fog – Dickens of a Blog

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.

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.

The third iteration of Doug Bolden's various thoughts and musings.

Tag: fog

Waking Up to the STINK

Foggy Night in Grimbergen