While I was writing the previous post (Foggy Night in Grimbergen), I looked out the window and saw a double rainbow to the west. Feeling I only had a few seconds to make it count, I headed outside and scooted over until I found the angle for which I was looking. To capture a rainbow over De Abdij van Grimbergen.
Unfortunately, my phone does not do well with the zoom and I still haven’t unpacked my better camera. Unzoomed, it looks more like…
Because it was actually a double rainbow.
Neat-o. Even if my photo quality sucks, it’s still a fun shot.
Right after I took the shot I had to scoot back up the road and inside because we were getting another Devil’s Fair. Then it just turned into outright rain for several minutes.
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.
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. ↩︎
After this morning’s rainy walk, there was a lot of waiting out the rain to finish. Got in my work out. Showered. Ate “second breakfast” [read: a banana]. Drank tea. Did some online errands.
Finally, got a slight break before what looks like round 4 or 5 hits, and so went outside to pick up a couple of things that had gotten blown around a bit like the bucket we use to our restafval1 and just checking the outside plants. Remember, one of the previous storms took out our granny statue.
Anyhow, while knocking water out of buckets and such, I saw this absolute unit of a slug:
I would guess around 10-12cm. Not the chubbiest I have seen but still an impressive chad.
Translation: residual waste. In Grimbergen, we divide our waste up into various types. PMD [Plastic, Metal, Drink Cartons]; P&K [Paper and Paper Cartons]; GFT & SH [Food Waste and Clippings (groenteafval, fruitafval, tuinafval, en snoeihout, to explain the acronym); Glass [not including beer/beverage bottles, which we return to stores]; Bulky items [grofvuil]; and Small Hazardous Items [klein gevaarlijk afval]. Restafval is essentially everything else. ↩︎
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.
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.
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.
A bit of an addendum to the last post, after several rainy and very windy hours we now get mostly sunny day which is still quite windy. Doing a quick run around the house to check for damage, caught a fun effect where leaves blown about by the morning bluster had caught up on the cement and caused a kind of “attractor” force to protect the water from the sun and the wind and evaporation so there are these little micro-puddles around them.
Just wanted to share.
And yes, we need to cut our grass. It’s just, you know, damp.
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.
