Kaz sent me a message to go out and look at the moon because there was a planet hanging out right nearby. I snagged this shot on my phone…
Didn’t occur to me until later that if I had waited I could have possible caught the contrail moving up from the bottom more centered into the shot as a whole.
Ah well, it was still a very pretty Belgian sunrise. I love the sunrises, here, this time of year.
I should find my actual camera and tripod and try taking some more proper shots.
Today has been kind of sunny, here, but that’s a change.
The past couple of weeks have been quite rainy and gray in Grimbergen. Considering how drought-tastic July and August were, having it swing colder and wetter has been nice.
You just have to brace for the mostly unbroken gray and the scent of rain covering everything. Even when the sun managed to peak out from behind the clouds, it was through rain-drenched windows and drowning in the mud.
This is assuming it was not an outright downpour:
We had those, too.
The grass, though, the grass has grown quite green. That’s nice.
Unfortunately, we have also had quite a few sick days in the same time. Kaz got hit around 10-11 days ago. I had milder symptoms show up around a day later. Then B got sick a couple of days into it. This virus, Space Pilgrims, it persists…
B was supposed to start back to school this week but after one-and-half days had her throat swell up and become quite painful and her fever from last weekend returned. So we ended up keeping her out the next two days of school so she can heal up.
I did manage to get this quick photo of her making friends with a moth on her half day. I’ll take that as a good omen despite the illness. Note that there was actual sun at the time but I think it was raining by the time we got her home.
I don’t have a lot of photos from the afternoon of the Full-to-Some, Partial-to-Us solar eclipse which happened on 12 August 2026. I have a few though, and the above and below ones are my favorite.
I think my favorite part was everything wearing “mermaid scales” as the eclipse passed through the trees.
Also, apparently Kaz’s t-shirt was apparently just a coincidence.
In a perhaps gentle but unpleasant reminder that I’m a 49-year-old man with the body of a bruised 59-year-old, today my right knee popped out a bit while I was simply walking, slowly, across my kitchen. Hell, at the time I might have been standing still.
Time flies into a blur when you are wincing in pain.
For those checking records, this is not the knee that had surgery. This is my emotional support leg that had to do heavy lifting for four years while I relearned walking and has suffered quite a bit for it.
Joy.
This is Turkey…
He is asking you…begging you… please do not play with his toe beans.
But then this is the temptation…
Sleepy boo…
Couple of nights back, I was getting B to bed and we were talking about how she had worked hard that day. On the way downstairs from her bedroom I turned around and said, without a trace of irony:
HARD WORK MAKES THE BED SOFT.
Space Pilgrims, it was like I was temporarily possessed by an aphorism-spouting southern grandmother.
Like I passed, in that instance, into the age where you are a movie stereotype of the gray-haired man who shows up to gives speeches on a porch to the much younger, and much more attractive, protagonists.
Lord.
Anyhow, time to embrace this new silver age, because if you don’t hold on to what you got you might get nothing at all.
Bonus, I looked it up to see if this was a phrase I had read somewhere before and Google’s AI keeps jumping into the conversation to claim it is a “well-known phrase” and offers absolutely NO evidence of such a thing.
Sounds like the folks at Gemini need to be WORKING harder, eh?
NOTE, some folks are pretty sensitive to spiders so I’m going to save the actual photo of the spider until after a cut, but just note that there will be absolutely a photo of a spider if you continue down this post. The header has a bit of a preview that’s been washed out so hopefully it’s not too bad.
That’s my photo of last night’s sunset, marking the day-time end of midsummer (circa 22.00, give or take a minute). As a bonus you get to see our window screen. Now say, “Thank you, Doug’s window screen, for keeping out the bugs.” Show some care, Space Pilgrims, for these windows screens are good friends of mine.
Currently it seems a bit too hot for even the insects to be out, at least during the heat of day. Still, its nice to have the screens at night when the temp is low enough to make having windows open worth it and the buggies are just fine with stinging.
Anyhow, midsummer. Maybe that’s met hoofdletter, eh? Midsummer. Capital M. Behind Halloween, it is possibly the date of the year that I feel the most spiritual about despite genuinely considering summer to be my least favorite season by some margin. I am autumn’s child and do ok in the winter while enjoying enough of the spring-time that I forgive it mostly for wrecking me with pollen.
Summer, though? Bah.
I hate the heat. I am of mixed-feelings about storms. I don’t like drought. I’ve also been tied up in academia for long enough that summertime was always a strange liminal moment. I liked working with students. Even though I usually had projects that benefited from an extended quiet, it was never quite the same. Never the same joy.
One of my primary summer memories was in undergrad just walking around the campus during summer when everyone was gone. This was UAH in the late 90s, early 00s era. When the campus was almost entirely commuter instead of just mostly commuter. What scant campus life was holding on by a thread during Fall and Spring semesters popped out of existence in the summer interim.
There was such a striking sense of quiet, of nothingness, it depressed me more than any shadows or stormy weather.
Midsummer, though? I like midsummer. For me, the return of the dark seems more important than the return of the light. As the saying goes…there are no sweeter words than this: nothing lasts forever.
It’s good to be reminded.
This afternoon I finished off the last couple of volumes of Jujutsu Kaisen. I thought it was perfectly fine. That’s about all the praise I have for it. It was interesting in how hard it tried to justify its ever expanding rules of sorcery and cursed spirits and dozens of other classifications that were forced into being to justify single plot points. The world was boring as hell, the characters are kind of fun, the character designs were nice, and the story never trusted itself to slow the hell down.
My absolute favorite portion was when Gege Akutami would toss in inserts. That dried up more and more towards the end (something he himself calls out in the final few pages).
I might do a fuller review but probably not. Besides the above, my primary comment would be that the story would have been better at 40-50 volumes instead of the 30+1 we got. And maybe half the characters. We were supposed to care about characters taking 10-pages to die when they only had 2-pages to speed run their backstory? Having some downtime would have made it feel like flesh instead of just fancy skin. The between-the-lines that was there tended to be stuff I liked but it ended up feeling like I was reading the end-game crossover arc of multiple series that mostly existed in Akutami’s head.
Especially when the last few volumes are just constant “OH, but what if I used a triple third strike reverse widdershins life beam yellow hawk cry” and then someone going “its over!” only for the yellow hawk cry to get bested immediately by a filtered water stream double strength shatterspoon or some crap.
It’s cool but when you can endlessly invent new moves and rules and twists it feels less like a world and more like two kids shouting at each other in a sandbox after school.
To the 15-year-old kid who considered it the most exciting thing he ever read: don’t worry about me. I’m old and cranky.
On other happy media consumption notes, I realized there were a few patches in my general Japanese music collection I wanted to fill. The long and short being that across this past month I picked up some albums by Marie Ueda, tiny yawn, Aooo, Monthly Shonen Irony, Porno Graffiti, L’arc-en-ciel, and cinnamons. I also got Mono’s newest album, but I’ve been following them a long time. And tuki. just released a new song so I got that as well.
My plan is to avoid the heat by just jamming to tunes and maybe getting back into solo play stuff that took a big backseat lately.
If I try another manga series any time soon, I’m thinking Dorohedoro, maybe. I’ve only ever read volume of it but thought it was neat. That, or I might finally read Gantz to completion. I’ve read it twice before it was finished and never went back to finish out the missing pieces.
I like how when you look at my lunch from today, it looks like the kind of food you’d see in a prison film or otherwise a movie meant to suggest the person is being punished for eating. It was good, mind. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich with orange slices and a spotty banana. I liked it, it just doesn’t quite sell itself.
Last night, we had our first exam for our Nederlands Cursus. The oral portion. We had done the writing [fine], reading [mostly fine], and listening [somewhat fine] portions prior to the class. The reading had one portion that felt like it was suddenly quite advanced but I made it work. The listening had a limit to the number of times you could play the file (3) and I found this out after playing one of the clips twice to just the cadence of the speaker down. Added some spice.
The oral portion was probably the most stressed I have been while taking a test in a good minute, though.
It ended up going fairly well but when answering the question “Waar woon jij?” I had a strange blank and started to talk about living in Huntsville, Alabama. I mean, it was in language. That might count as my first senior moment.
Second glitch was when trying to figure out how to ask Kaz if they liked swimming (“Zwem jij graag?”) and my brain kept trying to force the “graag” to the front (“Graag zwem jij?”). I just couldn’t unlock it for a half second. The teacher fussed as I tried glancing through my notes but my brain unlocked after a second.
It is a weird sensation to be on the other side of the teaching process, but always good for long-time academics like me to have that pain, I suppose.
After our class, I got a package that had the two Arrow box-sets for Gamera (Showa and Heisei). I’m in the camp that feels like Heisei Gamera is just about absolute peak tokusatsu. We watched Gamera 2: Attack of Legion and I had a grand old time. One of my favorite movies of all time, and high up on the kaiju flick rating for me. I appreciate that Gamera 3 is overall a more interesting movie but what makes it interesting somewhat requires the other two moves of the box-set.
I do have the even bigger all-Gamera, all-the-time boxset from Arrow but it’s one of those encyclopedia sized numbers that makes it kind of hard to get the movies out without lots of faith. Having the individually boxed blu-rays is nice in that regard.
As a final note, had a strange dream last night. The bits I remember, I mean. The dream was third person (not involving me) and was something like a very-extended movie trailer. A group of friends doing stupid stuff.
At the very end, four of the friends are in a truck — it was a kind of smaller truck, but somehow one of the friends was sitting on the dashboard looking backwards, dream-logic — and one of the friends start talking about wanting to die and how he hopes it hurt. He then pulls out some sort of explosive device and starts playing with it and it starts counting down.
The guy on the dashboard reaches over and grabs his hand and the two (out of four) are waiting for death together. It had the vibe of a nightmare though the scene was ridiculously “shot” like some 90s movie.
Right as I was waking up, the dream had the device fly out of the truck and go across a field and blow up harmlessly…maybe. It was an odd experience like I was recalling something I had seen but it did not quite happen. Like my brain had scripted out more of a dream and then wanted to try and get to a good stopping spot.
This past weekend, a pretty notable stormfront moved through and not only dropped a good amount of rain, but also did weird stuff to the pressure.
Somewhere in there, plus an undiscovered bit of blockage in our outgoing pipes (presumably), the extra water + “wax-sealed bottle” effect + pressure ups-and-downs resulted in several liters of rancid water burping back into our garage.
To quote my description shared with a friend at the time:
I could tell you what it smelled like, but you’d never eat Taco Bell again.
It was rank and it covered most everything in the garage.
Kaz took charge and got a lot of stuff cleaned and since then I’ve done spot disinfecting as I locate a place that obvious needs it and, frankly, it all needs it. Spiritual taint abounds.
We called a professional who came out and got the pipes cleaned out and washed back out the sediment and such that had been shoved forcibly into our system.
Now I’m washing dishes with a sense of dread. Just waiting to hear The Burp again.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén