While I was writing the previous post (Foggy Night in Grimbergen), I looked out the window and saw a double rainbow to the west. Feeling I only had a few seconds to make it count, I headed outside and scooted over until I found the angle for which I was looking. To capture a rainbow over De Abdij van Grimbergen.
Unfortunately, my phone does not do well with the zoom and I still haven’t unpacked my better camera. Unzoomed, it looks more like…
Because it was actually a double rainbow.
Neat-o. Even if my photo quality sucks, it’s still a fun shot.
Right after I took the shot I had to scoot back up the road and inside because we were getting another Devil’s Fair. Then it just turned into outright rain for several minutes.
This is actually from a couple of nights ago. When I took the photos, I was shutting down for the night [basically]. Then, yesterday, I spent a fair chunk of the day wrapping up the Dragon Quest 1-2 HD-2D Remake [which is a crazy title to type out]. So while these lose some immediacy, and it is currently kind of sunny but with the threat of rain, I still wanted to share them.
This past Saturday night [2025-11-15, ~20:00] a heavy fog rolled into Grimbergen. We have had a few foggy days since moving here, a couple of foggy nights, but this was by far the strongest.
The lights outside our house were pretty clear, but also clearly fog wrapped. The intensity, though, was apparent in the way that we could see no lights [well, one made it through] across the field. There’s a street across the way and we can normally see the houses fairly clearly, including their lights. And there is the abbey (Abdij van Grimbergen) which can be spotted from a distance and is brightly lit. It was also lost into the dark. This latter bit was probably the most unnerving.
After noticing it, the fog kept building up over the next hour or so and in that way that you can hear shouts and barks and and a few other sharp noises, only those tended to make it out of the dark. It was a wonderfully spooky effect. One slightly lost as the lights of Vilvoorde caused the sky to redden noticeably to the east, but glowing red fog on one side is a sight in itself.
Around 22:00 or so, it had dissipated enough that you could see more nearby lights. The next day it was back to being rainy with just smaller patches of fog.
After this morning’s rainy walk, there was a lot of waiting out the rain to finish. Got in my work out. Showered. Ate “second breakfast” [read: a banana]. Drank tea. Did some online errands.
Finally, got a slight break before what looks like round 4 or 5 hits, and so went outside to pick up a couple of things that had gotten blown around a bit like the bucket we use to our restafval1 and just checking the outside plants. Remember, one of the previous storms took out our granny statue.
Anyhow, while knocking water out of buckets and such, I saw this absolute unit of a slug:
I would guess around 10-12cm. Not the chubbiest I have seen but still an impressive chad.
Translation: residual waste. In Grimbergen, we divide our waste up into various types. PMD [Plastic, Metal, Drink Cartons]; P&K [Paper and Paper Cartons]; GFT & SH [Food Waste and Clippings (groenteafval, fruitafval, tuinafval, en snoeihout, to explain the acronym); Glass [not including beer/beverage bottles, which we return to stores]; Bulky items [grofvuil]; and Small Hazardous Items [klein gevaarlijk afval]. Restafval is essentially everything else. ↩︎
First off, while out fixing our doorbell this morning and cursing the curse of tiny screws, I saw this cool looking snail:
How Dare You, Wordle!?
Second, how dare you Wordle!? It is October for goodness, sake…
Click to see the actual problem.
And yes, I partially posted that just to see if I can work out the mechanics of a “spoiler” type image. It should “enlarge” to the unspoilered image. If it doesn’t, I might just remove this whole section.
Just in case you don’t want to do that, here’s my explanation (click to expose spoiler): 2v Zo oj336s oS0o35, o3 2 J0o vEZ56Z5h vE0v W0szS vES J3RI J3pYI zS blxx4 05I h3v S9mZvSI 0z3pv Zv. n3JSkSR, V3RIYS jY0sSI WS YZ6S 0 M33Y!
EDIT: I’m going to leave it like th at for now, where instead of opening into a lightbox it opens another tab with the unspoilered version. I really don’t think it’s worth it, but I’ll give it a think about how to do it better without needing plugins.
Big Old Whoops on the Website Backend
I have been cleaning up a good bit of the backend of my old wyrmis.com website and today was chunking out a few hundred-ish tiny files from the file structure that were no longer used and at least potentially, therefore, a security risk [at worst] but just a hindrance to sort through, at best.
I ran what I took to be a basic rm -rf * type command but apparently the software does it a bit more complicated than that (and even has the option to move the files into a local recycle bin).
This was treated as me {moving | uploading | downloading} a lot of files and triggered an automatic kick. The software got booted from the server and I am at least on a temporary ban. My assumption here was very wrong, see UPDATE below.
I can still log on to the server through other means, and the website seems completely unimpacted. Now I’m waiting an hour or two to see if it clears up on its own or I might have to contact someone for some technical support.
While I can still edit the website in a number of ways, I had a nice workflow going.
I’ll spend the time, instead, building up a tool that might help me to semi-automate some of the process of fixing hundreds of HTML files and then like, get back to house repairs, instead.
Now I am off to take some photos of damaged bookcases that the shipper broke and wants more photos to prove despite sending them a number of photos.
[2 hours later] Update to Website Woes
Turns out my previous assumption was just plain wrong. The [re]moving of a large number of files might have exacerbated the situation by making it harder to tell what was happening, but the actual culprit was that after I backed out of the directory that had the files, I thought it was sending me {Doug's Directory} while instead it was sending me {The Directory ABOVE Doug's Directory} and then, because the program I was using had the option to recall last directory, it entered into a loop where it kept trying to enter a forbidden zone.
I figured this out when at a whim I tried to enter directly into a sub-directory, which failed and then kicked me back out into the directory I was supposed to be in and I realized what was wrong.
The reason it wasn’t immediately obvious before was because when it kicked me out it essentially prevented me from even seeing what sort of directory I was in. It was the sort like finding a NO ENTRY sign in the middle of a very dark room and having to guess your location. Only every time you re-enter the room, a helpful guide runs up and escorts you to the same place you were just told you not to enter.
I’m going to be absolutely real: I suck as a tourist.
In this context, I am not a tourist right now but I am a currently a long-term visitor in a strange land — and I feel like Belgium counts as a strange, if delightful, land — who at least generally should be engaging in a bit in the culture.
Which I totally do. I talk to magpies and crows and hang out with cats while just enjoying nature and some old streets.
I finally decided to correct my first statement with a visit to Brussels’ Museum of Illusions with Barbara and Kaz. It is a smaller collection of full-sized illusions, mirror tricks, and puzzles. Kind of place you could spend an hour or two. It is quite nice and absolutely surrounded by all kinds of shops and destinations if you wanted to make a day of it.
If nothing else, take these two points to heart:
It is well worth a visit and has some cool trinkets in its gift shop.
My photo skills inside sucked more normal so I do not have a lot of photos to show it off, alas.
The Museum at a Glance
Once you get up the escalator/elevator there is a bit of confusion about where to go because it is a highly visual place. You come up about 1/3 the way into the exhibits. My natural tendency to curve right almost lead me to enter into the place without paying. Barbara had been there before — as had Kaz, who was joining us very slightly later — and helped point out the desk to pay for entry. I would have spotted it eventually, no doubt. It is not hidden, just also not super obvious compared to some of the kooky fun on display.
Once paid — €17.50 for adults, €14.50 for children of Barbara’s age — you then have the option to get a lock and key to put your stuff into a locker, which nice, and the guy behind the counter double checked that we did not have balance issues — I am a fall risk, after all — or epilepsy — I am just light sensitive enough that one of the attractions (The Vortex) was pushing it for me.
There a few dozen features. They are numbered but the precise count escapes my memory. Maybe half of those are fairly quick images or wall-mounted illusions. The kind of thing where one line looks longer than another. They did a good job of curating some of the more interesting ones and several have been redesigned to have some interactive elements.
Then there are several larger, more interactive pieces. The aforementioned Vortex is the larger carnival classic of walking through a dark, swirling tunnel of lights. That was my one mistake. I should probably have skipped it.
Besides that you have rooms with angled floors and carefully designed wallpaper so that a person on one side looks a lot larger than the other or looks like they are leaning.
My favorites tended to be the pair of rooms playing with lights and the handful of exhibits based on mirrors. The above image show the top of my head is a fun little item where angled mirrors allow you to see yourself and the room from multiple angles. That’s a single photo showing more or less every angle of myself.
There’s an “infinite room” where you can throw your own rave party with hundreds of yourselves. An upside down room where you can your best “clinging to the ceiling.” A hatch that looks like an infinite spot into darkness where you can take “falling” photos.
Then there are a trio of large scale puzzles. A pair of several kaleidoscopes that make for some trippy pictures. A forced perspective chair.
In general, the place is pretty heavy with photo opportunities and your enjoyment will be based on (a) how many fun photos and videos you want take; and (b) how carefully you pay attention to the balance-or-epilepsy warnings. Those wanting a more hands-on variation of learning about light and optics tricks can get some good learning done.
The staff and the other attendees were all perfectly chill and it was a heavily positive experience. It is not necessarily a regular outing type of place but I imagine we’ll go back a few times while in the country.
Turns out that all that “bluster” I was talking about yesterday was Storm Amy. Which tracks in retrospect. We were mostly lucky. It hit some areas a lot harder than it hit us.
I feel like I should have been aware of that but I have not yet trained The Algorithm™ to actually tell me important news for the area. Instead, I get opinion pieces about rowdy youth on e-scooters. I’m going to go and find some actual local news sources and stop trusting the modern equivalent of drunken oracles.
Shortly after I took the photos of the leaves, another round of wind and rain hit — including some sleet — and this time the wind was strong enough that it knocked over our ceramic statue of “Granny.”
A neighbor back in Huntsville had gifted it to us because we have a statue of a creepy doll and I think she thought we liked such front garden kitsch. Which, in her defense, we kind of do.
A bit of an addendum to the last post, after several rainy and very windy hours we now get mostly sunny day which is still quite windy. Doing a quick run around the house to check for damage, caught a fun effect where leaves blown about by the morning bluster had caught up on the cement and caused a kind of “attractor” force to protect the water from the sun and the wind and evaporation so there are these little micro-puddles around them.
Just wanted to share.
And yes, we need to cut our grass. It’s just, you know, damp.
