The Wednesday HodgePodge (March 1, 2023)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s Wednesday again, so I’m joining the Wednesday HodgePodge yet again. Here goes.

1. Hello March! Is it coming in like a lion where you live? How do you feel when it rains?
I have no idea what the saying that March comes in like a lion means. Probably something about rain, given the next part of the question. If I’m correct, no, it doesn’t rain here. It’s cold though: 7°C at midday and -4°C at night.

I generally don’t like rainy weather, though I can handle it better than I used to like a year or two ago.

2. What’s something you’d like to do differently this week than the last? Explain.
Last week was better than this week has been so far, so honestly, I wouldn’t really change a thing.

3. March 1st is National Sunkist Citrus Day…do you drink orange juice? Orange, lemon, lime, tangerine, grapefruit…what’s your favorite citrus fruit? A dish you love with a citrus fruit as one of its key ingredients?
I don’t usually drink orange juice. It’s not that I don’t like it, but it’s not among my favorite drinks either. My favorite citrus fruit, if I have to choose one, is the tangerine. I honestly don’t care for anything citrussy except for its scent in essential oil blends.

4. What do you consider to be your culture. Elaborate.
This is a tough question. I don’t particularly associate with my native language (Dutch) or country for that matter. I initially wrote that I sort of consider myself European, but that’s not even true, since I do write in American-style English on my blog, for instance. The only thing that makes me more “European”, besides the obvious fact that the Netherlands is in Europe, is the fact that I’m quite progressive.

Then there are other identities. I am part of many communities online that consider themselves as having a specific culture, such as the autistic/neurodivergent community. I however don’t really associate with that as a culture either. These are more things that define my identity than my culture. These include my gender, race (although that’s a bit problematic for me to admit as a white person, but it’s true), etc.

5. Sum up your February in fifteen words or less.
Not good, but better than January.

6. Insert your own random thought here.
Wanted to share that my husband did bring the unicorn cookie/clay cutters that were supposed to be my Valentine’s Day present last Sunday. One is a rainbow, the next a unicorn head and one a unicorn. I haven’t yet had the chance to try them out.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (February 18, 2023)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m joining #WeekendCoffeeShare today. It’s 5:35PM as I start writing this post. I probably won’t finish it until past seven, when I’ll have my last cup of coffee for the day. Care to join me? We also have pure green tea (so the kind without flavoring). We also probably have lemon-flavored green tea, but I don’t care for that. I did discover a new kind of green tea, Indian chai green, which I do love. It is loose-leaf tea, which I rarely have, but I think this one is quite good. I can brew you a cup of this too. Let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, first I’d ask about your weather, as I usually do. Ours has been mixed. Early in the week, we got some sunshine, but later, it’s been rainy. The daytime temperature usually rose to about 12°C.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that my mother-in-law, my assigned staff and my support coordinator were supposed to have a talk on Tuesday. I wasn’t invited and the goal of the meeting remained unclear to my mother-in-law until the last moment. Then, it was canceled because my support coordinator was off sick. My mother-in-law took the opportunity to make it clear that, if it’s up to me and her, the possibility of me moving out of this care home should be a serious topic of discussion at a rescheduled meeting. She also pointed out that she’d like the behavior specialist present. This meeting, all going well, has now been set for March 2. I’m not sure whether I’ll be allowed to attend too. I think I should, honestly.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that, instead of coming to the meeting, my mother-in-law paid me an extended visit. We drove to Apeldoorn, like we seem to do regularly, and had lunch. Then we went into several shops to buy some little presents for one of my mother-in-law’s coworkers at her volunteer job, who will be going into hospital soon. It was there that I discovered the Indian chai green tea. We also went into a supermarket so that I could buy rolled oats, raw nuts and some other things. I fully intended to make overnight oats with those rolled oats. I did try, but either used too much milk or did something else wrong, because there was a lot of milk that hadn’t been absorbed by the rolled oats.

If we were having coffee, I would share that I did end up crafting a Valentine’s Day present for my husband after all. It’s a polymer clay heart with an arrow in Premo cadmium red with a Fimo Effect metallic gold edge and the arrow is done in Premo white. I textured the back using a ball of tinfoil, which turned out rather ugly – uglier than it would’ve been with visible air bubbles, which texturing aims to prevent. Oh well, that means I learned something.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I weighed myself on Thursday, as I do each week, and I lost another 0.6kg. I have only 2kg to lose to be at a healthy BMI. I am still slightly worried that some physical health condition is causing me to lose weight, because to be honest I’m not minding my diet much at all and I’m not exercising excessively either. However, I did notice that my Apple Watch estimates my cardio fitness level has increased. It’s still “low”, as it’s always been, but is slowly creeping towards “below-average”.

If we were having coffee, lastly I’d share that I didn’t walk as much as I’d have liked over the past week. I signed up for a challenge with other Apple Watch users in an app called Challenges. The challenge ran from Monday through Friday. I started out doing quite well on Monday, starting with a walk to visit the institution’s petting zoo, which is about a 45-minute walk total. My feet hurt terribly after it. During the rest of the week, I didn’t do so well. I ended up 48th out of 88, which I’m okay with all things considered. I’d have liked to be in the top half.

By the way, while at the petting zoo, I took a picture of the goats. I didn’t get to actually pet them.

How have you been?

The Wednesday HodgePodge (February 15, 2023)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m once again joining the Wednesday HodgePodge today. Here goes.

1. Pantone’s color of the year for 2023 is Viva Magenta. Etsy’s color(s) of the year are indigo and honeycomb. Your thoughts? Would we find any of these three shades in your home or wardrobe? Is there a room in your house that needs painting this year? Will you do it yourself or hire out?
I don’t care for magenta and have no idea what color honeycomb is. I do love indigo. I do have magenta as a polymer clay color, but use it for mixing my own colors. For instance, I’m pretty sure magenta was in the color recipe for creating indigo I once read (although I’ve never tried it yet).

I have no idea whether any room in my and my husband’s house in Lobith needs painting. If it does, I guess my husband will do it.

2. Something you had to do recently that could be described “as exciting as watching paint dry”?
Try to condition my blue agate polymer clay. Though it was Fimo Soft, it was quite hard and crumbly. Doing the conditioning is a very repetitive process, which can be exciting if it yields results, but this time, it hardly did. I eventually gave up and chose another color.

3. Who would you most like to sit beside on a 10-hour flight? Tell us why? Have you ever taken a 10-hour flight?
My husband, of course. If I get bored of him talking about his latest special interest, I can just tell him I’m minding my own business and he won’t be disappointed. Oh wait, you can’t use mobile devices on flights. However, I can sleep on flights. Also, my husband would be the one I’d least easily get bored of sitting next to for ten hours anyway. I’ve never been on that long a flight. My longest (and first) one was 3 1/2 hours from Amsterdam to Moscow in 2000.

4. What’s something you did growing up that would get you into trouble?
Argue with my younger sister, throw temper tantrums, have meltdowns that were perceived as temper tantrums, engage in self-injurious behavior, but also general autistic weirdness. I’d get in trouble almost on a daily basis.

5. According to Google the top searches in 2022 were- Wordle, election results, Betty White, Queen Elizabeth, Bob Saget, Ukraine, Mega Millions, Powerball numbers, Anne Heche, and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Hmmm…what does this say about us? How many of these words did you search last year? What would you guess was your most “googled” word/phrase/question?
I think it just says that we search for what’s in the news currently (mostly). I mean, Ukraine and Queen Elizabeth were and I guess the election results refer to some election somewhere (no idea where). I saw the Jeffrey Dahmer thing too and think it relates to a movie about him which came out last year. Never heard of any of the other things.

I didn’t Google any of these things myself but did click through to the Jeffrey Dahmer Wikipedia article when it was trending on there.

My most searched for phrase on Google, no idea. On YouTube, probably something like “polymer clay unicorn”.

6. Insert your own random thought here.
My husband and I went to Apeldoorn on Sunday. At Hema, which my husband claims is his favorite store, we saw alien-style cookie cutters. My husband suggested they may be useful for polymer clay, if a bit large. I said that if they’d come in a unicorn shape, I’d get them.

Then yesterday when we were on the phone, he told me my Valentine’s present hadn’t yet arrived. I didn’t even really expect one, but I told him his Valentine’s present would soon go into the oven, as I had indeed finally managed to craft something. He then went on to guess (jokingly) that I’d baked him unicorn cookies, a particular brand of cookies that aren’t unicorn-shaped at all but that we keep talking about since I got them in my Christmas hamper. He then told me that, if I’d make cookies with my Valentine’s present, they’d automatically turn into unicorn cookies. So my guess is he found me some unicorn-shaped cutters. How cool!

The Wednesday HodgePodge (February 8, 2023)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m joining the Wednesday HodgePodge once again today. This week, it has a love theme, which had me a little confused about the date, since Valentine’s Day isn’t till next week. However, who cares? Here goes.

1. Something you’ve done recently that might be considered a labor of love?
I honestly can’t think of anything. I don’t really do much for others, truthfully, shameful as this is. I still haven’t even crafted anything for my husband for Valentine’s Day yet, even though I usually do something each year.

2. What’s one thing you love about being the age you are now?ab
I’m 36. This means, or so I think, still being young enough that my body isn’t completely betraying me yet (although due to my disabilities aging is starting to set in), but old enough to have at least some knowledge of who I am.

3. What do you value more: careful planning or the freedom to be spontaneous? Elaborate.
A little of both, I think. I mean, my days are fairly structured with my day schedule and I still think they aren’t structured enough. My desire for more clarity though isn’t because I don’t want to do anything sort of spontaneously, but because any transition is hard for me. And there still are many in my current day schedule.

4. A home cooked meal or a fancy restaurant? pink or red? watch the sunrise or watch the sunset? wine and cheese or champagne and chocolate?
Home-cooked meal, just because I can’t stand fancy restaurants due to the expectation of my table manners. Pink. Sunset. Chocolate (but skip the champagne please). In all honesty, none of the above particularly appeal to me.

5. What’s your definition of romance? Are you a romantic?
I have no idea about my personal definition of romance. It probably has to do with showing your significant other your love in a special, attuned-to-them way, or something. I’m not a romantic at all. I usually think up ways to show my love in a particularly special way to my husband, but in the planning, things often go horribly wrong so that I end up with nothing at all. As with my idea for a Valentine’s gift this year.

6. Insert your own random thought here.
I am struggling with too many ideas in my head for crafty projects and not enough of something I can’t quite pinpoint to actually make them happen. It could be the fact that my ideas are a chaotic mess and I have no sense of how to actually go from idea to plan to project. Of course, I blame my day schedule, but I’m pretty sure that’s not everything there is to it. Yes, the problem is in part that watching a YouTube tutorial on something takes time, something I do have in only hour-long segments with no guarantee that, when I start on something with one staff (say, watching a tutorial), I can actually follow it up with them too. I am not sure this is the entire problem though.

Gifts My Husband Gave Me

Posted on by Astrid

Today is Valentine’s day. Of course, my husband and I aren’t together now, as he had to work and I’m at the care facility, but I wanted to honor the occasion anyway by sharing something about my husband I appreciate. I looked to Lisa Shea’s collection of journaling prompts on love and romance. One of the prompts is to share a gift your lover gave or gives you that’s most precious to you. It can be a physical gift or an action or emotion. Instead, I am going to share a list of things my husband gifted me. Some of these things, I didn’t really appreciate in the sense that I liked the gifts themselves, but the gesture at the time was very much appreciated. And the story behind those gifts gives me and my husband a good laugh now.

1. A Planxty CD. This was the first gift my husband gave me when we were officially dating, for my 22nd birthday in 2008. I only listened to it probably once or twice when he came to visit. Then again, that same year, when he had his birthdday on November 12, I thought I’d gifted him a very well-thought-out present: a book of previously-unpublished philosophical texts by British Idealists. British Idealism was my profile research (high school graduation thesis) topic and he was a philosophy major at the time. He never read the book though.

2. Homemade apple pie. One year, I think it was 2010, my husband brought me a home-baked apple pie in the psych hospital. It was delicious!

3. A Tom Lehrer CD. This CD was much more appreciated than the Planxty one. In fact, I put the entire thing on my computer so that I can always listen to it, even now that I don’t have a CD player anymore (or the CD for that matter).

My husband had introduced me to Tom Lehrer’s song I Hold Your Hand in Mine back in 2008 and I loved it. From there on, I learned about most other songs. We still crack jokes about some of these songs.

4. Chocolate. It used to be kind of a tradition that my husband would buy me chocolate on Valentine’s and our wedding anniversary. Not that I’m a big chocolate fan, but I loved them nonetheless. One year, I bought my husband peanut rocks (chocolate filled with peanuts), but I’d bought him the milk chocolate ones when he preferred dark chocolate. Oopsie.

5. A bear soft toy. I can’t remember whether I showed this one on my blog yet, but last year, I got a gorgeous teddy bear holding a heart for Valentine’s day.

6. Winegums. I remember one day, my husband had been shopping at the wholesale store and he’d bought five bags of winegums (gummy candies) for me. He said he’d wanted to buy a prime number of bags and three seemed a little too few to him. You can imagine my delight, but, if you know me, you can also imagine I consumed them within a week.

7. A phone case. In 2020, when I’d bought my current iPhone, I’d asked my husband to set it up as a birthday gift and, if he wanted to give me a material gift anyway, he could give me a case. It turned out I could do the setting up mostly myself with some help from my staff, but I did get a pretty sturdy phone case.

I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting something really important my husband gave me. Of course, the most important thing he gave me, and continues to give me, is his love. I hope he feels I give him the same in return.

loopyloulaura

Also linking up with Senior Salon Pit Stop #200.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (February 13, 2021)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi and welcome to another #WeekendCoffeeShare post. I just had my soft drink of Dubbelfrisss and some Pringles for today. However, I can make you a cup of Senseo coffee if you’d like. I can also make you tea. A staff brought me some green tea without additional flavoring earlier this week, which I’m so grateful for. I love this kind of tea! Anyway, let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that it’s still pretty white outside here. The below picture was taken on Thursday, but not much of the snow has gone yet. That should change tomorrow, as temps are supposed to rise above zero.

A picture of me in the snow

If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I’m happy to report feeling much better than I was earlier in the week. Like I said yesterday, I had some worrying health symptoms on Monday and Tuesday that were probably attributable to constipation (and possibly some stress too). Like I mentioned, the doctor prescribed me magnesium tablets. I’m feeling much better now. Not yet completely normal, but almost so.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I got a wonderful stuffed bear from my husband as an early Valentine’s Day present today. I gave him an airdry clay heart I’d made.

My husband paid me a quick visit at the care facility on his way back from buying a trailer for his car. The trailer is truly huge for one that’s behind a regular VW car!

If we were having coffee, I’d share that my support coordinator told me that I thankfully no longer need to tell the staff several days in advance when my husband is going to pick me up. The reason they so far required this, is my one-on-one support. However, my coordinator and the manager agreed that it’s possible for them to schedule the staffing regardless. This is a huge relief, as especially with COVID and all, it’s hard to plan ahead.

If we were having coffee, I would tell you that today, my one-on-one support staff took me to a farm with my care agency where we could see the horses, goats and rabbits. Unfortunately, they were eating, so they didn’t show me much attention. I didn’t take my phone with me, so no pictures. That will have to come next time.

If we were having coffee, lastly I would tell you I’ve done a lot of reading and book hoarding lately. I will have to do another reading wrap-up soon. Let me say for now that I’m totally inspired to read more SciFi. I totally love the escapism!

That being said, I’d also like to moan (probably for the third or fourth time) about the fact that Amazon doesn’t accept payment methods other than credit cards for their digital products. This is really annoying, as I don’t own a credit card. I really wish I could benefit from their Kindle deals, but apparently Amazon doesn’t want me buying anything there. Okay, I could still buy physical products, but what’s the point? We have Bol.com for that, and I want Kindle books! *Whines.* Okay, I can still get the free ones, but well.

What’s going on in your life?