The Wednesday HodgePodge (July 20, 2022)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I haven’t posted in a few days, because I was too tired from the heat. It’s still quite hot here, but I feel okay now. Today, I’m joining the Wednesday HodgePodge. Here goes.

1. Last time you drove more than 100 miles from your home? Where did you go?
I don’t drive, but I’m assuming riding in the passenger seat counts too. That being said, the last time my husband drove more than 100 miles with me in the car, was probably eight years ago when we went on a short vacation to the Black Forest in southern Germany. We drove in our Kia Rio, which we later found out deserves its acronym, “killed in action”, because shortly after that trip, the car crashed on the highway and my husband could just about move it onto the shoulder before it completely malfunctioned. We thought we had the problem fixed, but it developed the same problem that had caused it to crash back then again half a year later. Needless to say we sold that car. We’re thinking of going back to the Black Forest this September, but my husband has a really small car now, so he might want to replace that one first.

2. Something that drives you batty?
WordPress’ ever-increasing number of ads on free sites. I hope at least that, since I have a paid plan, they aren’t displaying on mine.

3. Do you feel like you’re “on track”? For what?
In my blogging life, I don’t feel as though I’m “on track”, but maybe that’s just my feeling. I mean, I really would’ve wanted to write at least as much this year as I did in 2021 and, up till the month of June, I was keeping up nicely. Now though, I’m not.

Similarly, I have a ton of craft projects waiting for me to finish them. Not that there’s a timeline for those to keep track of, but it does sort of feel as though I’m losing track anyway.

4. Your favorite car snack(s)?
Licorice and winegums (gummy candies).

5. Something you’ve done recently “on the fly”?
Nothing really. I plan most of my activities at least some time in advance. That being said, I do buy things impulsively at times. Does that count? In that case, going to Action (a budget store) in town and buying some random craft supplies last Monday. The trip into town was planned, and I had sort of planned to go to Action too, but I hadn’t planned to buy any of the things I ended up buying.

6. Insert your own random thought here.
Yesterday, I had a review with my nurse practitioner from mental health and the behavioral specialist from my care facility. I could rant about it here, but I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to say that, after it, I finally concluded that, screw it, I’m ready to face whatever it takes to get real help for whatever it is I’m facing mental health-wise, be this trauma-related or a personality disorder or whatever.

The Wednesday HodgePodge (June 22, 2022)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m joining the Wednesday HodgePodge once again. Here are Joyce’s questions for this week.

1. Something you learned from your father?
Well, I shared about this on Sunday already: my father mainly taught me academic skills. He also was the one who taught me the limited personal hygiene skills I did learn as a child. There’s a story he used to tell me about having to teach some personal care to my mother when she moved in with him at age 22. In this sense, I shouldn’t really feel embarrassed at the fact that my husband had to teach me to use shower gel when I was in my mid-twenties.

2. Do you like onions? Raw or cooked? How about onion rings? What’s something you love to eat that calls for onions?
Onions, mmm, love ’em! Raw is nice, cooked even better. I love onion rings too! A recipe I love and used to cook when I still cooked independently which calls for lots of onions (and garlic!), is macaroni with mushrooms, bell peppers, onions of course and I’d use a mushroom soup that you’d need to add water to in order to turn it into a soup as the sauce. Sadly, that brand of soup eventually added ham to its mushroom soup, which I don’t care for. When I cooked for just myself, I’d also add chicken, but when I’d cook with my husband, we’d skip that as he was a vegetarian back then.

3. It’s officially summer (in the Northern hemisphere)…your favorite and least favorite things about the season?
My favorite thing is, of course, my birthday at the end of June (in five days’ time!). Other than that, I love the longer daylight. My least favorite thing are mosquitoes and other summertime bugs such as the oak processionary.

4. When you think about the summers of your childhood what are two or three things that come to mind?
Vacationing at Vlieland, one of the Wadden Islands. For the first several years that we went there, I loved it. I remember building treehouses with my holiday friends one year when I was eight. The next year, we didn’t return. And not for another several years. When we returned to Vlieland again the summer I was twelve, I didn’t like it nearly as much, because I’d by then lost most of my vision. Besides, kids my age no longer wanted to build treehouses.

5. A hot mess, the heat of the moment, beat the heat, if you can’t stand the heat, catch heat, in a dead heat…choose a ‘hot ‘phrase and tell us how it applies to your life right now.
A hot mess… that’s my country at this point!
Today, two protests took place in the Netherlands: one by farmers against the government’s nitrogen crisis-related policies (or plans, really, as no real policies have yet been implemented), which will likely cause some farmers to need to stop business; the other by Extinction Rebellion, a group of climate activists, also against the government but with the opposite aim. The farmers caused huge traffic jams on various highways because they were coming to the protest in their farming vehicles. The climate activists gained unlawful entrance to the Tax Service main office in The Hague. The police claimed to be powerless against the farmers, but arrested 22 climate activists.

Thankfully, neither protest is impacting me personally, but all the bad news does worry me.

6. Insert your own random thought here.
I was going to ramble on above about the rapid rise in COVID cases here, but I guess that needs its own heading. Last night I had a slight headache and, since that was how my COVID started last February, I worried that I was going to get it again exactly four months after I’d initially contracted the virus. That in turn would mean canceling my husband’s visit today, my birthday celebrations this weekend and my nurse practitioner’s appt on Monday, which, though Monday is my birthday, I decided to go on with after all. Thankfully, I have absolutely no symptoms indicative of the virus now. Please pray I won’t get sick anytime soon.

The Wednesday HodgePodge (April 27, 2022)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s King’s Day, so I have the day off from my day activities. This means for me that I don’t have one-on-one support between 1:30 and 4:00PM. This in turn means plenty of time to blog, so I’m aiming for two blog posts today. First, I’m participating in the Wednesday HodgePodge for this week. As the questions went online yesterday and the host participates in the #AtoZChallenge too, her questions are all related to words starting with the letter V. Here goes.

1. What does the word values mean to you personally? Where did your values come from? What are some of the values that have guided you throughout your life?
I discussed some of this yesterday already. Values to me are those abstract qualities that are important in my life. Among my values are authenticity, connection, self-determination and growth.

as for where they came from, I’d like to say I developed them in spite of my upbringing. My parents are very success-minded and more concerned with outward appearance than authenticity. I do think my self-determination comes from my parents though, as they did somewhat raise me to make my own choices.

2. Your favorite vanilla flavored something?
I love everything vanilla really (well, except for vanilla coke, because I can’t stand fizzy drinks), so picking just one is hard. I’m going with ice cream though, yum!

3. What’s something you’ve seen/done recently that you found to be very difficult, very confusing, very helpful, very interesting, or very special. Elaborate.
Deciding to have a discussion with the behavior specialist on the possibility of finding me a more suitable care home. It’s been a very difficult, very confusing time. I thankfully have been able to share my thoughts with most staff, who all have been as supportive as possible.

4. Something you own and love that is violet in color?
I don’t think I own anything that’s specifically violet. I mean, I have a lot of shades of purple in my polymer clay collection, including lilac and translucent lilac, lavender, plum and a couple colors I mixed myself. However, none are exactly violet. I’ve heard it’s one of the harder colors to mix with polymer clay too.

5. Do you have vacation plans on the calendar this summer? Tell us more.
No, I don’t. I was joking around with my husband yesterday about going camping out this summer, but really, we haven’t been on vacation since 2014. I really would like to someday, but I’d go into a hotel then (like we did the last couple of times we went on vacation). My husband is off work for two weeks around my birthday in late June and two more weeks around our wedding anniversary in September. We may plan some extra time together then, but that’s it.

6. Insert your own random thought here.
I just want to share I went on a giant outdoor trampoline this morning. Last year this day, my assigned home staff asked me whether I’d like to go to a playground in a neighboring village that had a giant trampoline and I said yes. I was discussing ways to get out of my room today when I remembered this and so we went again. It was fun!

A Trip to Berlin

Posted on by Astrid

Fandango has started a new challenge for the month of August and the prompt word for today is Trip. I’m going to write about a train trip my parents, sister and I took to Berlin in 2002.

At the time, you had this bargain called “schönes Wochenende” in Germany, which meant that for just €28, four people could travel all over Germany by train on a Saturday or Sunday. The only catch was that you had to take local railroads.

My parents, sister and I at the time lived in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, which isn’t too far from the German border. So we drove to Bad Bentheim to go on the train. The first train we took, drove us to Osnabrück. Then we took three more trains until we finally arrived at Berlin Hauptbahnhof. The last train we took, I remember, had Frankfurt an der Oder as its final destination. I found that fascinating.

I at the time had train routes as one of my autistic special interests. It was totally awesome learning all about the German local railroads.

The holiday in Berlin itself wasn’t a good experience. I had a lot of meltdowns and was pretty confused. I did like visiting a street called Straße des 17. Juni, because that year on 17 June I had first opened up about my distress that I’d suffered with for years. The street was named after a protest in east Berlin in 1953.

This was, actually, the last trip I took with my parents. The next year, I went to computer camp in Switzerland and the year after that, to blindness skills camp at the country’s training center for blind people. The year after that, I graduated from high school.

I feel pretty sad that I don’t have many memories about the trip to Berlin and the ones I do have, aren’t good. I guess trips rarely were enjoyable for me. That’s probably why I haven’t been on vacation with my husband in six years.

Summer Memories: Camping at Vlieland

Posted on by Astrid

A lot of thoughts have been floating through my mind that I’ve wanted to blog about, but I couldn’t motivate myself to actually write. I’m not even sure what about these thoughts I wanted to write, so instead, I looked up a writing prompt again. Over at Mama’s Losin’ It, one of the prompts for this week is to share your favorite summer memory. Here goes.

In the early 1990s, my parents would take my sister and me camping at a campsite called Stortemelk at Vlieland, one of the Dutch Wadden Islands. We would send our baggage there via a now no longer existent transportation company called Van Gend & Loos and ourselves travel there by train and ferry. Our parents didn’t have a car at the time. This made the journey all the more interesting, because we met lovely people on the train.

We would often meet the same people at the campsite, but also we’d make new friends each year. In 1993, when I was seven, I remember we collected shells and bird feathers and such and put them on exhibit near our tent.

In 1994, we went again and this year was the year we built a number of treehouses. I was eight at the time and my sister was six. I still had a little vision, so I was able to join in with the rough-and-tumble play of the other kids. I loved this vacation most.

After that year, we stopped going to Vlieland for several years. The reason was our move from Rotterdam to Apeldoorn, so our parents wanted to use the summers to get to know their new city. When we returned to Vlieland in 1998, it was a lot less fun. I was twelve by this time and too old for treehouses. I was also too blind. I could no longer find my way to the campsite store or anywhere on my own.

The last time we went to Vlieland was in 1999. I have very few memories of that trip. I liked going again but probably just because I was used to the routine. It was no longer fun.

Mama’s Losin’ It

Travel: My Most Enjoyable Vacation #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Welcome to day 20 in the #AtoZChallenge. I am feeling a bit frustrated with myself at the moment and as a result not as inspired to write. I hope this mood will lift while I’m in the process of writing this post. Today’s topic is travel. I was inspired to write about this by a nightmare I had last night, which was about a summer camp I attended in Russia in 2000. I don’t want to revisit that right now, so will instead be writing about my most enjoyable vacation.

This was, incidentally, also a summer camp. I attended the International Computer Camp for blind and visually impaired students in England in 2002. Because of my negative experiences with the summer camp in Russia, I had my reservations about going to this camp. Of course, this time I wouldn’t be the only blind person, but I still worried that I wouldn’t fit in.

The computer camp was held at a college for the blind in Loughborough, a town in the East Midlands. For this reason, we also took a trip to the West Midlands to see the Black Country museum or that’s what I remember it being called. This was something about the industrialization of England, but I wasn’t able to follow it much.

For most days, we had two workshops we could attend on computers and technology. I at the time had just discovered the Internet and was excited to learn what cool tech there was out there. I attended some workshops on word processing, but also on music and audio. I was also lucky enough to be on the editorial staff for the camp newspaper. I loved this and this was probably one reason I later began an online diary.

The staff worked at various disability agencies in their respective countries. One person I remember well worked at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. He helped visually impaired students find their way through college. He taught a workshop on studying abroad, though it was more of a general survival skills for blind students workshop. This was perhaps the best experience I had there. It helped me realize that I wasn’t the only blind person out there trying to follow her dreams.

This was also the general message I took home from the camp: I am not alone. I met lots of blind and visually impaired young people from across Europe who were facing the same issues I was.

I returned to the international computer camp in 2003, this time in Switzerland. I liked that a little less, possibly because the Dutch staff who attended this time were a bit more pushy about my independence. I still enjoyed it though.