#WeekendCoffeeShare (June 14, 2025)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone on this hot Saturday evening. I’m joining #WeekendCoffeeShare. No more coffee for me, as it’s 7:30PM. I was just discussing possibly creating a mocktail someday, but not today, as I don’t have the right equipment. It’s the right weather though. Let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, first I’d talk about the weather, as usual. Early in the week, the daytime temperature didn’t even reach 20°C, but yesterday and today were hot with a high of 30°C. It’s also pretty humid. We got some rain today and there are thunderstorms in the forecast. Tomorrow, the temperature’s supposed to be less hot: about 23°C.

If we were having coffee, next I’d tell you that I did still meet my movement goal on my Apple Watch each day this week. I went for bike rides on Monday, Thursday, Friday and today. On Thursday, we rode the side-by-side bike to a shopping center about 10km away. I wanted to buy fruit and look for a hat or cap to protect myself when in the sun. I have a giant straw hat, but don’t like how large it is. Then again, it’s supposed to protect my eyes too. I didn’t find a hat or cap I liked, but I did buy peaches. Yum!

If we were having coffee, next I’d tell you about my creative endeavors over the past week. On Tuesday, I made a new necklace and today, I made four pineapple charms out of polymer clay. These are to be used as decorations for the living room. They’re currently still curing in the oven.

If we were having coffee, I’d also moan once again about the institution’s policies regarding where packages are supposed to be delivered. And about PostNL. I ordered a number of jewelry-making supplies on Tuesday, which were sent out by the store on Wednesday. On Thursday, PostNL would’ve delivered them, but they were too busy (as they usually are). They tried to deliver my package today, but the place that usually picks up packages here on grounds is closed on weekends, so PostNL sent my package on to a pick-up point. And to make matters worse, the pick-up point isn’t even within biking distance. I hope that the package will arrive at the pick-up point Monday morning, and I hope that my Monday afternoon staff will be able and willing to drive me there too. It’s all very frustrating! PostNL used to have a pick-up point in the next town, but that apparently closed.

If we were having coffee, finally I’d talk about the stressors re my upcoming birthday. I initially wrote a post on this topic yesterday, but decided to delete it.

My birthday is on the 27th and I initially waited on my parents to take the initiative to schedule a visit and they apparently waited on me. Then on Tuesday, my bestie and I were discussing this and I realized that I would probably regret it if I didn’t meet my parents for my birthday this year. I mean, they’re in their 70s, so I won’t have many years with them left.

Then came the stress of figuring out what we’re going to do. My bestie proposed we drive to Groningen, which is the big city nearest to where my parents live. I asked my parents about this and my father immediately came up with an idea of showing us around some library museum thingy. We usually eat out for my birthday too, so I asked my parents to find a restaurant. They got the impression that I wanted a Thai restaurant like last year and the year before, so came up with one. Thing is, they’d never been there and the reviews were horrible. There was even a customer who said there’d been plastic in their food and, on top of that, the restaurant admitted it but wouldn’t give a discount.

Then I came up with another idea: to go to a chicken restaurant about 45 minutes from my parents. However, this restaurant is in a tiny town with nothing to do. I also asked my sister to recommend restaurants in Groningen. She initially reacted disappointed that I hadn’t invited my parents over here the day my sister and her family are coming, so I was like “Screw it!” and came up with the chicken restaurant. My sister eventually recommended some places, but these sounded more like diners than restaurants. Finally, my bestie decided to look up good restaurants and found something which sounds good to all of us.

I still feel quite a bit of stress about my birthday, as I don’t have a good relationship with either my parents or my sister. I will however get through it.

Kymber’s Get to Know You (May 1, 2025)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. How is it May already? Time flies and the #AtoZChallenge certainly was a fun thing that made time fly. I really do hope I’ll be able to continue in the flow of blogging, but I won’t promise anything even to myself.

Today, I’m joining Kymber for her Get to Know You prompt. This week, it’s a This or That. Here goes.

1. Shopping online or shopping in-store?
For fun, I prefer shopping online, honestly. It allows me the ability to browse what’s available, whereas in-store I’m dependent on someone to tell me what they see. Because of this, if I could really do all my shopping online and package delivery here to the institution wasn’t as complicated as it is, I’d do all my shopping online. Yes, I do realize that town centers would be empty without stores, as they already are much emptier than they used to be. We’ll find a solution to that though.

Currently, I do go shopping in-store once a week with my best friend and I do love going to the supermarket with my staff. However, the latter is probably because the supermarket doesn’t deliver to the institution and I can’t access the website of the one that does.

2. Science fiction or mystery?
Mystery, although in all honesty I’m not that much of a fiction reader. I do read the occasional sci-fi novel but think mysteries are more my thing out of these two.

3. Movie adaptations or books?
Books. I don’t watch movies, because without audio description I can’t follow them because of missing the visual aspect and with audio description, I can’t follow them because I get overloaded. Then again, like I said above, I am not that much of a fiction lover in general.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (November 30, 2024)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone on this last day of November. I’m joining #WeekendCoffeeShare. I just had my last cup of coffee for the day, with a treat of the Dutch typical St. Nicholas candy mix “strooigoed”. I’d have loved to pass you some, but ate the whole bag myself. I’m just comforting myself that the amount wasn’t nearly what I used to consume during a binge. Anyway, let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, first I’d talk about the weather. A serious storm passed by here on Wednesday. It was the first major storm in nearly a year and a half or so I read on the news. That surprised me, since it wasn’t even a year ago that a staff from one of the intensive support homes died while riding the side-by-side bike with a client. Then again, the most severe winds aren’t in this province and therefore maybe near the coast people are less likely to go out in stormy weather.

Anyway, during the remainder of the week, it hasn’t rained and sometimes even the sun came out for a bit. Daytime temperatures have been around 8°C.

If we were having coffee, I’d say that I’m doing pretty well this week. I consider the fact that this is my fourth blog post of the week, a positive sign of my improved mental health. I really hope it continues.

If we were having coffee, then I’d share that I have a nasty cold. This morning, I spent most of the time in bed because I was feeling so miserable. No fever, thankfully, but in my case even a cold can knock me down for a few days.

If we were having coffee, then I’d tell you that I’ve been quite crafty over the week. On Tuesday, I created a polymer clay pig for a staff who will celebrate 25 years of working for this care agency on Monday. And just so you know, she was the one constantly asking me if I could create a pig; it isn’t like I think a pig is especially suited to her.

Polymer Clay Pig

On Thursday, I crafted yet another polymer clay unicorn, this one for a new staff, who is into unicorns as much as I am. I tried adding flower-shaped wings to it, but this wasn’t a success, since during the curing process, one of the wings fell slightly down the back of the unicorn and got distorted in the process. No photo, sorry, since I threw the thing into the bin.

Then today, I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to mix a polymer clay color. Not sure what I’ll do with it.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that I didn’t do Black Friday shopping this year. That is, I did purchase some new clay supplies yesterday, but they weren’t on sale as far as I could tell.

If we were having coffee, lastly I’d tell you that we had pasta salad with tuna for dinner today. I had originally planned to make it with a staff, but since I don’t want everyone else to catch my cold, the staff ended up making it himself. He initially wanted to offer everyone a bit as a side dish with our regular meal, but I countered that we have enough to use it as a meal. My plan had been that we’d have a tasty meal for once rather than the mediocre meal service food. Besides, we get treats more often than I want to think of. See my point about the St. Nicholas treat: it wasn’t a binge, but it was more than my food plan says I can have and I’m not even on a weight loss diet.

It’s October

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s October. Several years, I’ve at least tried to participate in blog challenges, such as #Blogtober and #Write31Days. I saw that #Blogtober is running again this year, but I’m not officially participating. Still, I’m challenging myself to blog more this month. I did okay’ish in September.

Generally speaking, I don’t like October. It’s not as bad as November, but it’s not a fun month. Unfortunately, this year so far is no exception.

The weather’s bad, so I didn’t walk today except to a staff’s car to drive to a DHL service point to pick up a slow juicer I’d ordered online on Sunday. It’s a Chinese brand, so I may at some point regret having bought it because of the risk of microplastics in my juice. In fact, I’m already putting a good juicer and blender (my blender is not Chinese but it’s a cheap one) on my wishlist should I decide juicing and smoothie making is a true keeper hobby for me. I’m not buying either until I’ve waited a few months to make up my mind though.

I did start off this month with a new course on Duolingo: intermediate English. So far, most of it is ridiculously easy. Then again, the option I selected on the start screen to determine my skill level made the app think I’m at the early B1 level in the CEFR classification system. My spouse said my writing skills are probably C1 level at least but I’m pretty sure I miss some B level vocabulary. Let’s hope the course will aid in teaching me that.

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

Posted on by Astrid

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.

The Wednesday HodgePodge (November 29, 2023)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s been four weeks since I last participated in the Wednesday HodgePodge, so I thought I’d join in again. For those who don’t know what it is, the Wednesday HodgePodge is an opportunity for bloggers to answer a diverse selection of questions. Here goes.

1. Does anybody really know what day it is? Last week we skipped the Hodgepodge and I just assumed this week would find us in December, but nope. Still November. Do you wear a watch? Use a paper calendar or strictly electronic? What’s your favorite hour of the day? Why?
Well, usually I know what day it is without looking it up, but I was confused yesterday too. I told my staff, when she was looking up who would be working today, to look at the 28th. Nope though, it’s the 29th already.

I do wear a watch, ie. my Apple Watch. I bought it primarily for its activity tracking purposes, but honestly now I find myself using it as a timekeeping device too. In fact, my assigned staff at my former home said I’d keep track of staff’s whereabouts by the second. That wasn’t true, but oh well.

My favorite hour of the day is probably 8PM, as that’s when I’m most energetic. I am currently writing this blog post around that time.

2. Tell us something about how you celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday.
I didn’t. It’s not a thing here in the Netherlands. I did want to benefit from Black Friday, which is a thing (of course, since companies benefit from it ultimately), but when ordering something online that day, had forgotten to check the store’s newsletter whether they had any coupon codes.

3. What’s a sound you hate to hear?
Where to even get started? The vacuum cleaner and lawn mower come to mind now as most common sounds I hate, but I am generally very sound sensitive. Oh wait, a particularly annoying sound is people whistling.

4. Where do you not mind waiting?
Uhm, nowhere. I’m not very patient and can’t handle long periods of nothingness.

5. I really wish____________________________________.
That my one-on-one gets approved real soon.

6. Insert your own random thought here.
I’m having a nasty cold. Or maybe it’s COVID, since I didn’t get tested. I doubt it though, since I’m still at roughly the same fitness level I was last week. That is, my cardio fitness level according to my Apple Watch has decreased, but it isn’t like I can no longer go for 45-minute walks.

Walking and Making Smoothies

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I have been struggling a bit lately, but today was a good day. I went on three walks, one over an hour and 4.5km long. It rained for most of the day, but I’m not made of sugar, as they say in Dutch. I honestly have no idea where that saying comes from and what sugar has to do with not being water-resistant. I mean, there are many other substances that will melt or otherwise dissolve in water. As a side note, we only had a slight drizzle on some of our walks, so it wasn’t like I got soaked in the rain.

When the rain did come pouring down, I decided to make a smoothie. I had ordered some supplies online yesterday. Like I’ve explained before, my care home does have its own postal code but officially you need to address things to the main building, adding the home in an additional address line. Most stores though don’t allow for two address lines. So, in an attempt to bypass the need to have stuff sent to my in-laws and wait a week for my spouse to bring it here, I decided to say “screw it!” and address my order to the home with its own postal code. And guess what? It got delivered right to our doorstep. This is not how I should be handling things if I can avoid it, but it’s quite tempting, honestly. Waiting a week for my stuff rather than having it delivered within 24 hours of my placing my order, isn’t very appealing.

I had ordered carrot juice, mango nectar, agave syrup and hemp seeds. The hemp seeds are in a lot of smoothie recipes and I’d kind of impulsively ordered them to get to the minimum order amount. The person with whom I unpacked my package, didn’t ask anything about the hemp seeds, but the next staff did make a bit of a weirded out sound. I had looked it up online and found out that usually only the shells (which mine have been removed from) contain trace amounts of THC. Nonetheless, I decided not to add them to my first smoothie, which I was going to share with my fellow residents.

I did add carrot juice. I also added frozen mango chunks, which we’d ordered from the online grocery store that delivers to care homes. We added one banana and a pinch of cinnamon.

Honestly, the smoothie turned out a bit thin for my liking, but it was definitely delicious. My spouse later said that ginger and orange make for a better addition to carrot juice, which I think may be true. I’m going to try this with my remaining carrot juice.

The Wednesday HodgePodge (July 12, 2023)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s time for the Wednesday HodgePodge once again. Here goes.

1. Is your life simple? Elaborate.
My life is both boringly simple and insanely chaotic at the same time and like you might’ve guessed, neither is in a good way. It is simple in part because it’s so chaotic. I mean, if I get a new-to-me staff member each day, I don’t get to try exciting activities with them that require me to explain a lot, such as crafting, because I cannot be sure I’ll ever see them again.

2. What simple pleasure are you currently enjoying?
I’ve been enjoying listening to calming music on my music pillow a lot.

3. Travel by plane or go on a cruise? walk or ride a bike? swim or ski? ocean or mountains?
I’ve never been on a cruise and don’t think it appeals to me, so I’ll choose traveling by plane. Walk for sure. Swim! Not that I’ve ever been skiing but I hate snow and the cold. Oh, that last one is hard, but I’ll pick the mountains.

4. What’s the last thing you bought online that you really loved?
I haven’t done a ton of online shopping lately, honestly, because package delivery to the institution is quite complicated and staff at my home have a policy of opening packages before they get to me to check for stuff they deem inappropriate. I solve the problem by getting my online orders delivered to my in-laws, but this means I can get my stuff here at most once a week when my spouse visits me.

Anyway, to answer the question, I think my AirPods Pro 2. I’ve had them for about six weeks now and they replaced the original AirPods Pro that I’d had for two years but that had started to develop an annoying high-pitched beep.

5. What’s your “back in my day we__________” story?
Even though I’m only 37, I am an oldie compared to most of my staff, who are in their early to mid twenties. As a result, most of my “back in my day” stories probably revolve around relatively small changes to technology. For example, my spouse and I met on a message board and most staff never used those.

Compared to the other residents though, I’m young, as all others are in their mid fifties to early sixties. I find I’m often confused when other residents talk about what life was like “back then”.

6. Insert your own random thought here.
I am still struggling. In fact, last Monday, I hit another low point. My mother-in-law E-mailed the behavior specialist once again, but she’s on vacation until the 31st. I’m pretty hopeless right now.

Share Your World (July 3, 2023) #SYW

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today I’m joining Share Your World. The questions for this week are so intriguing. Let’s go.

1. Do you own your own home, rent, or something else?
It’s complicated. While my spouse and I are homeowners, I don’t live in our home. Instead, I live in an institution. We actually went to the solicitor to sign the contract to our house in Lobith in the same week I moved into my old care home.

2. What is your favorite “go to” food when you’re feeling under par?
Licorice. I love indulging in it whenever I’m in need of a pick-me-up, but also when I’m feeling under the weather.

3. Do you indulge in retail therapy?
Absolutely, but for me, online window shopping is almost as comforting as actually spending money when I’m in a bad mood. Currently, I’m loving looking at clay cutters, jewelry-making supplies and other crafty stuff, but I’m restraining myself from buying any until my mother-in-law has visited me, because she might bring me some of the things I could’ve bought otherwise.

4. How many pairs of shoes do you own?
Four pairs of walking shoes, three of which are so damaged they really shouldn’t be worn anymore but I still wear them because I don’t want to buy a new pair of walking shoes every month. My orthopedic shoes. Two pairs of gym shoes. My horseback riding shoes. Does that make eight?

Gratitude:
Take pride in the person you are, you are unique.
I agree 100%. How could I not, as an Enneagram type 4?

Gratitude List (July 31, 2022) #TToT

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all on this last day of July! Today I’m joining Ten Things of Thankful (#TToT) for a gratitude list. I’m rather late to the party, but better late than never, huh? Here goes.

1. I am grateful for some good phone talks with the care facility’s behavior specialist this week. She gave me some useful advice on how to handle my frustration with respect to my recent care review with her and my nurse practitioner from mental health.

2. I am grateful my nurse practitioner gave the get-go for me to lower my antipsychotic again. Next week, I’ll be starting with the slightly decreased dose.

3. I am grateful for a nice visit from my sister and her family. I am so grateful Janneke, my oldest niece, was really friendly with me. I tried to show her how to make a play-doh unicorn, but she may still be a bit young for that and/or I wasn’t engaging enough.

4. I am grateful I got to hold Wolke, my youngest niece, who is just two-months-old.

5. I am grateful for the belated birthday gifts my sister and her family brought me. I got four sets of cutters and a set of texture sheets to use with my polymer clay.

6. I am grateful for a delicious salami pizza with added olives and red peppers. Yum! We ordered pizza (and fries for Janneke) last Monday when my sister and her family were here.

7. I am grateful for a good visit from my mother-in-law on Friday too. We went out to have lunch, which was delicious.

8. I am grateful for no mosquitoes last night or the night before. This hopefully means my anti-mosquito device, that I’d bought last Friday when in town with my mother-in-law, is working. Either that or none had been in my room at all. I don’t really care which, as long as the critters aren’t bothering me.

9. I am grateful my pasta machine isn’t broken after all. I had experienced it’d crumble several colors of polymer clay. Even after a deep clean session, it still did this, so I thought it must be broken. Thankfully, one of the most knowledgeable people in the Dutch polymer clay Facebook group took a look at a picture I’d taken and said it wasn’t broken. Apparently it’s the clay.

10. I am grateful the new pasta machine I impulsively ordered online when thinking the current one was broken, can be returned. I will probably ask my staff to drive me to the PostNL pick-up point tomorrow. When I have my refund, I’m going to order supplies I really do need from that same store I now ordered the pasta machine from.

What are you grateful for?