After a rainy afternoon yesterday, we had a pretty sunset in Grimbergen.
This is not a post about sunsets. I just did that to be nice for those who twitch at certain topics.
This is about spiders, spiders upon my person, and the things which happened next. Only continue if you can handle such things.
A spoiler if you are unsure: l 5Yg SIa SP 5xYa l YggptQ 5Yg Y PQ99q5 gYj gkI3QV 9Yga 7IJxa. la xpVa, Y73 TI73 qR gaI99 xpVag, Spa gxqp93 SQ qT.
I won’t really go into great or mighty detail about the ins-and-outs of Duolingo. But, there is a regular exercise where you repeat back a phrase it says to you — and has shown on the screen, as above — and then it…judges. I’m not precisely sure how, but it highlights a number of words that you said right versus not and then if you get a certain percentage of words or certain key words correct then it passes you. It’s something that can be very useful to practice while learning a language.
But, it’s often quite buggy. At least on my phone. Sometimes it fails me before I can speak. Sometimes I get a pass despite mumbling. I have occasionally had to figure out how to say the word incorrectly in the “expected” way to get it to register I was speaking.
THEN, Space Pilgrims, we have the phrase: Zij is zeventien.
It’s one of those Dutch phrases that I think is pretty immediately understandable by folks who can read English, but let’s save that for half a second down the road.
It failed me with that a week or so ago. I passed all the other glitches and mistakes I made, but not that phrase. There’s a place where you can visit your past mistakes and correct them — it’s a bit odd since you tend to do that in the lesson itself, but it’s a nice way to see things that maybe tripped you up — and it has sat there the whole time. No matter how I say it, it doesn’t register. I have recorded Duolingo itself saying it. I have used translation text-to-speech apps to say it.
I even one day, this past week, reached a near breaking point where I just shouted it in a variety of pronunciations.
Zij is sayvayteen.
ZAY ES SEVENTY!
ZI AS ZEBENTAN!
Etc.
It was only after I had had my several minute shouting match at my phone that I realized that my windows were open, and drapes pulled back, so it was quite probably audible to anyone walking by on the street (and our neighbors) that I am shouting variations of “Zij is zeventien!” on loop.
Which meant I was shouting, in Dutch, “She is seventeen!,” on repeat. For minutes. And anyone who glanced into the window would have seen me holding my phone while doing it.
I would like to apologize to my fellow Americans abroad that I am doing absolutely nothing good to improve our relationship with the lovely Belgian people. Whoops.
Bonus fun fact, though: If I tell Duolingo that “I can’t speak right now” it auto-passes the exercise for 100%. Which I 100% abuse on almost daily basis to get all the dang Daily Missions speed cleared.
I am a big fan of home repair. I’m not saying it’s easy. Hell, it’s often quite hard. There are plenty of times when you want to call a professional. Still, I like home repair a lot.
It’s one of the Tiers of Ownership that I believe in. A bit of control. A realization of what you have. Like cooking. Or posting your content to a resource that you have actual stakes in upkeeping.
This is a story about when home repair goes wrong.
On Easter Sunday, 5 April 2026, I was doing one of those gnarly-but-necessary tasks: cleaning out a deep fryer. I needed to refresh it because I was going to cook some vegan nuggets to go with our usual Sunday waffle meal.
I went into the water closet downstairs to wash my hands and a few seconds later noticed the sink was not draining. To clarify, it was draining but only if really full and only a small amount until it got about 1/3 full and then stopped.
We had some clogs upstairs in the shower and Kaz had worked on fixing those — later I realized the clogs are less like a traditional clog and possibly a mechanical aspect causing a bit of a vacuum/pressure problem but I have not solved that yet — and we were convinced that this new problem was somehow a child of the old problem. I tried plunging. We tried running water up to near the top of the sink to see if we could some pressure to release. Nothing was working.
Kaz unscrewed the screw holding in the drain guard. Let me illustrate with a picture.
The screw there in the middle. We wanted that out so that we could try and see what thing might be blocking the water flow. Past that part of the sink, you get this:
Something like a p-trap but not quite. I mean. We tried using a couple of tools to see if we could figure out where something was blocking the flow from the sink through this device.
Nothing was working.
We put a weak-but-potent-enough mixture in there to help break up clogs but had the problem that water simple wasn’t flowing enough. I would fill the sink up and let it slowly drain to the 1/3 mark. Did this on loop.
After maybe an hour or so, a time when I should have 100% been working on making Sunday dinner, there was no real progress.
Kaz had committed to running to a shop — few were open on Easter Sunday, as you can imagine — and while getting ready for that, I decided to reach under and feel around to try and figure out if there was supposed to be someway for us to access the piping system.
At that point, the whole under-pipe just fell completely out and dumped a sink full of water+chemicals all over me, the wall, the floor, and the tools we had been using.
Luckily, Kaz had not quite left yet and so I had helped wrangling cats and cleaning up a hell of a mess.
Turned out the pipe had a lot of soap-scum built up, along with the other bits such pipes accumulate, and they had somehow wedged into the section right as it goes into the wall.
I had no idea how I was able to effectively rip the pipe from the sink with barely a touch. Like finding out you have super-strength.
ONLY, you might have guessed it, but it was foreshadowed earlier on: turns out the screw that holds the drain-guard into place also holds the pipe in place. In fact, we had been massively lucky that it hadn’t dropped out earlier while we were waiting and possibly causing even more damage.
At any rate, we were able to take the pipe and get it completely cleaned out and get everything re-installed and cleaned up and working possibly better than has since we have moved in.
Never did make waffles, though. Sunday dinner ended up being cold cereal and sandwiches.
Did get the deep fryer cleaned. There’s that.
This morning I made two sizeable purchases. One via a Belgian storefront for stuff like an automated cat feeder, some kitchen supplies, another air filter since allergies are whooping us, and some cat treats. The other purchase was from the US Amazon storefront and represents something like three+ months of stored-up shopping cart. Possibly the biggest Amazon order I’ve ever made but maybe not [not four digits big, just a lot of stuff at once, then with shipping and international handling fees and currency conversions and whatnot].
To explain the latter, when we moved I lost a decades-long history of streaming movies. Upwards of 200 movies. Most likely upwards of 300 movies. Stuff I’ve watched a lot. Genre classics. A fairly joyously curated list. And stuff from streaming services like Shudder which is not available here.
Something I started doing was picking up, through various methods — largely online — was high quality physical replacements of my favorite bits of that lost digital media. Some US versions but also UK, Belgian, French, German, Australian, Japanese, and so forth releases. I am finally at the effective end of that and today’s order was more or less wrapping it up.
Only, as soon as I clicked order I got kind of a icky feeling.
Not for what I ordered. Not for my at least momentary rampant consumerism. While this is something like twenty movies and that’s a fair lot, it does represent a fairly curated list and mostly definitive editions of everything on the list.
It’s just… I hit this moment where I’m kind of tired of buying things. Combined with stuff like pre-ordering the next year’s worth of Big Finish audios and some collector’s edition books — though of the “a lot cheaper” variety than my old indie book collecting days — it does represent a fair amount of money spent in the past two weeks.
Consuming media can be a black hole. Stuff where you spend more and more and then always look to a horizon. I am 100% opposed to the “clutter free” lifestyle that tends to prioritize streaming and the dissolution of ownership. I am also aware of my tendency to packrat and curate past the obvious choices. Stocking up on just-in-cases.
Anyhow, while I will no doubt enjoy and rewatch everything I ordered today multiple times, I think this vibe is a sign for me to call it quits right there. There are some pre-orders and outstanding crowd-funding. I have enough stuff to spend a good couple of months just enjoying.
Thus, from now until my birthday (30 May), I am going on a spending holiday. Taking a break from being a consumer whore, as it was.
While I promote ownership as a concept, especially curated ownership, you do really want to prioritize the stuff you will use and love.
This is my two months to do that.
And then maybe more but we’ll see.
A couple of weeks ago, maybe, I took a screenshot from the top of a Reddit thread because I figured I’d get around to answering it:
“What’s something you’re pretty sure only you do?”
Now, here are two answers and one answer has two parts because I’m me.
Just a shout out to all us Space Pilgrims: when we look at specifics a lot of what we do is actually fairly unique. Absolutely no one else is in that cafe at that table and eating that donut but you. In cafes? Sure. At tables? Sure. Eating donuts? Sure.
And I suspect, but have no idea what kind of chaos computing super mainframe would be required to know, that it only takes a few facets of our activities before a significant number of everything we do is unique.
A lot of people might grow roses. A much smaller amount by specialize in a particular type of roses. Arranging them into patterns based on, I don’t know, famous Shakespeare plays?
I am deeply suspicious of a growing trend that tries to paint uniqueness as being cringe while also judging folks for being basic.
That being said, this is about me…
To keep this lighter, let me say there are two things that come to mind.
Not truly unique since both Kaz and I say this on a regular basis, and I think I got this from somewhere, but the phrase “No digs for Satan” shows up a lot in our household.
What does it mean? We generally use it to mean, “This topic is so off-the-table we won’t even consider it.” 0-stars is a review. “Did not like,” is an opinion. This is something below consideration.
As always when I think this hard about it, I try looking it up to see if there is any other references to it and got this from the “helpful” AI summary:
heh.
At any rate, I updated that older post today to point out it might have been, “No ribbits for Satan” but at any rate, I’m sticking to my own thing.
Here’s one I’m more sure is definitely unique to me. Over on The Doug Alone, I play out multiple long-term solo RPGs set in alternate history Alabamas including a long running history of characters and locations cribbed from dozens of sources.
There are newspaper articles, fiction book series within the series, and multiple timelines that diverge depending on the campaign.
Some of those characters, like Amy Patel and Eustace Delmont, show up in different time lines as slightly different but interlinked characters. When stuff happens in a “future” timeline, it might get referenced and added to the lore to a “past” timeline, etc.
Eustace, by the way, is effectively a way for me to play a parody of myself and while in the cyberpunk-infused “The GLOW” version he is much more an angry, muscular guy, in the more “normal” Alabama Weird version, I simply just use my one photos modified in whatever style of art that fits that particular campaign arc:
He’s sort of like me if self-doubt was replaced with the simple bravado to fight all the strange things going on down in the swamps and small streets of lower Alabama.
Foggy mornings are not rare in Grimbergen.
BUT, sometimes those foggy mornings have a way of trapping the smells and scents of absolutely everything at around head height. The fumes from the airplanes, the smell of pollen, the decay of grass.
This morning, I woke up, was getting out of bed, started to smell something…awful. For a few seconds, I got really angry at the cats for whatever the hell they had just did…and then decided to investigate.
Opened the front door and that’s what I realized just how well insulated our house is in general. It was worse outside. And there was that sound. Not unlike the scene in Dumb & Dumber where Jeff Daniels’ character tries to take a not quite stealth poo. If you don’t know the scene, just look at this GIF and imagine the sound:
Like a hundred tubes of cottage cheese being forcibly evacuated. Just a long phhlllbbttlllttt sound that would definitely be followed by a green fog in a 90s cartoon. It was rank.
There was a tractor in the field around 30m from our front door spraying a very organic fertilizer on the field.
The end result was a smell not unlike a port-a-potty left in the summer sun near the kind of race track where they serve egregious amounts of cheese and red meat.
I absolutely adore farmers and have no real issue with the process, but the mix of that being sprayed on a day when all smells are locked as tight as a 16-year-old girl’s diary…
It was a rough couple of hours until it dissipated.
I have a half-dozen links/notes saved for blog posts from this past week. Which is likely a sign that those half-dozen things will not be posted. Because that is the way of blogs like these: you either strike when the rod is too hot for common sense to stop you or you do not strike at all
And because I have spent the last week in a lot of pain.
Pain comes in shades.
I post this with the caveat that I am not trying to one-up or out-suffer anyone. Trust me, as much as you can trust me, that I appreciate that pain is personal in the way that tastes in food or enjoyment of art is personal. There are recipes. There are genres. But right there, where the spark exists between the “I” which is you and me and each of us individually and the It, the object or concept in question, there is that personal relationship between your I and its It.
When you hurt long enough, people are apt to give you advice which is to say people are apt to tell you about their pain. Their suffering. Their shades. Their tastes. We are lonely. It is in our nature to talk. Bless us, one and all.
Sometimes, maybe most times, we mean well, but we are idiots. Because all we do is shout the name of our own personal pain over and over and over again. Into the void. Into the sky. Into the gray.
I am sorry that you hurt, Space Pilgrims, I truly am.
But this is my blog, so it is my time to shout. I am not speaking for you. I am not even speaking for myself, because the me in this much pain is probably not really me. Whether a half-truth or a desperate plea, I hold to that. I will continue to hold to that.
In 2022, when I fell while hiking and tore the ligaments | muscles | nerves in my leg so badly that I still do not walk like a real boy these four years later: that should have been the worst pain I ever experienced. It maybe was. I do not know. I told the people at the scene that it was a 6 or 7 on the out-of-10 scale, maybe an 8. A doctor later told me that it was a 10. Thing is, I do not recall that pain. I recall the fear. I recall the months of healing. I recall the falling down. I recall the long void that followed.
The pain I better remember is the pain much like the pain I have right now: the revolt of my body against itself as the genetic lottery awards me an autoimmune disfunction which fills my vessels and my veins and throat and my joints and my bones with inflammation.
The shades of this particular flavor of pains goes like this:
First, there is the idea of pain. A twinge. A whisper. A voice hiding behind a corner which is down the hall.
Then, there is the greeting. The laughter. The introduction. Hello, my name is…
Then, there is the romance. The dance. The twirling with pain down the path under the trees and up the hill. Waking up and having your pain there in the bed beside you. The pain strips naked and crawls into the shower with you. It shares meals with you. It stands with you and walks with you and it listens to you tell stories about itself.
Then, there comes the shade I fear the most. There comes the moment on the edge of a pit where you wonder for a second if you and the pain are just different names for the same thing.
This is the moment of exhaustion.
The reason the pain no longer crawls into the shower with you is because you no longer feel able to take a shower. You do not wake up beside pain because your dreams were pain. So much so for a moment upon waking you think you might be better, only to realize you are worse.
Where you press your hand against your back because making it hurt there means it hurts less elsewhere and you can breathe for a moment without wondering why you can you feel each and every breath. Where you watch TV or read books and every word and every scene is being told to you by the pain and it speaks with broken spiral teeth and a throat of bark and and bone and feathers.
Then, comes the shade I do not fear so much, though it is possibly worse. That point past the exhaustion. There are no words or quaint ideas about that point. Deconstruction. The silence that was never silent in the moment but is after because part of us is lost there on that shore. We forget the sound of the waves and later wonder from where did the salt and grit come. Memory lapses and a sense of loss.
Then, the lucky of us…we wake up one morning and we’re still exhausted but we can walk again. We can shower again. We can drop something on the floor and pick it back up again. Maybe not gracefully. Maybe not without sacrifice, but we can do it.
[this is where i am right now]
And each day, maybe each hour, after that is a step back up the hill. Learning to walk on our own again. Learning to breathe without having to press our hands into our back. Reading. Watching TV. Doing these things on our own, again.
Moving on to the final shade of pain, the ugliest shade of all, the one we don’t like to talk about with anyone but ourselves and often not even then
: the shade where we remember what it felt like and know it will one day return. Maybe worse. Maybe not.
and we laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh
I had another bout of reading-induced insomnia last night and so when my alarm went off at 06:00, I slapped the snooze button with a mix of despair and elation. The former for the fact today is going to be a snoozy mess and the latter because that was 06:15 Doug’s problem.
Then Kaz, in bed, asked me to get up so I could help them take care of a spider.
“It’s big,” they said.
To put this in perspective, this is a rough depiction of what happened next…
For a less silly depiction, keep these measurements in mind. There is a carafe that we use to bring water up to refill a cat fountain. I have not measured it but I would assume the top to be around 8cm wide. The spider, aka Shelob the Ancient Terror, was big enough that she maybe had 0,5cm clearance on either side when I aimed the carafe to capture her.
After summoning enough energy to actually capture and not outright kill the foul hell beast, I finally – with only one instance of the spider trying to bolt – got it in the carafe and then the spider actively leapt to the back of the carafe like she was trying to eat my hand. Sure, sure, I appreciate she was probably just going for something she could hide in, but it made me think really hard about this scene:
I grabbed an index card to act as a temporary lid and then had to semi-gently hold it down to trap the demon, who preceded to charge the lid as the obvious weakpoint in her containment.
Kaz, who has pretty notable arachnophobia, had to take point at this, um…point…because my legs are not stable enough to go down stairs while holding a paper lid to a glass carafe with the fifth horsewoman trapped inside.
Kaz got it downstairs and then set it outside by the hedges and fled the area to a minimum safe distance.
While it is not freezing here in Grimbergen, it is cold, and I realized that if the spider was unable to get out of the glass carafe then it could be in a bit of trouble and I felt bad for it. I got on enough clothes to go outside and see if I needed to tip the carafe over and it was like a scene from a horror movie where the clearly dead monster is now gone.
There was the glass carafe, empty, and the paper lid on top had been knocked over and was a few cm over right at the edge of the hedges, like it had been dragged with force, with no spider in sight. You could practically hear the John Carpenter soundtrack playing. The spider you don’t see, and all that…
I picked up the carafe, and brought it inside, a single strand of thick web on the lip of it the only sign it had been used for that purpose.
It was only around fifteen minutes later that I realized what the index card had on it and that I was going to have to go back outside and reach into the edges of a hedge bush that statistically now had more giant spiders than it had before, and had to get it.
Why?
Because this was what was on the index card…
![can you figr out who this is from? I love you Kaz and Douge. you two are the best parints in the world. [then there is a heart with K+D = B and an explanation of K = Kaz, D = Douge, and B = Barbara...which maybe negates the secret love letter angle a *tad*]](https://dickens.wyrmis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/SpiderQueen-1024x576.jpg)
…and I wasn’t going to allow her to keep it.
Anyhow, I’ll accept my Dad of the Year Award, now.
BONUS HORROR MOVIE VIBE: Right as I was finishing this post I reached up to brush at the side of my face where I could feel something, and there was a long, thick strand of spiderweb in my hair, because I guess I had brushed my head against the hedges.
Once again, cue John Carpenter music.
I made a [hopefully slight] mistake, Space Pilgrims. In the sheer metric tonnage of things to do prior to moving, I forgot at least one important step.
There’s a company, a tax company, that Kaz and I have worked with for years. As our finances have gotten more complicated, they have they have been great to us. I don’t want to precisely name and shame them—*cough* *cough* Z&5 tycTM *cough* *cough*—but let’s just say that you could come up with an almost-a-pun if you said, with a bit of a swollen mouth, sketch and draw block.
Like a lot of accounts, our account with them is deeply associated with an email address. And in this case, the email was deeply associated with my old job. I had notes to myself, “Doug needs to change this specific email address for {x, y, z, etc},” and in a lot of cases I did.
I think I started to change it there, but when I try to log in to start the annual Joy in Taxes Ritual, it wants my old work email to let me sign in. Despite insisting, in the out of date online help pages, that there should be a button I could button to use another way to verify who I am, said button does not even have the dignity to face me as a man.
So I call.
Pick up a phone and call.
Like an old person.
Only, now there is an AI assistant to help with the phone. Ah, the dream. The future. The slow erosion of all middle-class jobs to make sure there is an even bigger divide between the rich and the riff-raff.
*sips tea* Yes, yes.
At any rate, I smile because why not be nice to the unthinking digital monstrosity feasting on our good will and hopes for a brighter tomorrow, and I respond to the “How can I help you [fleshy creature]?” prompt and I say, in as clear of a voice as I can muster:
“I need help updating my email address on your website.”
This was followed by clicking and clacking sounds. To make me feel like it was thinking and typing out an answer. It went on for a while, so I had some hope that it was digging up some module to actually assist with my problem or at least give me follow-up sub-prompts.
….
………
….
……
“To update your computer, you need to make sure you have the right software…[detailed instructions on finding software as a concept online]…and then make sure your firewall is not blocking the upgrade and install…[some more advice, including contacting the company’s help line for all my tech support needs].”
It “heard” the word “update” and then gave me a response about updating my computer before then appending the standard “there is help available” by giving me the information I had already used to end up in this conversation. It was both an endless loop and a sidequest.
Now, the company does have product-specific software. At least, I assume it does. Wait, let me check….
[pretend clicking and clacking noises]
…yes. It does. It seems like they have it updated through 2025 and I’m sure more AI bots are vibe coding the 2026 version right as we speak. Well, right as I type. I’m not saying this out loud or anything. That would be….crazy, right?
At any rate, while utterly unhelpful, it makes at least some vague sense if their average customer base is calling to ask for tech help and its having to start very basic on a whole.
Still.
The future is now.
After that, I simply said, “Agent, please,” and it made some more clicking clacking, told me human agents were only available from 7am to some other time CST, and then hung up on me.
It started as the wettest snow I have ever seen. I struggle, a bit, to explain it. You hear “wet snow” and you might think something like “wintry mix” but that’s not a good explanation. Think snow. Run-of-the-mill white stuff falling from the heavens. Only wet. Moving like clumpy rain.
I’m sure in the vast volumes of weather descriptions, there are words for it. Thompson’s Snow or Merriweather Flakes or some such. I could look it up but as for now, I’ll just call it Merriweather. Sounds, appropriately for this blog, Dickensian.
The above photo I took around 18:20 on 2025-01-02, a Friday, putting it at one of my first photos of the year. It is a mediocre-sliding-to-terrible photo in most metrics, but I feel it captures the essence of Merriweather Flake.
By Saturday (3 Jan), it turned into more legit snow. Here’s a photo of B and our two tuxedo cats enjoying the first or second aftermath. [Photo by Kaz]
The sun was at least partially out in this photo and the snow had stopped. It returned later that day. Then a very bright moon came out (not pictured). Then the snow returned. Then it cleared.
That was the pattern for several days. Remember how I have talked about there’s a stretch of woods we have to walk through to get to civilization? Here’s what that looked like on Sunday (and, presumably, today) [photo by Kaz]:
For those paying attention, this means B is now in the select group of people who can say they had to walk through the dark and snowy woods [sunrise is currently after her school day starts] just to get to school. There’s even an uphill, there.
A bit back, I talked about how often it rains during sunshine, here (The Devil Has a Lot of Fairs in Grimbergen + Pooping on a Train a Decade Ago). I can now attest that it also snows in the sunshine. This is around 08:30 this morning (2026-01-06):
You have to have faith there is snow in that picture. There is. Much like the last time I was talking about it, you also have to have some faith there’s sunlight in that picture.
Shortly after, the snow ate the sun and it degraded to this:
And now, circa 14:50, the sun has again taken the lead:
We are expecting more snow and, this time, a proper wintry mix over the next several days.
I’m Southern US enough that I’m still mostly fascinated by the snow. There is the downside that my post-injury stability is so low that I pretty much cannot step foot outside while there’s any chance of icy or slippery terrain so I’ve been largely stuck indoors since Friday night with only short excursions.
That is kind of ok. I just get to be the creepy guy staring out the window as folks walk by…
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