Simon Butcher

Lately I realise my life is amazingly out of balance. I'm now forced to play catch-up with everything going on around me, not only at work but in my personal life; Everything's out of kilter, and this is why I haven't had time to return phone calls, answer emails, scratch that bloody mozzie bite on the side of my arm, or write blog entries.

I've started to write about several things, but they've never really gotten anywhere beyond simple statements. As most of these are inspired by something I've seen, I thought that the best way to deal with them was to sporadically compile a little post that was somewhat closer to a photo-blog. In a moment of weakness, I unfortunately invented a little word for this; Apologies in advance.

The one thing that occurs to me lately is that getting healthy can be very expensive. Oddly, I always knew that eating healthy was horribly expensive compared to buying junk food, but now I realise the cost of things to help you be healthy are equally expensive.

I love my empty calories, and as my metabolism is slowing down like the rest of my family, I'm regaining the pot-belly I once grew while I baked myself in the sun at a resort in Pattaya back in 1992. Get me another watermelon juice, slave!

It's time to put an end to all that, and get a bit of catabolism going, beyond just walking everywhere. I've been saying for months that I should start running, but I couldn't motivate myself. Cyclocity instead encouraged me to cycle, and unfortunately for them I wound up buying my own bike.

Over the weekend just passed, the Brussels Summer Festival (formerly known as Euritmix) wound up the last big batch of their 280 free concerts being performed through-out the city. Me being me, I missed out on most of it, but I couldn't possibly miss the action when it arrived on my doorstep!

The weekend was probably the busiest weekend I've had in a long time, with many errands to run and much out-of-pattern spending to be done, and yet I still managed to spend a lot of time watching bands from my window ledge. For my own future reference, I thought I should jot down some notes about these unknown bands, which is represented by this post.

As I try to refrain from The Lovin' Spoonful references, I have to say that lately I've been feeling more and more at home living in the city. I love summer in Brussels, because all the plebs that live outside the pentagon bugger off on their holidays and the city centre turns into one amazingly friendly village (so long as you ignore the tourists).

Brussels also comes alive in a certain indefinable magic way, not only because it has it's own beach on the canal, or the arrival of the carnies at the medieval city gate in the south, but because of a fantastic summer festival.

This year, the festival has come to my doorstep!

Anybody else have problems with phones or Internet within the nineteen-communes today?

Around 4am this morning, Belgacom suffered a major outage that impinged upon everything in the Brussels area including phones, Internet connections, business data circuits, EFT networks, and even Belgacom's own mobile phone network, Proximus.

By mid-morning, Proximus, most land lines and EFT networks were available again, but related problems continued between networks such as Mobistar and BASE. A significant number of business services are still unavailable across Brussels, and should only be restored over the weekend.

I'm a proud brother today after my sister wound up appearing on various national news programs in Australia doing a press conference for ARBIAS. I managed to catch the story on the SBS World News Australia snippets released online, which even features a cameo from my Dad (a.k.a. Rent-A-Crowd).

As Scott has reminded me, a year ago today the two of us were wrapping up our 8000km lightning fast road-trip, mostly through Western/Southern Europe. Back then I didn't keep any sort of journal, and I still didn't believe in taking photos using my then brand-new E70 since camera-phones usually take photos of miserable quality.

Scott took on the role as the photographer putting some of them up on Smile In Europe. I left this up to him since he brought a suitcase that included his fancy Nikon D70, and about a million accessories to handle any photographic circumstance!