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.
In my last post (The Pillow Washing Incident), I mentioned a bit of a catch up. This post represents that, mostly. I’m sure I’m leaving things out but to kind of enshrine a log for myself.
B back in Town
Barbara’s school had their annual “adventure camp” conclude today. It was a week-long trip somewhere in Belgium [I, oddly, do not know specifics, though I am sure I have been told] where the school as pretty much a whole — minus the early year students and some others that have opted out for various reasons — goes and does a lot of camp-type stuff. Swimming. Playing. Music. Talent shows. Eating in camp cafeterias. That kind of thing.
I’ve never exactly been to that kind of camp. I have done some volunteer work where we go out into the woods and clean up a bit or fix old playgrounds. Kind of similar, just a bit more hammer-and-nail and less friends-playing-games. And I’ve gone camping plenty of times. Lots of hiking and such.
I’m glad she got to experience it. She said it was mostly ok. Food was her biggest complaint.
Oddly enough, she seems to have more energy than I do now that it is concluded.
Kaz and I had a week to ourselves but we got the edge of a cold and for other reasons mostly just hung out and took care of a few things around the house and rested up. The parent paradox. Kids are gone for a week and you just choose sleep. Well, sleep and watching The Substance (my second time, Kaz’s first).
Take this as advice: it is a terrible date night movie.
It also ranks up there with Under the Skin as far as movies go where you get to see someone who is undeniably attractive in the nude and the overall vibe just outright punishes you for it.
Mail Call
On the left is the UK Blu-Ray of Southbound. On the right is Florence and the Machine’s new album, Everybody Scream, the “Chamber Music Edition.” Not pictured, because I picked it up digitally, is Robert Rich and Markus Reuter’s Incubation.
I have watched Southbound once, years ago. Likely near the time of release. Back then, I liked it better than the V/H/S movies. Ironically, I ended up rewatching V/H/S a good bit more. I have been doing a rewatch of that series and kind of felt like Southbound should join. I’ll likely write up my thoughts at some point on Doug Talks Weird.
As for Everybody Scream, I’ve been a fan of Florence and the Machine for a good while and am excited for this one. I have heard a couple of the singles and they fit well into my expectations. A good witchy album. We’ll see how the “Chamber Editions” of the songs go. It was supposed to hit on Halloween but there was a delay so I got it a week late. That’s ok.
Halloween
Speaking of… Halloween is not quite a big deal here in Belgium. There are lots of parties and lots of decorations. Schools have costume wearing events. I’ve heard there are even haunted corn-mazes and such. Here on our sleepy street, we were pretty much the only one to do anything.
That’s “Sam,” my very quickly done pumpkin using Sharpie. I decorated him on Halloween evening and put him out in a chair with a little hat because it was quite chilly. The hat got deeply rained on so I tossed it into textile recycling but still have the pumpkin. Not sure what we’ll do with him. Maybe consign him into the garden and let nature take its course.
Barbara (and Kaz) went to a classmate’s house and did some minor trick-or-treating. It seems like a few neighborhoods organize stuff.
She was Rumi from K-Pop Demon Hunters. She is of the age for that movie to hit big and wide. Got her the soundtrack and everything.
Spices (and Beans) from Foods of Asia
One of the things Kaz and I did while B was out of town was hit up Foods of Asia in Brussels/Evere and dropped around 100€ on spices. I am not talking any crap at all about Belgium, which actually has an ok assortment of spices in most shops, but there were a few that I really missed getting in proper bulk. I don’t like the tiny little jars of spices when I want to cook.
We got cloves, coriander, cumin powder, whole cumin, nutmeg, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, asafoetida, and some other similar things. Also some ramen and a mid-sized bag of jasmine rice.
Oh, and butterbeans, which I grew up knowing as limas. It was a pretty big staple for our family growing up (only bested by black-eyed peas in the legume category). We had a bean we called butterbean which was probably just baby-limas picked fresh. I don’t know.
The only bean that I have not been able to find, precisely, is pinto beans exactly like what we had in the Southern US. There are pinto beans here, but maybe just a bit more mature? I’m not sure. They taste a bit different and are a bit harder. It’s not too bad, though. Just a minor shift in cooking.
Alright, that’s probably enough note-taking. It’s sunny here in Grimbergen. I’m about to get out and go blink at this so-called “day star”.
OH, before I go, here’s my bike ride stats. Pushing to over an hour. Roughly of an average of mid-20s km/h. Intensity up to around the half-way mark on the bike (equivalent of mild uphills). The middle of the ride was more intense than the end but there’s no way to take a picture of the whole route so I just have the snap of me doing the wind down to finish out to the 17mi mark:
I have a little bit of a backlog of stuff going down so will do some catch up, starting with this: The Pillow Washing Incident.
I have used the same pillow for years. I don’t know if twenty is the right number, but it feels right. To be safe, we’ll lean towards fifteen-years since I started using the pillow.
The kind of pillow that is neither the same color nor shape that it once was. The original structure has been consumed by time and replaced by a strange new realm.
And it slept perfectly.
But like all such things that once were pillows, you have to wash them to keep the gods-of-nightmares away and it has been some time since I have washed it. How long? Well…
It has been a time.
I figured last Friday was a good time to wash it up and threw the vaguely orange tesseract into the vortex of a Hygiene+ wash cycle. It went perfectly fine for the first 95% of the process. Then, right at the end, when it should have just been bringing the ray of light to Doug’s sleep-land, something occurred.
The stitches on the corners of the pillow-esque thing popped out in the final spin cycle and two-decade-old (give or take) fluff, albeit clean and once again white, exploded into the washer and as it went to drain out the water, the water-saturated fluff got sucked into the works.
How many works, you ask?
The drum had fluff in and around it. The drain hose was clogged. The filter was clogged. Water was spewing out of the system. There was the extra spice that it was Halloween when this occurred and Kaz and B were off doing some Halloween-themed things. Which meant it had to wait until we could teamwork it.
I had a washer half full of water, half full of a poem entitled “The Deconstruction of What Was Once a Pillow,” and half full of despair. It was a 150% situation. I did what you do: I watched Blacula and Trick ‘R Treat.
The next day (November 1), Kaz and I had to work on clearing it out and getting some of the water and still-water-saturated fluff out of it. Thanks to some YouTube videos and finding an English-language version of the manual, we got the drain hose out and slowly got the excess water out and then was able to get the filter clear.
I did not take any photos of the process, which is a shame, but you can roughly replicate it by just staring at Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” especially the right-hand piece.
Then we had a few cleaning washes to get the rest of the fluff out.
As of right now, the system is working as intended and, thanks to some sunny weather, we are getting some speed drying done to make up for the backlog.
What lessons did we learn, Space Pilgrims?
LESSON THE FIRST, wash your pillows more often.
LESSON THE SECOND, either tie off the pillow case or get some sort of laundry bag that zips up, just in case.
LESSON THE THIRD, every screw up is a good time to learn some new valuable life skills. In this case, how to drain and repair and gunked up washing machine.
We have yet to figure out LESSON THE FOURTH, which is where in the heck do I buy a new pillow in Brussels? I suppose at some point in time, I’m going to figure out what the IKEA is like.
In better news, here’s a blurry photo I took last night before bed to show off how bright the full moon was. My phone camera is not the best at night photography, but I appreciate the mood.
We seem to get a lot of sunshowers [LGT: Wikipedia] here in Grimbergen, BE. The weather mix where it is raining while sunny.
Back in Alabama, I feel like you’d maybe see it once or twice a year. In Belgium, I’ve already seen a good dozen times over the three months I’ve been here. I have no idea if it is normal, or if I have some magic touch. Though, since the Flemish word for it seems to be Duiveltjeskermis (Devil’s Fair), “magic touch” might have a cursed connotation there.
You can probably not see much rain in either photo. Consider this something like a trust fall.
It’s also non-Summer Belgium, so you can barely see any sun. So it goes…
Three fun facts in which one is a follow-up of another:
(1) I had the window open [obv] in that second photo and while taking the picture, noticed the wind had shifted enough that it was starting to blow rain inside. Before I could shut the window, a quantity of rain poured all over my radiator, electric cords, power bank, and so forth. I had to rapidly shut everything down and unplug stuff while still covered in rain water.
(2) Whenever I see sunshowers, the Southern US phrase “The devil is beating his wife” pops in my head, which is frankly some Punch and Judy-level nonsense.
(3) Only that specific phrase doesn’t. My brain loves to say “God is beating His wife.” Which is potentially more blasphemous, though I’d argue that the extra-Biblical depiction of “The Devil” is plenty enough to go around to start.
Anyhow, the linked Wikipedia article has lots of fun phrases. My second most used, after “X is beating his Y” is “fox wedding” because I’m a weeb at heart.
I did have to check, though, because I was sure I had blogged about this before. Which I have. Though it seems like the actual discussion was on my old Livejournal, which has gone the way of Punch’s baby.
BONUS PHOTO: Pooping on a Train a Decade Ago
Ten years ago, today, Kaz and I were on our way to Providence, RI1. It was a nice trip. Since one part was visiting H.P. Lovecraft’s graveside, I might post during spooky week.
That photo shows our toilet in our compartment. If you notice, it is right up against the seat. Meaning either you had to sit next to the person pooping or you had to sit across and stare them in the eyes. Good times.
That’s not even the worst “toilet business on a train story” I have. The worst was on a trip back from New Orleans when I was trying to pee. I was standing because I was not trusting the cleanliness of the shared seat. The train took a corner at speed which caused me to slip a bit and, well…
Sorry, Amtrak folk who had to wipe that down. I did do my best but it was a bit past what you could accomplish with train-quality toilet paper.
You can go ahead and put the “whoops” GIF here, too.
The photo was tagged by Google as being exactly a decade ago. It might have been the day before, since I would have had to get to a good connection to upload it. ↩︎
Note, these pictures are a bit blurred out because of, you know, rain. It was relatively impossible to actually wipe the moisture off the lens without adding additional moisture. Take them as mood pieces, if you will.
My weather app keeps insisting it’s going to stop raining, soon. It has been doing such since around 20:00 last night.
The above is actually waiting at the bus stop for B’s bus.
Here is the walk through the woods between our house and the bus stop:
Yes, I’m taking the piss just a little. No, that’s not just a black PNG like last time. It’s a photo I took, in the rain, of some very dark woods. Toss in the sound of crackling branches and running water and not being able to see a dang thing.
If there were ghosts there, I probably would have spotted them. An unearthly glow would have been welcome.
This is the last one where coming out of the woods into a rain-drenched, leaf-strewn street makes an interesting juxtaposition where nature ends and my ability to see began…
I should probably get a better camera for taking dark, rainy photos. I have a feeling I am about to see a lot of them.
I know it’s a common features of expat blogs, of which this tangentially one, to focus on “10 things which shocked me!” type content but while there have been two dozen stacks of things to which I have had to adjust, I am not sure if many are really “shocking.” There’s a few I might share because of humor and anthropological studies type reasons, but overall I am pretty boring in that regard. Stuff is kind of the same but definitely not the same the world over.
There is one thing of which I was previously aware intellectually but in everyday practice has taken a bit of adjustment: the later morning sunrises.
That was taken at something like 07:08 this morning [2025-10-20]. My phone camera slightly lightened it. The sky was more true black at that angle though the light pollution of Brussels was pushing through a bit to the south.
I think you should at least get the idea. Squint a little while looking at it.
I appreciate this is a reality for millions of people and not really a big deal. It is fairly new to me, though.
I grew up in southern [aka Lower] Alabama in the United States. For most of my life, there was a rough idea of sunrise and sunset being similar throughout the year (there’s a four hour swing but Daylight Savings Time imbalances this to the evening side). 7am was pretty definitely post-dawn. 4pm was pre-Dusk. It got fuzzier after that.
Up until my 30s, all of my travel was across the American Southeast region. Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana. Probably in that order, though maybe more LA than GA. I think the furthest north I had ever been was Norfolk, VA. The furthest west was near-ish New Orleans, LA.
Occasionally I would read books like Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and it would talk about the sunlight fading at 11pm [aka, 23:00 in here terms] and I would be confused. I was aware of stuff like the so-called “midnight sun” but it took me a long time to really appreciate the difference. Even when I traveled to places like Boston, it never quite stuck.
My trip to Scotland, near Glasgow, in 2018 was probably the first time where I had that all important realization of proper first-hand experience. Around midsummer, the days were delightfully long which was probably terrible for jet lag but it was nice having a practicum.
It was similar to student-era me figuring out that integrating a curve = acceleration & area under curve = total distance traveled by an accelerating body. The kind of thing I could rationalize but actually using the math to predict real life objects and extrapolating that into new formulae was a big deal for me in my astrophysics days. Or when I began to work out multidimensional math and how frames of reference could be shifted and calculated in high school.
All that said, moving from a place with something like an 4-hour swing to a place with an 8-hour swing has been kind of neat. The ultimate practicum. I’m sure I’ll be fussy around mid-winter but we’ll see.
While I would call the current sky approaching noon as “Mostly Just Gray,” there have been a few moments where a color apparently called “blue” and an object that Wikipedia tells me is “the sun” have been visible. Such wonders!
It is actually supposed to be sunny and clear in Grimbergen this weekend, but also the temperature is going to drop again. Win some. Lose some.
One Hour Workout Results
See what it looks like when I use a flash to illuminate the darkness? At least it doesn’t look like I’m working out in the unlit part of the backrooms this time.
Went ahead after yesterday’s post and decided to push it up to a full hour and a bit more speed while retaining the resistance. Final result was around 28km. At an average of speed of…well, I’ll let you math nerds solve that.
I’m not 100% I can keep it up on a daily basis because it definitely flexes the leg a lot but it is also not that difficult. I was more concerned about having to pee starting around the 40 minute mark and just how numb my ass got sitting on the metal seat that long. Tomorrow’s a different day but if I am not overly sore or having trouble with mobility after today I might give it a try.
Dickens of a Blog Reclamation Continues Apace
I have been working on the tech behind fixing up as much of the older Dickens of a Blog as best as I can. The Poetry section is “working complete” which is to say that I have cleared out around half the poems and focused on highlighting the ones I really like, and gotten all of those updated, but there are no doubt others that can be linked.
I’ve been using a mix of WinSCP and Notepad++ to do a lot of heavy lifting. I can copy and paste chunks of HTML and CSS into the backend and then do some document wide find+replace actions to reaching a decently stable point.
I finished up a rewrite of “8 Space” this morning and for now I think I’ll take mostly a break for the day. Give myself something to look at that isn’t just more HTML and terminals.
Having that focus on a single aspect for a couple of days has helped me to figure out the mechanics a lot and I hope I can do a lot more in a shorter time in the future. And if I have to go and do more fixes in the future, the layout should be stabilized enough that I have a better chance of just automating it.
“Mail Bag” Maybe Incoming
I have a small stack of deliveries I’ve gotten recently and wanted to give a shout out to some of them but I need to figure out exactly how I want to do that. I think I’ll divide them up and give myself space to go through more of them one at a time. Or just skip it. I don’t know.
I really need to shower. I still am covered in an hour’s worth of sweat.
Also, look at my hair just give up on me. That’s one way to get out of having curly hair.
Ever since my accident, my primary source of aerobic exercise has been a recumbent stationary bike. In terms of my lower body, and especially my left leg, the ability to sustain an increased heart rate in any other way is pretty slim. I can lift weights and such, especially those using just the abs and arms, but good cardio is a trick.
Working Out Just to Stay Alive
I fell in May 2022. Through the rest of the summer, I was mostly on bed rest with only short excursions. By September, I was able to be more active and was returning to work several days a week. I was starting to figure out stairs. Through October and November 2022, I was getting better at navigating slopes and ramps as long as I had assistance (be it mobility aids or someone assisting me).
As we got into 2023, there became an increased need for me to get more mobile in general. In January of that year, Kaz and I ordered a recumbent bike. It took a moment to get it and get it set-up but early on the idea was just to get on it and move. At this point, I could move using just a cane, later using a pair of Nordic walking sticks, though had to be very careful with any kind of obstacles or changes in height.
Early workouts on the bike were usually just me getting to something like 10-11ish mph (16-18km/h) and keeping that going for 10-15 minutes with nearly no resistance. Even that was wiping me out.
Getting into Trackable Patterns
I have been steadily improving while trying to not stress my legs so much that it leaves me too tired to move. In the last couple of years I have worked out two general loops: sprints and uphill jogs.
Sprints will be roughly 20 minutes, give or take, and will be pushing for speed with lower degrees of resistance. 20-22mph (32-40 km/h). Hitting somewhere around the 100w and up (I’ve seen 180w). The idea is to hit the 10km mark as soon as possible and then go past it.
This involves a lot of sweating. A lot of sweating.
I probably look like I have been crying in the rain after I get done.
The “uphill jog” will have moderate to high resistance but a slower overall speed, centered around the 16-17mph (25ish km/h) for half an hour with the focus on strength building.
Trying to Up Endurance
Today I worked in the first cycle of a distance-as-in-time. Pedal as fast as I want, or as slow as I want. Just keep going for the whole time. Keeping the resistance in the upper-low-to-lower-moderate range (for now). Began with just 40 minutes, but it went well enough that I’ll up the time to an hour next time.
Not too bad. Not great. Somewhere in between.
Ends up being an average of ~26km/h over ~17km. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes as I increase it to a full hour.
By the way, yes that image of my final results (and the image I took for the header) are a bit dark. Keep in mind that this is roughly what it looks like outside as I start my workout:
dramatic re-enactment
It’s dark. I could turn on a light but there’s something about being out of breath and sweating bullets in the pre-dawn light that is kind of meditative.
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.
Woke up at 6am to get ready for my morning workout and spent a few minutes, as I do every morning, resting in bed to give my joints time to “calm down.” The arthritis/inflammation-meets-disability tends to be worse after prolonged activity and when I first wake up. I’m sure there’s math to explain the latter. Just know that most of my mornings start with a “Daddy, Chill!” moment between me and my aches.
While resting up for that ten- to twenty-minutes that it takes for my body to realize it is indeed ok to get out of bed, I heard a noise that sounded like someone showering which caught me off guard because I was pretty sure I was the only one awake. Then a few seconds later the wind hit and it turned out that Grimbergen was getting a LOT of wind and rain. It was kind of fun getting up in the pre-sunrise darkness and just watching the rain slam into the side of the house.
Pictured above is my cat, Turkey, pondering why the outside was so blustery. Taken in the moments right before sunrise [the light outside is mostly the streetlights but you can see the sky starting to lighten]. It’s a bit blurry because it was taken in fair darkness and it’s hard to get a photo of a cat while your phone is doing night-photo mode.
At some point I need to find my Nikon and try taking some more proper photos. Not just of weather but also like, you know, heavily macroed shots of rusty nails and stuff.
A Return to “A Day in the Life”
Holy crap, it has been a while since I have used that post title template. In fact, I had to dig through the back-end a bit to find out the previous “Day in the Life” was #14194. That’s over 3000 days ago. Also finding it made me a bit sad. It dealt with a fair amount of negativity. 2016 was a hell of a year. Blogs are truly a double-headed beast.
Just to clarify, in case you are wondering, the Day in the Life posts show the number of days I have been alive, not the number of posts I have made. I used Google to calculate it this time but somewhere in my stacks of files is a Python script I made when I would post these “just stuff I did today” type posts on the old Dickens of a Blog. I should find that. Marvel at how my code used to look. Good marvel? Bad marvel? I don’t know.
#!/usr/bin/python
import datetime
YEAR = 1977
MONTH = 05
DAY = 30
d = "%Y/%m/&d"
today = datetime.date.today()
birth = datetime.date(YEAR, MONTH, DAY)
daysinlife = today - birth
print daysinlife.days
You know, frankly, that’s not too bad. It is clearly Python 2 era. And from the time period where I tended to purposefully over-write code so it was easier for me to chunk and fix later. I’m not even sure what one of those lines is doing in this context. It’s like I copy and pasted it from some other function and just changed the bits I need to change. Let’s show some confidence and fix that up, slightly:
Despite being a person who has been sharing stuff online since the late 90s, and having multiple blogs of which only three have been named “Dickens of a Blog,” it is still a bit odd for me to just share my personal stuff without some major context to sort it through. And possibly that’s because when I get personal I tend to get a bit self-incriminating and self-deprecating. I become that stranger on the bus that starts complaining about his ex-wife and his brother’s dog and stuff his boss said. I mean, maybe not that bad but you get the idea.
At any rate, the “Day in the Life” series was a way for me to have a few dips into those waters on the occasional basis without dealing solely with myself as the main topic. It’s nice to have them back in principle whether or not I use “the brand” all that often. Like most Days in the Life, it is less about a day and more about a bunch of random stuff that has accumulated.
EDIT: Shortly after posting this I realized that my code was still wrong. The way I am wording it would need to include a zero-day. As in, on the date of my birth I would be considering that “Day 1”. I could either set the day to the day before my birth or add 1. I added in a cheeky “+”. That means the title of this is off by a day, but eh. So it goes…
Warning: this one might get a bit over-long as I get back into the balance.
Pommelien Thijs’s Gedoe
Pommelien Thijs’s Gedoe — note, link is in Dutch/Nederlands — came out yesterday so I got to listen to that for a bit. Then more this morning while doing my workout. I really enjoy it.
When we first moved to the Flemish-Brabant/Brussels region, I was trying to absorb some language by listening to local news and such. Thijs kept coming up right as I was breaking into the point of following the slightest bit along. Looking up her music videos, I came across “Ongewoon” [in the context of the song, the line is “Alles voelt zo ongewoon” which is “Everything feels so unusual” but possibly “peculiar” or “strange” or “unfamiliar”…the feeling you get when some preconceived emotions are actually out of whack with expectations] and “Het Midden” [“the middle”] (below):
I enjoyed both of those and other stuff I could find. I’m not a pop-head but still, it was an album I wanted to pick up as I return to getting more physical media, again. I pre-ordered it and ordered her first and got them both in the mail.
The issue at first was how to listen to them. Neither my desktop or laptop have optical disk drives. This means I had to a) get out my external drive that was a still in its box from the move, b) get a voltage converter that we bought early on but have not used yet, c) hook a into b and then plug that into a computer. Then tweak/fix the files I ripped. Being me, I then zipped and cataloged the files and moved them into two different backups.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done a proper review of an album so I am thinking about using that as a guinea pig of such. Maybe. Maybe not.
Barbara’s Assembly
Barbara’s P3 class had their first assembly at her school, yesterday. She spent a fair amount of her own time building up wings using old construction paper and Amazon boxes:
This was all for about half a minute when she was on a stage pretending to be a bird of the Amazon while her class talked about education around the world and how environment impacts education opportunities.
NOTE: I have a photo B wearing her wings but I asked her if she was ok with me sharing and she said no. Since one of the reasons I pulled out of social media because of a personal disagreement with parents oversharing elements of their children’s lives to the wide public, I respect her decision. She was ok with me sharing the wings, though.
Between her planning and construction of a costume largely on her own; her sense of stage direction; and her (at one point) helping another student to remember his lines during the show: she’s a natural stage manager. At eight, she better at handling the chaos of stagecraft than I ever was.
Finally, an American-Style Peanut Butter!
There is actually very little American food that I miss over here with the slight exceptions of Back Home™ has a better selection of types of beans and, via mail order, an overall better selection of TVP (textured vegetable proteins) shapes/sizes. There are plenty of beans here and some variations of soy product [and cheaper soya drink/milk and tofu], but it required some adjustment.
Still, I’ve had a few sad moments where I miss American style peanut butter (or pindakaas [peanut cheese] in Nederlands). Yesterday, swinging by the Carrefour in Vilvoorde, I found this beauty:
I have not been this excited about 2g of added sugars per serving for a minute. I mean, compared to some American foods, this peanut butter is still relatively a healthy food. And, most importantly, it tastes amazing.
I’m not throwing any shade at the availability of plant-based Nutella or the decent selection of other nut butters including some quite decent Belgische pindakaas. It just, good salty-sweet peanut butter hits different.
“Breaking” and Fixing a Garage Door
One aspect of the move that cannot be overstated is how much the large beats are sometimes easy to adapt towards since a lot of support tends to exist to learning the language, replacing electronics, etc but the small beats can practically haunt you as you learn what some minor device or some local custom means. Learning how to say, “Pardon, waar is het toilet?,” can take less time than figuring out how to ask what a small symbol might mean on food packaging when everyone around you thinks of such things as derived from universal common sense. Even somewhat universal symbols can shift slightly enough to imply different things. This is well, good, and expected. Language is a product of the people using it. It just sometimes catches you out.
One way you adjust, which is to say one way that I adjust, is just occasionally pushing a button or pulling a string to see what happens. Buy the product. Tap the card.
This morning, post-workout, I realized our garage had a pull cord and so I went, “Hmm, ik kan aan dit koord trekken.” And then a loud pop answered my call as the cord turned out to be a release to detach the door from the mechanism.
Kaz and I fixed it shortly after but it was a good life lesson. Push the buttons, pull the cords, and bring a toolbox to fix the fallout when you do.
With the above photo, don’t sweat about the power cord with duct tape. It’s not actually plugged in. We’ll replace it if we ever need to use it.
