Gratitude List (May 6, 2022) #TToT

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone on this first Friday of May. My husband and I always count the days from May 4 till May 8 as special days. May 6 is only special because Pim Fortuyn, a Dutch politician, was murdered on this day in 2002. Not really a cause to celebrate. Nonetheless, I’m doing a gratitude list today anyway. As usual, I’m linking up with Ten Things of Thankful (#TToT). Here goes.

1. I am grateful for a good talk with the behavior specialist on Tuesday. She was really understanding of my wish to eventually find a more suitable care home.

2. I am grateful I finally had a face-to-face meeting with my community psychiatric nurse again after several months. She’d been off work for a while and, before that, I had COVID and had to talk to her on the phone. I am so glad she’s back!

3. I am grateful my nurse practitioner called me on Tuesday, after I’d E-mailed him on Monday evening because I’d been in crisis. We will soon be planning a meeting with the behavior specialist too so that my nurse practitioner can get a more complete picture of my mental health.

4. I am grateful my husband’s car didn’t need replacing or repairing after all. The financial setback I mentioned last week, was related to his car. It made a weird sound, which could be the oil level, but could be a lot of other things, likely to be very expensive to repair. My husband was considering trading in the car if it wasn’t the oil level. Thankfully, that’s what it turned out to be.

5. I am grateful the store I bought the headphones at (the ones that stopped working after two weeks) finally sent off the headphones to the manufacturer. It took my staff making a phone call on Monday for them to send them out and another phone call for them to confirm they’d actually been sent out, but now I’m hoping they’ll be fixed soon.

6. I am grateful I am still allowed to borrow the headphones the Care Lab loaned us before I even originally ordered the ones that stopped working. You normally get to only keep products on loan for like a month or so, but the staff said they’d contact the Care Lab.

7. I am grateful I was allowed to go into the nearby care home’s garden to photograph their tulips yesterday. They are beautiful! I had been wanting to photograph them all week, but hadn’t been able to find the right time of day either sunshine-wise or with respect to being able to ask the staff whether I could enter their garden.

8. I am grateful for home-cooked macaroni this evening. It was delicious! Yesterday, I also had some leftover macaroni that we still had in the freezer from the last time we’d cooked it.

9. I am grateful for some crafty inspiration again. I finally did a little crafting today.

10. I am also grateful I finally seem to be in a reading groove again. I have truly been enjoying my young adult novel, Thrive. This is the final installment in the Overthrow trilogy and it’s been out for a year already, but because its prequel was a bit disappointing, I didn’t get to reading this one.

What have you been grateful for lately?

Sharing this post with Flower of the Day too because of the tulip picture.

Historical Events

Posted on by Astrid

Today, in the journaling app Day One, the daily prompt was to write about the historical events you remember. I used to be a big news and politics junkie as an older child and teen, so I remember quite a few events.

I was born in 1986, so technically might’ve remembered the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, but I didn’t. In fact, the first important historical event I remember was the Gulf War of 1991. At the time, I listened to the radio and heard about it, but erroneously thought that Iran, Iraq and Kuwait made up Ukraine. I don’t know what news event there was about Ukraine at the time, possibly the fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

When I was nearly eight, I remember my parents taking me to the polling station for the national election in 1994. I remember both of the names of the candidates my parents voted for. I also clearly remember learning about the “purple” government, which meant that the Labor Party and the conservative party VVD were for the first time forming a coalition. Another party, D66, was joining them too and I asked what color they were and why that party’s color wasn’t represented in the mix. My parents explained that mixing too many party colors would make brown and that’d be a Nazi color.

When I became a teen, I got involved even more into politics. I obviously remember 9/11 when I was fifteen and the murder of Pim Fortuyn eight months later. That year’s election, nine days after Fortuyn was killed, was the most memorable election of my life. I remember kind of aggressively persuading my father to vote for the Socialist Party rather than GroenLinks, the leftist party he normally votes for.

During the fall of 2002, I myself joined the Socialist Party. I was a semi-active member in my local affiliate for a while. Still, I gradually lost my interest in politics and important news events. I left the political party in September of 2007, half because I didn’t like its rather undemocratic treatment of its members and half because I was tired of politics.

Since then, I haven’t really been following the news or politics much at all. I do find it intriguing to be a witness to the coronavirus crisis even though I’d rather have gone on like old normal.

As a teen, I wasn’t affected by the impact of important historical events. Like, I always wanted the stock prices on the AEX to be low for some reason I still don’t comprehend. Now, I understand the impact of economic crises more than I did before and it scares me. That’s why I’d rather put my head in the sand and not watch the news.

What historical events do you remember most?