The April-May crazyness

Holy wow and hi again everybody. It's been about 2.5 months since I posted a blog last, where I already remarked on how crazy 2026 has been, but what I didn't realize at the time was that shit would KEEP happening !!! The month of May has felt like a whole year, April now nothing but a distant memory belonging to someone else...

Ok, dramatics aside - I thought I'd come on here to post a lil update, cus I rly am very excited about recent developments in my life, and I also wanna ramble :D Lets go.

The good news!

I'll start with the best news: I've been offered a permanent job position!!! That I'm starting on monday!!! I work as an IT consultant, so even though I'm changing employers I'll actually keep working at the office I've already been working at since the start of 2025, with the same coworkers I really like, but now I'll just also have waay better benefits and a higher salary :D and of course I won't have to worry about what happens when my limited-time contract ends!

Speaking of higher salary, I have a funny little tale: I was listening to two coworkers (who already work for the employer I'll be starting with) talk about their recent salary negotiations, as we were headed out to lunch. They were comparing their, like, 2.03 and 2.01 percent increases respectively, and then I got to whip out the "Oh yeah, I just managed to negotiate a 38% salary increase" at them. It's a shame this is probably the biggest salary increase I'll see in my career, cus their looks of surprise until they caught on were glorious.

And the ordeal.

Outside of work, I also once again made it through the year's Taurus Birthday Gamut, where 4 dearly loved ones have their birthdays over a period of only 2 weeks - including my grandma's 90th this year! Sadly I cannot say that our combined fridge/freezer unit made it through as well !!!

Our fridge decided it was time to leave this mortal coil for good on the evening on my grandma's birthday, after the first of 3 short, rapid-fire power outages. Unfortunately this was also one of the extremely rare nights where my sister, who I share the apartment with, was out of town for work. Now imagine that you're home alone and it's just you, a dead fridge/freezer, and a breakerbox with no blown fuses. And you have work in the morning.

After only crying a little bit on a phone call with my sister and parents next morning, I end up working from home that day; my dad comes over before noon even though he had already promised my sister he would drive her home later that same day, I leave in the middle of the workday for like 2.5 hours to go out looking at new fridges with my dad, we find a fridge that they say they can deliver tomorrow (friday), asks for a moment to think on if thats the exact fridge we want, decide yes it is, now they can't deliver it friday because it's almost noon(??), they ask if saturday can work, it can't because I have a certain 90th birthday to go to, ask if they can deliver sunday, no they don't deliver sundays, settle for delivery monday and a fridge/freezer-less weekend. Eat ikea meatballs for lunch with dad. Mourn the 10 fresh portions of homecooked meals you add to the freezer earlier that same week.

90th birthday is lovely, and monday rolls around. My sister stays home from work to help get the whole apartment ready to receive the delivery (my office already works from home on mondays thankfully). The delivery people arrive and get the fridge to the last set of stairs before our apartment door and then... can go no further... the ceiling of the stairwell slants at that point, and the fridge is too tall to pass. The delivery people tell us that getting the fridge up the last set of stairs is a Special Delivery, which costs 1500 DKK extra and requires different people. We say Okay.............. and thank them for their time.

Dad manages to arrange a Special Delivery for wednesday. We've been living out of a cooler box that smells a lot of onions due to a "frozen bag of onions"-mishap for the past week. It is wednesday, I'm working from home again, alone this time since my sister also needs to tend her work, and the Special Delivery people arrive right around noon. They look at the fridge. They examine the stairwell. They say they can try to lift it over the stairwell railing if I'm ok with the risk of breaking the fridge. I'm not.

They at least tell me that movers should be able to get the job done since they have special straps. I relay this to my sister, who starts looking up movers immediately since she's just waiting on someone else to finish their work. She manages to land a deal with a pair of guys who can come later that same day!!! It's another 1500 DKK, but I just want a fridge at this point!!! The movers arrive in high spirits, get straight to work, MANAGE to simply SHUFFLE the fridge ALONG THE PROBLEMATIC LANDING IN THE STAIRWELL (THEY DIDN'T NEED TO LIFT IT OVER THE RAILINGS) (AT ALL), and get the fridge into our kitchen and help me install it and make sure it's sitting correctly. They also move the old fridge down onto the street next to our apartment front door, and I am grateful to pay them their 1500 DKK. My sister and parents and Ani all breathe a sigh of relief that it is finally over.

Except it's not quite over! I get a call from the store we bought the fridge from, and they're of course really sorry for how this went. They refund the Special Delivery fee and cover the fee for the movers, and at no extra cost they send out another set of people to pick up the old fridge, since that's also a service we paid extra for. Perhaps I could've asked to have the installation service we paid for refunded as well, but I was just ready for this to be done.

The people who'll pick up the old fridge come by the following monday. It was a lil funny to see a our old fridge sitting on the street each time we came and went, but it's good to finally have it removed so it's not in the way. So I get the call that the people will be there to pick it up in 10 minutes. I make my way down to the street and... there's a distinct lack of fridge. At first I don't really know what to make of that information. Then I start by peering around the corner of the building - some construction work had started a few doors over from ours that morning (I presume it was related to yet another(!) power outage we had the night before) so maybe it was in the way and someone moved it? I briefly consider whether the pick-up people were just really fast and already grabbed it, but then they indeed roll up! I swear to them that the fridge was literally here just yesterday, the guy goes "Oh the immigrants must've nabbed it", I go "Ohh...", and then they're off again. So as the very cherry on top of this fridge saga, I guess our (old; broken; maybe containing valuable scrap?) fridge got stolen?

And as a lil epilogue: Remember those 10 portions of food that I had freshly frozen right before the fridge broke? I decided to take the chance and kept them in the cooler box (fridge temperatures) during the ordeal, and I refroze them when we got the new fridge. I swear this will be the first and last time I am refreezing something after thawing it, and I am simply glad they taste fine and haven't made me sick. All's well that ends well :)

Honorable mentions

Those were the 2 biggest events of April and May for me, but I'd also like to shoutout the earthquake (!?) we had last week as a noteworthy event. It lasted maybe 5 seconds in total, but it was a Noteworthy 5 Seconds. Not that anything toppled over or anyone got hurt even (my condolences to the one couple on the news whose basement ceiling now has a crack in it though), but it was the strongest earthquake we've had in 14 years! At a grand magnitude of... 3.9...!

I wasn't awake to notice the earthquake 14 years ago, but my mom let me know that plates and stuff in the kitchen rustled for a lil bit. I was bummed back then that I had missed it cus it sounded really cool and novel. So thankfully this time around I was one of the lucky ones who got to experience it :D It was a very unique experience; I was at the office at the time, and in the first second I noticed a loud clattering of stuff coming from in front of my desk, then the next second I was the one being rustled - it almost felt like standing next to a really big speaker at a concert, but only for that one second - and then the next second the clattering was behind me, and then it was quiet once more. I turned to the two other people still in that part of office at the time and, very smartly, asked: "Was that an earthquake?".

About 5 minutes later the news finally got their BREAKING NEWS story out that there had been a supposed earthquake. I found it weird how there had been no info online about what just happened in the seconds after it passed through, but it makes sense that no news can exist before someone else has time to react to it and write those news. 5 minutes is still blazing fast, so it's just rare to feel the lag between Thing Happens and Thing Is Reported Upon so clearly :D

ANYWAY I ended up writing a whole novel for a blog post again!! I never mean to end up spending a whole afternoon writing these and yet here we are again!! By the way, it's not lost on me that I mentioned hoping to write a 2025 retrospective in my last blog post and now it's almost June - let's see if it happens at all with the way my life keeps being crazy :) Now I gotta run though, so stay safe and have a good rest of your days ya'll!!