Annie"
Rosalind googled Aileen Quinn, who played Little Orphan Annie, on her phone, and discovered that she is now a 50-year-old theatre professor at a university in New Jersey.
Aileen Quinn in 2019
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!! [You've done that one at least once already! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!!!
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