A Tag Sale find

As most of you might know: Back in February when I was in labour I sent Morten swimming and tried to make the hours seem short while sewing. These two were created while baby B. and I were getting closer and closer to meet for the first time.















This weekend Benjamin and I have been home alone (again just the two of us) and on our morning walk we stopped by a Tag Sale. Suddenly this blue coloured backpack showed itself.















Don't know if I have a 'thing' for owls, or Benjamin has..? -or it's just a Tag Sale find...?

Little Miss(ter) Perfect

We have started the new year with a trip to the doctors office to make sure that our little addition to the family is doing great. After a hectic couple of months, long flights and lots of Danish Christmas food we went for an extra ultrasound appointment to check up on the progress.
The ultrasound showed a good strong heart beat, good amount of amniotic fluid for the very active baby to move around in. Our doctor gave us an 8 out of 8 and used the word "perfect" to describe the condition, so we couldn't be more happy.













The baby has already taken position for the 14th of February with head down and feet up. Might be a luittle triathlete with that pace, activity and preparation. Our little one is working out and practicing another 5 to 6 weeks in here untill the big day.

White on grey

It's a whole different world coming to central Europe from sunny USA when everything is covered in snow. It's been a while since we've been making ourselves understood by our International friends, so here is a small post explaining a little in English.
Temperature has dropped to below freezing in Denmark and there is snow everywhere. Its hard to depict in images when all you get is white on grey.













This morning the temperature reached a weekend low as I went for a run. Minus 13 degree Celsius was displayed on the thermometer, and my cheeks were freezing as i pointed my nose in the direction of the wind and started my 10K run for the third day in a row.
The good news is that dinner is just outside the window, so even though it is too cold and snowy to go shopping we will not starve!













Unlike the deers, It's hard to get a grip of the surface in the snowy conditions with runnind shoes, but luckily I was yesterday gifted with a set of these cool Yaktrax Pro snow chains for running by my brothers. Now there is no excuse.













We've learned that the weather in the US is still sunny although cold. We'll see if we get any snow this year so the Yaktraxs can come to use in Connecticut as well. We wish everyone over there who's reading this a merry Christmas.

Ship Ahoy

Getting to live near the ocean was a big reason for us to leave the otherwise perfect, beautiful Switzerland. Coming from Denmark you are notoriously close to water since the country is no bigger than a stamp and getting the opportunity to enjoy the sea made the decision to move to USA a lot easier.
On saturday we had the pleasure of sailing the Long Island Sound with friend's friends Art and Catherine. They own a beatiful, classic Scandinavian sailboat in which they showed us around the Sound. The boat is located in Stamford, so sailing to Long Island takes less than an hour.













With temperatures in the 90's getting out on the water is heavenly refreshing. Even cruising slowly out of the harbour cools you down like an air condition compared to being on dry land.













I starten gik det roligt og stille for sig, så der var tid til at nyde udsigten og blive kølet af i let brise fra sydvest. Det varede dog ikke ved, sejlene skulle op og da jeg var den eneste af gæsterne, der havde prøvet det før fik jeg lov at få lidt sved på panden i sommervarmen.

However, work has to be done to get the ship sailing, so after leaving the harbor area, we set sail and got on our way at wind power.













Selvom man er aspirerende triatlet er der stadig en smule muskelvæv tilbage i armene.

Anja was on lookout duty on the front deck, in safe distance from the waves that came over the side of the boat in a few occasions. Nothing beats wind in the hair and the smell of salt water on a sunny saturday afternoon.













Meanwhile the cockpit was full - everyone taking a turn at the steering wheel.













After zig-zagging the Sound we returned to the harbour around 7:30 and got ready for a nice Italian dinner. Thanks to everyone for inviting us and for the lovely day at the sea! Felt almost like home.

Memorial Weekend

For the first time ever we have sort of a garden which we share with the girls living down stairs from us. The garden is only a few square meters, but there is still a lot to do since no-one have really taken care of it for a long time. Anja has been busy the last two weeks organizing the clean-up and reorganizing of the area, so this Memorial weekend we have been digging and planting to improve the looks of the property.













Anja planter blomster omkring huset loerdag formiddag i 26 graders varme.

Weather has been great the past week with plenty of sun and up to 31 degrees Celcius, which we still haven't figured out how to convert to Fahrenheit, but it is somewhere around 90.
After spending most of the day in the garden we decided to go for a drive up to Wilton YMCA to go for a swim. On the way we stumbled upon a nice guy with a classic car for sale, so now we are contemplating investing in a 1968 Jaguar E-type.













Loerdag boed paa lidt af et ekstra-ordinaert loppe-fund, da vi snublede over denne Jaguar E-type fra 1968, som vi nu overvejer at investere i.

It was purely coincident that we spotted the car in the driveway with a "for sale" tag in the front windscreen, and it prooved to be worth the stop. The car had been restored so all the mechanical parts were in great condition. The 4.2 litre engine started emidiately and sounded fantastic with its 6 inline cylinders and 265 brake horsepowers.













At first it was mostly the excitement of seing a classic car live that got us interested, but we must admit we are now considering becomming classic car owners...
To clear our minds of Jaguar thoughts we went to the beach on Memorial Day (monday), which is a national holiday. Most people spend the day with family and friends on picnic or BBQ'ing in the garden. We were invited to Tarrywile, which is a famous house traditionally occupied by (male) Cannondale employees. Tarrywile has always been the gathering place for everyone employed in Bethel and although it is no longer only the Cannondale brand which is represented, the ever friendly and welcoming spirit of the house lives on.
Before driving north we went to the beach to get a long walk in and get a little sun on our shoulders.













Det foeles naesten som ferie naar solen skinner paa en fridag, temperaturen naar +25 grader og man har adgang til en strand.













Livredderen er paa plads i taarnet i ren Baywatch-stil.













After having been to the beach we drove to Tarrywile mansion celebrating Memorial Day with BBQ with the rest of the Cannondale crew.













I am not sure weather it is a new game or just an old addition to the classic frisbee golf, but "polish horseshoe frisbee game" was a clear winner. The rules are simple, each person or team has a pole with a beer on the top. Throwing the frisbee and knocking the beer down by hitting the pole is 4 points, if you take out the beer with a clean shot is worth 5. If your opponent catches either the frisbee or the beer, it substracts 1 point. Who ever makes it to 21 first, wins.













Frisbee spil i Tarrywile haven, hvor det gaelder om at ramme oel paa en stang.

If you look carefully you'll notice Justins beer in the background on its way to the ground earning his opponent 4 points.
Tuesday morning it is back to work, but with this kind of weather and friends like the Tarrywile team, living in Connecticut is like the best holiday ever.
Happy Birthday Samuel!

It's alive!

Part of the Anja & Morten relocation package was a Volvo which you may have seen some time ago in this post. We have not told you about the car until now since we are still not able to drive it untill Mortens social security number goes through and he can get it insured.
Since we were in Connecticut back in February, the car has been in the parking lot of the office waiting for us to arrive. Even before that time, it was left by its old owner, so in total it has been in outdoors storage for over 4 months. Not ideal for an old car, but with a little love it has turned out be quite the classy car.













We’ve spent the weekend getting the car to our premises so it will no longer have to spend the night amongst the wild life around Bethel, it now has a safe home in our garage. We called upon a trusted Volvo magician to deliver a new battery and then Morten started cleaning and scrubbing with professional assistance from our amazing landlord Randy.













After 2 hours of hard work the car was once again clean, waxed and shiny like new. Well maybe not exactly like new, but Randy who is a long time Volvo owner was quite impressed. Even the vinyl bumpers got a newish look to them after an hour of buffing.













Only issue now is that we have to pay the old owner, so we hope he does not see these pictures and wants to be paid with interest…

What matter(s) ?

With the visa approved, we are one step closer to making the move to Connecticut. Next step is an interview in Bern and emptying our apartment, shipping our goods to USA.
This weekend we’ve taken us time to prepare the move by cataloguing all of our possessions in order to have in ensured during transportation. As you can imagine counting all your stuff is not as easy as it sounds. For example, how many chairs, boxer shorts or pens do you have in your house?













Armed with plenty of patience and a good Chablis, we spent the afternoon counting the inventory of our apartment. Among the items, there was a few which lead to a raised eyebrow. How about for example 49 - the number of belts contained in Anja’s part of the closet? Or her selection of a staggering 153 t-shirts? No wonder she has requested a walk-in-closet in the new apartment.

Classic Sunday Training

It's been a long winter with more snow on the ground and more days with freezing temperatures than ever before. At least in the time we've lived here in Basel.
You know it's cold when you are all alone on a sunday at 10 AM without any company from the bike club. Maybe there has been a sunday or two where I have been slightly late, but judging on the feedback from others in the club, there haas been days without anyone training on the road.
Today the sight was more encouraging, we were 8 at the club rendezvous point for a nice 2 hour ride. I did not bring my camera so you'll have to look at one from last year, but the dress-code was similar with me being the only one wearing knickers today.













The ride was pleasant for the first 50 and with a lot more speed over the last 20. We divided the group in two, some went straight back and we were a few that did a little extra. With a couple of the fast guys in the group we made a good push at the end finishing the morning training with a sprint for the hill-top and lastly the city limit. My legs are not too bad, even though I felt tired after yesterdays training. Looks like i'll have a good chance of getting in shape over the next couple of months even with the move and all. Hopefully the snow is all gone for this year and there will be a great bicycle season ahead of us.

What would you be in the future? (Anja)

As you already know I work at the Swiss International School, Basel. I work in kindergarten three days where the children are three to four years old. The other two days I work in Primary Intro here the children are between six and seven years old.

















Miss Kelly is reading a story to the Kindergarten girls

We of course have a curriculum we follow and right now everything is about Easter. Easter eggs, easter stories, colouring, cutting, drawing or even hopping like easter bunnies.In Primary Intro the level is a bit more advanced, of course the children are older and have more living experience.

















Primary Intro visiting Basel Natural History Museum

Lately we have learned and talked about the Past and the Present. This week the theme was: Future. What is the future? What would you be in the future? While discussing what we would be, alot of great answers came up among them were a farmer, a vet, a scientist, footballer etc. When asked again one child pipes up and says 'dead.' -chock! He is right, but where do does he get it from? What do you do? You can not do anything but just smile and try to get the discussion back on track. Think of how you speak to others, how you behave- it may effect more than you know.
Smile to the world and the world will smile back at you!

Fatboy Slim

The great thing about a training diary is that you can follow your weekly progress and keep an overview of your training independent of you being pro or just happy amateur like us. With a simple calendar interface you can keep track of all physical activities and you can compare with same time last year.
Exactly that leads to the conclusion that I have been training on the edge of too little over the last couple of weeks. It is difficult to combine travelling and a busy work schedule with ambitious training, and the curent level of 5-6 hours a week does not cut it if the ambition is making it through an Iron-man in good style this year.













The scale does not lie either, so after two weeks in US and a weight gain of +1 kg, I am determined to put in a good week of training before traveling to Asia on monday next week.
Sunday I went on a reasonably long ride - 70 k and 2.5 hours going out into the strong head wind for an hour before turning back towards Basel. I didn't climb much, but I was happy to go into the wind and my two companions stayed behind in the draft so that was a good indication that the legs are not all lost.













I must admit the increased level of running has a positive effect on my biking. I do not feel it in particular in any way, it is just a feeling of keeping fitness level easier than without the running. As much as I am still not greatly anticipating the weekly run drills, I keep them close to an hour a length and I'll try to go long this coming weekend. Providing the weather is good, right now it is still freezing outside and the wind is atypically strong.

This weeks schedule is:
Mon - 1 hour easy run.
Tue - 75 min swimming with tumble turns and intervals.
Wed - Minimum 1 hour outdoors ride, spinning class or run.
Thu - 1 hour swim
Fri - Rest
Sat - 1 hour weight training + run or swim.
Sun - Minimum 2 hours ride and/or run.

Total should acumulate to minimum 8 hours of training if all goes well.

Insider info

I wanted to go back to Norwalk today to take some pictures inside the house, but I got stuck at work and had some errands to run, so you'll have to do with the below from the real estate add.















The apartment is the two top floors of the house, 1200 square feet with equals 120 square meters. On top of that there is a large addict are for storage, and with 2 living rooms, 1 bed room, an office, a guest room and kind-of-a porch, there is more room than we could ever use. Hard wood floors and walk in closet is just another reason why this is a great fit for our lifestyle.













Beach is a few minutes away and even though the weather was not great yesterday, you can easily imagine how nice the outdoors will be in summer time.













If all goes well tomorrow we will sign the rent contract and we'll be ready to settle in. We do need to have a quite large check with us to cover first month’s rent and deposits, which has been a bit of a struggle to figure out how to raise. Luckily we have received some generous help so we'll be renting with someone else’s money.
Fingers crossed, by this time tomorrow all should hopefully be settled!

Tell your girl you are all good ...

"... offer accepted, lease will be drawn Monday."
Looking for places to live has not been easy this time around. We've looked at more than 30 different apartments and houses over the last 5 days and when Anja went back to Basel we had kind of settled with the fact that we would not find the right place to live this time around.













Yesterday all the sudden a new place showed up online which turned out to be just what we were looking for. Anja found the listing on the internet from Basel and asked our agent to go take a look while I was buried in work before the weekend.
Kelly phoned me in the afternoon with a message that she was on site and this place was an absolute beauty and perfect for our needs. Price was right and location close to ideal, so today I went to Norwalk to check it out.













It did turn out to be a very nice place so it took only a few minutes to agree that this was the housee for us. Only challenge was that we were the fourth interested party in 24 hours to visit the place and we would have to put in an offer like anybody else.













Room for a volvo

Tonight at 10:41 local evening time, our dear Kelly wrote us that we are all good, landlord has accepted our offer and 3 Sycamore Street in Norwalk is now our new US address.
All we have to do now is find a way to transfer some money in a hurry, and then we are a big step closer to being heading to USA!

Land of the yodel

This week I have been on excursion visiting Austria - land of yodeling and KTM motorcycles. We did not see much of the first, but we did get to see a lot of snow. First driving through Sct. Anton skiing resort, later from a heavy snowfall on the way home.













KTM was an interesting visit, although it was mostly meetings which took up the agenda we did get to see a bit of the factory as well. KTM is placed in a small village with 4000 inhabitants. It is a lot like in Denmark with companies like Grundfos and Lego providing a local rural area with opportunities.













Untill now the Southern part of Germany and Switzerland has been less hit by snow than the northern part of Europe, but yesterday on the way home we got our share of the white element.













Due to the snow the 600 km back to Basel from Salzburg took more than 9 hours, which was still pretty good taken the conditions into consideration. Thanks to some great German driving skills and nice dinner instead of the classic McD rest area option.

Hello World!

Hello world, hello 2010! We've got so much to tell and so little coulomb width to work with, so we'll make use of as many pictures as possible to tell you about our Christmas and New Year.
As we started our with back in the early days of December, our holiday time would be spent far from our home in Basel making it difficult for us to update the blog. We apologize for the missing entries but hope you will still follow our side of the world in 2010.













Around the 20th-22nd of December, Anja and I parted to go to Denmark and Austria respectively. She to her family and I to mine, spending our holidays apart until the 26th where Anja would join me and my family in Bad Hofgastein for a skiing/snowboarding holiday until the 1st of January.
I arrived in the Gasteiner Valley late afternoon on the 22nd after having spent 9 hours in a train. Luckily we found an offer online so I traveled first class which made the trip a lot more comfortable.













At about the same time in Denmark, Anja was enjoying the reunion with family and friends, shopping for the last Christmas gifts in our old hometown Aalborg in the northern part of the country.













The family trip in Austria was a big success both on and off the slopes. We were a big group, some with a lot of experience and some with less. We were lucky to get some snow in the middle of the week making it possible to ski from 1000 meters altitude and above.













I have the privilege of choosing between both snowboarding and skiing after many years of practise in the white element. so I did a bit of both throughout the 9 days we had on the slopes.













We spent Christmas eve on the hotel which was a new but pleasant experience. We had all brought presents even though it meant carrying a lot of stuff back and forth counting in skis and boots.













On the 26th Anja joined the party and the weather showed itself from its best side.













Unfortunately moments after the above picture was taken, Anja suffered a crash on her board straining a muscle in the lower part of her back which proved to put her out of skiing for the rest of the week.













For two whole days Anja had to spend most of the time in bed, at the physiotherapist or in the warm water of the tub trying to recover. She was able to walk but unable to lift, bend down or in any way rotate her upper body.













Thankfully she is a lot better now, although it will be some days before she can resume physical activity. A trip to the physiotherapist here in Basel should ensure she is all OK.














We celebrated New Years Eve with the family having a delicious dinner followed by traditional fireworks and drinks. The next day we got up and took the train back to Basel spending the weekend here doing some of our favorite activities: Biking, shopping and being with our friends.













Thats all there is to tell about our holiday, we hope you have enjoyed the days as much as we have. We'll do a 2009 recap soon, looking back on what we spend the last 365 days experiencing together.