music – Dickens of a Blog

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:

import datetime
print((datetime.date.today() - datetime.date(1977, 5, 30)).days+1)

Voila.

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.