#WeekendCoffeeShare (September 28, 2024)

Hi everyone. I’m joining #WeekendCoffeeShare again today. It’s nearly 10PM here, so no coffee for me. If you’d like some though, pour yourself a cup and let’s chat.

If we were having coffee, first I’d moan about the weather. I had to check back to last week’s coffee share to see if memory was serving me well, as I almost couldn’t believe the daytime high was above 20°C then. Today, the daytime high was only 14°C. It was raining all day yesterday and most of the day today too.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that, as a result of the rainy weather, I almost didn’t meet my movement goal on my Apple Watch yesterday. I was tempted to lower my goal for that day specifically, but my spouse convinced me that would be cheating. I then danced around my room for about 25 minutes so that at least I’d meet my goal. I didn’t meet my exercise goal, but that doesn’t count towards the perfect month award.

During most of the rest of the week, I didn’t walk much at
all either. On Thursday, however, I went swimming. This was great!

If we were having coffee, I’d share that I’ve also been quite fatigued lately. I’m probably starting to experience a touch of the seasonal blues.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I had bloodwork on Monday. I had no idea why and in fact was convinced they got me mixed up with another client. Apparently not. However, I had already had breakfast and one of the things needing to be checked was glucose. I thought this would be problematic, but the nurse said it wasn’t. I finally found out the reason for the bloodwork yesterday: it was the fact that I’d been experiencing night sweats. I had long attributed those to the warmer weather, but then again they aren’t gone now (though they’ve lessened). Fingers crossed for all normal results.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I had a meeting with my support coordinator, behavior specialist and mother-in-law on Monday. It was a bit difficult. Though I could see my support coordinator doing her best to help me, it was still quite hard to feel the limits of what she can do for me.

For example, I had been struggling with play therapy because a staff I don’t realy trust had been attending it with me. My support coordinator tried her best to find a somewhat trusted staff for me in the coming weeks but couldn’t, so I felt like giving in and accepting a staff I at least don’t feel bad about.

The next day, I had a candid conversation with my support coordinator. That was somewhat reassuring. Play therapy on Wednesday was still more or less useless.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that next week, I’ll be video-recorded in my interactions with a staff. The goal is for staff to look at the tiny signs that might lead to distress and things they can do or not do to help me.

If we were having coffee, I’d end on an upbeat note by saying I’ve been making a lot of smoothies lately. I don’t really have the energy for polymer clay or the like, but preparing a smoothie takes only five to ten minutes. I always create enough to share with at least some of my fellow clients and they truly appreciate it. My best one was a smoothie with pineapple, banana, coconut water and a pinch of cinnamon.

I also finally managed to make a delicious mug cake. I mean, the ones I made before were okay, but there was always something slightly off about them. The only thing about this one was the fact that I couldn’t wait for it too completely cool before consuming it. Otherwise, it was great!

Reading a Recipe (With the Help of AI) #SoCS

Hi everyone. I’m so excited to read this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, which is “recipe”. I could of course talk about my efforts in finding the perfect mug cake recipe. I did, after several attempts, have some luck with the ones from the book Best Mug Cakes Ever. That’s exciting enough. What’s even more exciting, is polymer clay, of course.

I have finally been claying a bit over the past few days again. Not with custom-mixed colors yet, but oh well, that’s my next step. I, after all, once again went on a shopping spree and bought several collections of color recipes off Etsy. Then, unfortunately, I found out that the first collection had all the recipe cards as .png files and the second was an image PDF. You can imagine how disappointed I was. Nearly €100 down the drain, or so I thought.

Then I decided to run the files through an app called Envision. This app has an OCR function, which lets me read the image PDF. The quality of the OCR’d text wasn’t great, but I saw a button called “Ask Envision”. That let me ask the app to search the scanned document and find answers for me and, for some reason, these were much clearer than when I read the document myself. It’s still a bit of a hassle, but it’s honestly quite cool what AI is capable of.

I also was able to run the .png image files through Envision, which also has an image description function. The image description was cool, but even cooler were the very clear recipes I got. Now I only need to buy the needed colors of clay, since all of these recipes use Premo, which I only have a few colors of and not most of the ones used for these recipes. However, I’m pretty sure that the same goes for polymer clay color recipes that goes for journaling prompts: that half the fun is in the collecting.