The Magnifying Glass #JusJoJan

Posted on by Astrid

When I was about eleven, my parents gifted me a magnifying glass for my birthday. It was a small hand-held magnifier that magnified everything eight times. That way, I was able to read large print for a little while longer, albeit slowly. That is until my vision deteriorated even further and, even with the magnifier, I could no longer read the large print atlas that I so loved. That was sad.

Now that I’m totally blind and couldn’t care less about that large print atlas, I do wish I’d kept the magnifying glass. Not for myself, but so that staff can more easily help me with my crafty pursuits. Many of my staff struggle with the detailed work involved in jewelry-making or with reading small print.

Then again, with the print, I could easily point my iPhone camera at it and have Seeing AI, Envision or another related app read the text for me. Intriguingly, yesterday I was chatting with a staff about learning to write and she asked me whether I could still write by hand. I asked her to hand me a pen and a piece of paper and wrote my first name onto it. Envision didn’t give me any feedback, but Seeing AI read everything except for the A. Of course, every letter except for the A was an inch tall. I am however pleased that it was legible by AI.

Not that it’s of any use in daily life. I mean, when I had to get a new passport a few months ago, it was decided that my handwriting isn’t readable enough for me to write my signature. That’s in part because my signature has always been a mess because I never quite understood the concept. However, my handwriting has definitely worsened over the years. I’m glad though that I got the comment on my passport that I’m unable to sign, because that way until I’m due to get a new one in ten years, no-one will ask me to try and then conclude that my signature looks nothing like the one on my passport. I had that problem when my wife and I were buying our house. Thankfully, the solicitor was able to ask to colleagues to sign in my place. Next time, official people will know beforehand thanks to the note on my passport.

This post was written in response to today’s prompt for #JusJoJan, which is “magnify”.

My Hopes for 2026

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all! I’m publishing a second post today to share my hopes for the new year. I don’t call them resolutions and I honestly hardly look back at them over the year, but it’s somewhat fulfilling to notice that I did make about half of my hopes for 2025 happen indeed. In fact, when I was talking with my wife about the year 2025, I realized I’d done better than I had expected, contrary to what I said in my yearly review. Anyway, here are the things I hope to achieve in 2026.

1. Get in more and more varied physical exercise. I am pretty sure that this is going to be a hard one, because it looks unlikely that I can go to the gym regularly or go swimming again. However, there are other ways too, like yoga, pilates, etc.

2. Do more meaningful activities, such as cooking, baking and crafting. This was one area in which 2025 has been less successful than I’d hoped but more successful than 2024. I’m still hoping to make that standing unicorn sculpture I mentioned yesterday happen. However, even if that’s not going to happen, I hope to include crafting and kitchen-based activities in my day schedule regularly.

3. Focus on mindfulness and gratitude. I am finding that even a few minutes in the Gratitude app helps lift my mood. I honestly think this is because it’s something new, but I hope that I can keep up the mojo. I already started this habit in 2025 when I wrote the positives and negatives of each day and E-mailed them to my assigned staff. I’ll continue to do so this year.

4. Improve my wake/sleep schedule. Over the past six months or so, I almost always spent most of the morning in bed. I’d really like to change that. Today was good in this respect.

5. Write more regularly. I don’t just mean blogging, although I seriously hope to do more of that too. I mean, my blogging year was better than 2024, but 2024 was about the most disappointing year blog-wise. I hope to write more this year than I did last year. I also started doing Morning Pages again. I however don’t get up early for them, because I know that’s a recipe for disaster. Rather, today, I did mine after breakfast, when I used to hop back into bed.

6. Further taper my medication. I’m having another meeting with the intellectual disability physician, who prescribes my psych meds, next week. So far, I’m pretty sure I’m still able to further decrease my med dosage.

7. Stay relatively mentally stable. This is an almost obligatory item on the list, as I honestly think the above have covered all I can do to help myself along in this respect. Some of the contributing factors to my deep lows have been related to external circumstances. Now I wouldn’t say I have absolutely no influence on those, but it’s not like I’m all-powerful.

8. Stay true to my wishes and needs with respect to my care. This means, for example, that I will continue to assert my right to informed consent for all of my care agreements.

9. Expand my social circle. Like I shared on Monday, I fully intend on going to more meetings in 2026. At least one of those, the brain injury support meeting, is local. I also intend to go to the nationwide cerebral palsy day in April. I intend to go by myself. In previous years, I went with my mother-in-law, but I’m not in contact with her anymore. Besides, I am pretty sure that, now that I know quite a few other participants, being accompanied by her is a hindrance to my social inclusion more than a help.

10. Be more conscious of my food choices and eat more healthily. I stepped onto the scale yesterday evening and the number wasn’t pleasant. Now I do know that part of that is probably holiday weight and part is the fact that I’ve been moving less. Regardless of my weight though, I seriously hope to be making healthier food choices.

Mindfulness As an Activity #JusJoJan

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Happy New Year to you all! I’m happy to read Linda has given #JusJoJan another go and I’m going to try to participate again. Today’s prompt is “mindfulness”, which really speaks to me.

When I first learned about mindfulness, I was in dialectical behavior therapy for my emotion regulation issues. All I remember of it at the time were rather abstract concepts like imagining your thoughts are like clouds in the sky. I couldn’t put these concepts into practice at all. I mean, observing my thoughts felt so completely alien to me. Same for mindful breathing exercises. I’ve tried them, a zillion times, mind you, but I always end up being distracted.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was listening to a podcast episode of one of the ADHD podcasts I listen to occasionally. Not that I have a diagnosis of ADHD, but I relate to many of its traits. The episode was about seven different kinds of rest. In it, the podcaster described seven different ways of rest that we all need, including physical rest, mental rest, spiritual rest, etc. None of these in her particular experience involved napping. Also, by doing just one activity, the podcaster said you could be resting in more than one way.

For example, she mentioned going on a walk and, while on her walk, being conscious of every red thing she saw. This is mindfulness in a totally different respect than imagining your thoughts are clouds. It totally spoke to me!

Now of course I’m totally blind so counting or naming red objects doesn’t work for me. But I’m sure the same principle can be applied to sounds or any of the other senses. I’m going to give it a try when I next go on a walk.

December 2025 In My Kitchen

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. As I type this, I’m going half-crazy from all the fireworks sounds. I love New Year’s, but mostly for the ability to reflect back on the past year (which, of course, I could do anytime). Today, I’m joining Sherry’s In My Kitchen linky. I only cooked dinner for myself and my fellow residents once, but did enjoy several other kitchen-based activities.

First, like I think I shared last month, I had planned on cooking another chicken curry but two consecutive staff who would be doing the cooking with me, called in sick. When, in late November, I found out that a staff who used to work here until the summer, would be working a shift again on December 16, I asked her whether we could cook the curry then. She was fine with this as long as I made sure the ingredients were ordered on time. And so I did. We used a recipe from one of my favorite Dutch cooking websites. It called for a teaspoon of curry powder per serving, which I thought was over the top, but it turned out to be good. We even added some chili flakes for some extra spice.

Over the rest of the month, like I said, I didn’t cook dinner. However, I did do several baking activities. This started on December 5 with a spontaneous attempt at baking St. Nicholas cookies. St. Nicholas is celebrated here on December 5, although we’d celebrated it at my home a few weeks earlier. I had gotten a package of cookie mixture with St. Nick and Pete (his servant) cookie cutters. Unfortunately, my staff and I had forgotten to get the butter for the dough at room temperature. We decided to add some melted butter to make the dough stickier, but that made it too sticky for the detailed cutters to work. We decided to go for Christmas-themed cutters, which were less detailed, then.

Unfortunately, my staff did comment that the cookies weren’t all that good-looking. I don’t care.

I had also found a recipe for flatbread made from scratch and really wanted to give it a try. I mentioned this to one of the staff on December 8 and she offered to help me make it the next day. It was delicious! I realize I shouldn’t have taken a picture with my phone of the pan while the flatbread was still baking, as it could’ve damaged my phone, but so far so good.

I decided to top the flatbreads with cheese, bell pepper slices and chili flakes.

Another baking activity took place on December 17, so the day after I made the chicken curry. I made a custard cake. I liked the flavor, but the look wasn’t what I’d expected.



In addition to these longer activities, I did make overnight oats and smoothies a few times. One of those times, I’d been frustrated at a staff refusing to do some tasks with/for me because of how time-consuming she thought they’d be. This time factor is a never-ending source of frurstration for me. However, another staff offered to help me make overnight oats after a walk, when we had only ten minutes left in my activity time slot. Guess what? It was a success!

Of course, like I shared earlier, I helped my wife make our Bastogne cookie dessert on Christmas. No picture of that one. I’m determined to make it for my fellow residents sometime soon.

Overall, the month of December was a pretty good month kitchen-wise. Here’s hoping for even more cooking and baking and other kitchen-based activities in the new year.

2025: The Year in Review

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s time for my yearly review. This year wasn’t exciting in any particular way. I’m not sure whether that’s actually a bad thing though. I mean, I didn’t decide to move yet again and that’s a good thing. Most of the bad parts of the year not being exciting are exactly that: it was incredibly boring.

That’s also what led to the most significant lows of this year: the fact that, for a while, an extra cup of green tea at 9PM would be my highlight of the week. I have, over the past couple of months, been able to make this cup of tea a regular occurrence, so in that sense things are improving.

When I looked at my hopes for 2025 a few days ago, I noticed most of them weren’t particularly ambitious. I mean, I was hoping to improve my crafting and do more cooking. I can’t remember whether I had already tried to ask ChatGPT how to build an armature for a standing polymer clay unicorn and, as such, whether this idea was behind that hope. If it was, I can safely say that I didn’t achieve this. I must say I haven’t improved my polymer clay skill much at all. I have, however, picked up jewelry-making again and my wife loved the necklace I made her.

I also did a lot more cooking than I did in 2024. It wasn’t as much as I’d hoped when the behavior specialist promised me early this year that when my one-on-one got approved, she’d allow for a weekly cooking activity. I am cautiously optimistic that this will change in 2026.

I had also hoped to find a physical activity other than walking that I could do regularly. No such luck. I’m not sure this will change in the new year.

Tapering my meds was one of the major successes of this year. I can’t remember what dose of aripiprazole I was on at the start of 2025, but I’m now down to 11mg a day and have also been able to completely go off my pregabalin. I also must say that I’ve been able to stay relatively mentally stable. Yes, I did have a deep low in July, which is once again down to the fact that I had been going through the motions for so long that life felt like I was not really living it.

This year was also the year we had yet another Center for Consultation and Expertise consultation. I haven’t yet found out what the consultant is going to recommend even though she said she was going to let me know by mid-December. I doubt it’s going to lead anywhere significant, but maybe I’m wrong.

Finally, this year was the year my wife and I were trying to figure out our relationship status. Over the summer, we were planning to get a divorce, but this eventually didn’t happen. We’re still unsure as to how to align the legal situation with our actual feelings for each other and it looks likely divorce will be on the table sometime within the not-too-distant future again. Thankfully, we’re both pretty sure that we’ll always be best friends.

One of John Holton’s writing prompts for this week is what letter grade we’d give 2025 and why. I’m clueless about letter grades, so I’m going to rate the year on a scale of 1 to 10 as is the grading system here in the Netherlands. My rating would be a 5, which is just about below-average. Things that would improve the grade I’d give next year, are mostly related to my having more meaningful activities.

My Existence Is a Medical Miracle, Or Is It? #3TC

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I just stumbled across Today’s #3TC prompt. In response, carol anne shares about her premature birth. She was born three months prematurely in 1980 and considers herself to be a medical miracle.

I, often, believe the same. I mean, I was born just over three months prematurely, albeit six years later than carol anne. I weighed 850 grams or 1lb 14oz at birth. I spent three months in neonatal care.

When I was younger, I’d occasionally half-jokingly say that I’m a calculation mistake. The reason is the fact that I was born at sometime between 25 and 27 weeks gestation. The official paperwork says I was born at 26 weeks 4 days gestation, but this wasn’t always easy to determine back then. My mother claimed that, back in 1986, the line between actively keeping preemies alive and only treating them when they showed genuine strength, was at 26 weeks. I never cared to look up whether that’s true, but I do know that my doctor was adamant he was keeping me alive. In this sense, not a miracle.

In another respect though, I’m definitely a medical miracle, in that obviously I wouldn’t have survived without medical technology.

Yesterday, I read about the Dionne quintuplets, who were born in 1934 and the last one of whom had just passed away. Compared to them, I’m not a miracle at all. I’m glad about that, as they were on public display throughout their childhoods.

Like carol anne, I realize I didn’t just survive thanks to medical technology, despite the fact that’s what my doctor more or less said when my father questioned him whether I should be continuing to receive treatment after my brain bleed. I wouldn’t have survived had I not had the will in me to survive.

This is somewhat of an interesting realization in light of my suicide attempts over the years. In 2017, I survived two medication overdoses and, this past summer, I cut my wrist. Thankfully, I survived and, in the case of the incident this summer, without medical intervention. I realize this means I still somehow have a desire to stay alive.

Share Your World (December 29, 2025)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I have a lot of thoughts floating through my mind, but none that I can easily type down. To get my fingers started on something, I’m taking part in Share Your World. Here are Di’s final questions for 2025.

1. Do you stay up to toast in the New Year?
Whether I’ll stay up until midnight depends on my mood. I’ll however most certainly not be toasting in the New Year. The staff here leave at 10:30PM as usual and I’m pretty sure the night staff are extremely busy by midnight with all the clients who are afraid of fireworks.

2.  Have you ever kept any New Year Resolutions made in the past?
I doubt it. I used to make extensive lists of New Year’s resolutions as a teen but I’m pretty sure that if I ever kept one, it was by chance. Now I call them hopes to keep the pressure off.

3. Do you have any plans for 2026?
I have hopes, like I said, although I haven’t penned them down yet. No definite plans at all. Oh wait, I’ll most likely continue to attend the monthly local brain injury meet-up, which has its first meeting of 2026 on January 19. I’m also intending to go to at least one real-life meeting for adults who spent time in the NICU and will attend the mild cerebral palsy meet-up if I don’t contract COVID again.

4. What was the highlight/s of 2025 for you.
There weren’t any high highs this year, but I did have some good moments, such as my cooking activities.

Gratitude

Di always includes an optional gratitude section at the end of her Share Your World posts. For mine, I’m going to include a favorite affirmation from the Gratitude app.

I like how this affirmation compares human life to nature (or rather, the rest of nature). Indeed, I am allowed to go through seasons and each of the seasons prepares me for what’s ahead.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (December 27, 2025)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all! Can you believe 2025 will be over with in less than a week? I honestly can’t. I’m joining #WeekendCoffeeShare again. It’s past 8:30PM, so no more coffee for me. My favorite soft drink wasn’t cold, so I had water with my evening medication today. Let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, first I’d talk about the weather. We had a frigid Christmas with a daytime high of -1°C. Today, the daytime high is 4°C. That’s still below-average for this time of year though and it’s still freezing at night.

If we were having coffee, next I’d tell you I finally let go of my movement streak on my Apple Watch. That is, like I said before, I was cheating all the while because I’d paused my rings when sick last September. On Christmas day, it was freezing cold, so I didn’t care for a walk. I could’ve cheated again, but didn’t.

If we were having coffee, next I’d share about my Christmas. I was at my and my wife’s house for the night. Christmas is often stressful with family issues and forced cheerfulness, but this year it was genuinely okay. Then again it was just the two of us (plus my wife’s cat, who was in hiding from me almost all the time).

The best part was my Bastogne cookie dessert. It was my idea to make this and I helped crumble the cookies and lended my wife my hand mixer. The recipe though was for eight servings. We made half of that, but of course it’s still a lot for just two people. The rest of the meal was good too.

If we were having coffee, then I’d tell you that I decided to give the staff who’s retiring next week her polymer clay “cheer up frog” on Sunday rather than wait for her last shift. She was very pleased with it.

If we were having coffee, finally I’d share that, yesterday, I decided to download yet another self-care app on my iPhone. I already used to have a ton of them, like I’ve had a ton of different apps for all kinds of things over the years. This one, I downloaded because I read on another blog about affirmations and wanted to do these again. The app this blogger uses, Labyrinthos, isn’t all that accessible with VoiceOver and its paid plan is a little outside of my budget. Besides, much as I love to dabble in tarot (which this app is mainly about), the cards are still mainly visual. This got me looking for other apps for affirmations and gratitude etc. The app I downloaded is simply called Gratitude. So far, I really like it. I’m really hoping to make positivity a bigger part of my life in 2026.

The War on Time #3TC

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone on this cold Boxing Day. When I saw today’s #3TC prompt, I was reminded of a newspaper article my father shared with me in late 1999. It was called something like “The war on time” and was about all the ways people have fought over timekeeping and calendars over the centuries. It included, of course, the change from the Julian to Gegrorian calendar in 1582. I gathered from that article that our calendar’s still not fully aligned with the sun, so that it’s proposed that the year 4000 won’t be a leap year.

By the way, can you believe we’re closer to that year now than we are to the year Jesus was born? Interestingly, in that same article I read that Jesus wasn’t born in the year 0 (which I’m pretty sure no-one had a number for back then) or 1. He was probably born at least five or six years before then and most certainly not on Christmas day. It makes some sense to celebrate his birth around the end of the year though, but that would be closer to March rather than January. Then again, back in the day the months of January and February didn’t exist.

I used to love learning all about timekeeping and calendars. I could probably find a lot more info about it now, over 25 years later and with my having access to the Internet. But I can’t be bothered, honestly. I’d rather be writing random ramblings.

Now going to turn off my little electric heater. The heating in the care home broke down on Wednesday. I noticed I was freezing, but didn’t connect the dots, since it was supposed to be -5°C outside too. I spent the holidays with my wife and came back around 5PM this evening to a home that was still cold. The staff figured out the problem yesterday and it got fixed, but with the type of heating we have, it takes forever for the entire home to warm up, hence why I put on the heater.

What If 2034 Isn’t the End After All?

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’ve been struggling quite badly with lack of meaning in my life lately. I mean, last week was pretty productive, but unfortunately that didn’t last.

Last Sunday, I was also discussing my comment that everything will be okay in 2034 with my wife. As regular readers of this blog know, I got the idea from the book 2034. Not that I’ve read it, but it’s about the next world war and I somehow decided to flip things around and say that everything will be okay. Originally, I was sort of serious, like I used to be about 2021 back in the early years of my blog. Now though, the only way I can picture 2034 is it being the end of the world in some kind of nuclear war.

My wife put things into perspective for me, saying that while it’s possible there’ll be a war between the U.S. and China in the coming decade, Europe most likely won’t be involved. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other risks, of course, but it sounds unlikely that the world is going to be blast to hell in 2034 or before.

This, however, doesn’t feel entirely comforting. The thing is, I’ve built my life around the idea that I won’t have ten more years to live. I’ll be 48 in 2034. That isn’t young, but it’s way too young to be dying of natural causes.

It somehow feels safe to say I will die in 2034 anyway. This allows me the luxury of not making any long-term plans. It allows me to take life day by day, week by week. It also allows me not to worry about my quality of life in the long run, which if I do think about it, doesn’t look good. My one-on-one has to be reassessed at the end of 2026. I’m scared that it’ll be cut and I’ll be forced to take more sedating medications to deal with the resulting challenging behavior. If that’s my life from 2027 on, all I can hope for is that it doesn’t last long.

Also, if life drags on past 2034, there’s no urgency to help me improve my quality of life. Not that there is according to the powers that be anyway. The team manager literally asked me what I’d do if everything isn’t alright by 2034. This was six months ago, when I was actively considering ending my life. I’ve not been actively suicidal since, but my life being finite has been on my mind all the time. And I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I really want to make the most of the remainder of my life, but on the other hand, I am paralyzed by, well, I honestly don’t know what, and this leads me to think that I’d be better off dead.