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.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (July 26, 2025)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m once again joining #WeekendCoffeeShare. It’s 9:45PM, so all I’ll have to drink before going to bed is water. I don’t mind though and hope you don’t either. Let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, first I’d talk about the weather. It’s been raining all week, but temperature-wise, it’s been nice. We had daytime highs in the low 20s Celsius most days. Today, the temperature rose to 25°C. I hadn’t expected it to rain, so didn’t take a jacket with me when driving to Apeldoorn with my spouse. Thankfully, it only rained when we were in the car or somewhere else inside.

If we were having coffee, next I’d share that my spouse and I may not be divorcing after all. It’s a long story that is too personal to share on a public blog. The short version is that I sent an impulsive text last week asking my spouse to finally make arrangements, because I wanted to live independently. The reason for the text had nothing to do with my spouse, but it did get things set in motion. As it turns out though, it’s probably not practically in our best interest to divorce.

If we were having coffee, I’d go into the reason for said text: one of my “favorites” among the staff is leaving and this is at a time when I’m struggling significantly with most other staff seeming at once not to agree on any way to support me but somehow agreeing that I’m a pain in the neck. At least on a weekly basis, I hear stuff like “You can’t go anywhere anyway” or “Your spouse doesn’t want you in this state” when I’m being restrained or otherwise having my autonomy taken away.

Furthermore, it looks like my staff have decided that neither I myself nor my spouse have my best interest in mind, while in that order, we’re the ones most adamantly advocating for me. However, I saw impulsive comments my spouse made after we found out divorce may not be an option cited in my report. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal, had staff also objectively reported their own comments, like all the “You can’t go anywhere anyway” stuff. The way it sounds now, my spouse sounds like the bad one.

One of my assigned staff even got me to agree on getting more information about guardianship because she somehow feels that a person who doesn’t know me but knows the law is better able to make decisions for me. I have yet to tell my staff no on this one.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that I did finally work with polymer clay again. I made a parrot for the staff who’s leaving, because this staff has two parrots. We have plans for making her other one out of polymer clay sometime this coming week.

If we were having coffee, lastly I’d share that I’ve been obsessing over recipes and cooking again. Like I said yesterday, I made a curry for myself and my fellow residents on Tuesday. The staff who helped me with it, proposed we do cooking again this coming Tuesday. This time, I chose a pasta bake. I’ve also been making smoothies and overnight oats recently.

I have an app on both my PC and iPhone to organize my recipes. It’s called Recipe Keeper and I’m half convinced it’s spyware like TikTok. Other than that, its only drawback is the fact that somehow I can’t have my password manager remember the password. This has me paranoid too. However, it’s the only app that’s available on both iOS and Windows that is remotely useable for me.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (April 27, 2025)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I really wanted to write a #WeekendCoffeeShare post yesterday, but was dealing with neck and shoulder pain and was quite tired, so I lay in bed by 9:30PM. I originally intended this to be a quick lie-down and planned to write my post after my music pillow had auto-disconnected after thirty minutes. Well, before those thirty minutes were up, I set the pillow to keep playing until I either manually turned it off or its battery was empty. Guess what? I know for a fact that the latter happened sometime during the night, because the pillow was no longer connected when I woke up at 8:30AM, but I swear I didn’t hear its pretty loud sound indicating it needs charging. I slept like a log!

Anyway, all this to say I’m doing my coffee share on Sunday evening. I’ve just had my last cup of coffee for the day, but I can serve you some soda or tea. Let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, first as usual I’d talk about the weather. We’ve had some rain, some sunshine and some clouds. Today, the daytime temp was 19°C. We’re supposed to get almost summerlike temps of 23-24°C this coming week.

If we were having coffee, next I’d share that I’ve been crafting again. I made several polymer clay frogs for staff members who are recovering from surgery. The frog (Dutch: “kikker”) is sometimes used as a symbol for cheering someone up (“opkikker”). The first one took me over an hour to finish, but the second one was so much easier once I’d figured out how I wanted it. Here’s the second one.

If we were having coffee, then I’d tell you that I have a new assigned staff. One of my two assigned staff is on long-term leave for familial reasons and the other is a student. I had been a bit angry at the student for various reasons, among which her way of communicating the temp worker situation with me. The new one will be my assigned staff together with the student. I can get along with her pretty well.

If we were having coffee, finally I’d make use of the fact that I write my coffee share on Sunday to share that my spouse and I had an important discussion today after our outing to have lunch and shop. We have made up our minds that we’re getting divorced. We will continue to be best friends, but since there’s no sexual or romantic component to our relationship and we’re not living together nor intending on ever doing so again, it makes sense that we officially divorce. We have been having this on our minds for several months already, so the discussion, though hard, wasn’t altogether a surprise to me. We mostly need to work out how much my spouse owes me for my contribution to our mortgage, so that the house can be completely my best friend’s and no longer mine. I guess I will from now on refer to my spouse as my best friend to ease the transition for me.

It may seem like I’m not affected emotionally by this decision, but I am. I mean, I’ve mentioned a few times that my spouse and I will always be soulmates, but the fact is nothing is for certain. When we got married after all, it was to affirm our everlasting love to one another. Though our feelings for each other haven’t changed all that much since we first met in 2007, there’s this voice in me telling me this is the beginning of the end. I tell myself this is attachment anxiety talking. Whether it is or this fear is real, doesn’t really matter in the present moment though, as right now we’re still soulmates.