Category: just life

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just life

52 good things in 2025

i wanted to have posted this much earlier… but then life happened, etc etc. last year, i kept a note of happy things as they were taking place, as a way to notice and be thankful for them. i wanted to post them here — a kind of archive of sorts. so here it goes:

  1. a speedy surgery and speedy recovery
  2. not having cancer!
  3. every time we’re back home for a stretch of time, after being away
  4. winter days with crisp blue skies
  5. our comfort foods at natsu
  6. so many pizzas
  7. my new treadmill
  8. some unexpectedly cheap alpaca mohair wool
  9. finishing the big algarve hike
  10. almond blossom season
  11. being able to run 10k
  12. matcha lattes
  13. riding our bikes together
  14. a few quiet days in comporta
  15. sharing books with laura
  16. sauna at the new gym
  17. affordable chinese classes
  18. art classes
  19. the novelty of a blackout
  20. a tuscan getaway with friends
  21. gelato, picci & laoganma
  22. farmácia de proximidade service
  23. running around kungsholmen
  24. cycling in aland, eating pancakes
  25. swedish cardamom buns
  26. new birds!
  27. laura saying “maínha”
  28. a bounty of yellow tomatoes
  29. mom turning 70

  30. strength training, getting a little stronger
  31. seeing paulo finish a half-marathon again
  32. being able to swim freestyle for many pools in a row
  33. saying no to stuff we don’t want to do
  34. doing a product from start to finish
  35. the university library in aveiro and its cantina
  36. easy game nights with friends
  37. seeing a very big important thing taking shape
  38. laura running to us with open arms
  39. a more efficient new AC
  40. celebrating the boy running 1500kms/year
  41. a nice christmas postcard to send to family
  42. laura recognizing the moomins
  43. seeing the parents join and enjoy the local gym (after years of our pestering)
  44. cheaper and unlimited mobile data
  45. tree planting
  46. celebrating 20 years postcrossing
  47. enjoying murderbot and attorney woo
  48. meeting friends we hadn’t seen in over a decade
  49. the nice ferry to aland
  50. laura saying her name “lau-ah” when poked on the belly button (a trick we taught her)
  51. warm july nights with events in town
  52. being confident handling a barbell

maybe “happy” is not the right adjective for these… it’s more of a list of milestones and small joys, with some other stuff that gave us perspective or helped us grow. there’s a lot of connection and everyday pleasures there, but also big important things. 2025 veered very sharply at the end, but i think this helps us remember it also had a lot of good in it. :)

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just life

2025 in books

we’re kind of taking it easier this week, so i have some time to write about the things i wanted to write at the end of 2025 and didn’t get to. like the books i read!

2025 was good, reading-wise — not record-breaking, but it’s not about that. there was a lot of fiction and romance with comfort authors (like emily henry or ali hazelwood) appearing multiple times. i read through a few different fantasy series too, but also non-fiction topics like tuberculosis, politics, or chernobyl. i think the highlights of the year might have been atmosphere (book) and project hail mary (audiobook).

once again, children’s books were practically the only books i read on paper, and the rest was mostly digital loans from different libraries that i read on the kindle. i went so few times to the local library that they’ve canceled my card 😅 (though it still works for digital loans, somehow). i don’t know what i would do without the kindle anymore — my eyesight is not as good as it once was, and i find reading normal paper books (with their tiny fonts) really uncomfortable. audiobooks continue to be a companion for boring chores, the gym or long train rides.

this year, the letter C won the alphabet count, followed by S and T! i did worse than last year though, with more letters missing.

i also did worse in diversity, reading from less different countries overall… 75% of my reads seem to be either from the US or the UK. oh well!

i think i would like to try to diversify my reading a bit more again — not just in terms of nationalities of the authors, but also in terms of publication year. somehow it feels like i mostly read contemporary authors, but there’s a lot of older stuff out there that is probably interesting and has shorter waiting times at the library.

that said, when i pick a book to read, i mostly go with the flow and what i feel like reading in that moment… so i’m sure soon enough i will forget about these “resolutions”. 2026 is not up to a great start, reading-wise, but we’ll see where it takes us! :)

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just life weeknotes

weeknotes, 7-8/26

more of the same: half of the time spent holding onto all the threads at work and the rest just trying to get things done at the in-laws. new hearing aids, bathroom renovations, dentures stuff, physiotherapy appointments, pressure washing the cement floor outside so that it’s not so slippery… the list is endless. the more time one spends there, the more things there are to do and fix.

things are finally settling down with the boy’s father at the nursing home, as the medical staff there found some old-school medication that helps him sleep at night without making him drowsy during the day. apparently it’s something they haven’t used in years and years, and everyone was happily surprised that it seems to work so well for him. i’m just grateful they didn’t give up — and that they had the resources and the patience to keep trying new things. we were so lucky with the place we ended up picking… i don’t take any of this for granted. our senior is still a little lost, but he’s in good spirits, clean and safe and talking about planting potatoes and beans on the gardens outside.

we watched one battle after another, and i finished listening to the correspondent, which was unexpectedly touching. i swam a few times in the municipal pool and took the kid to her swimming lessons too. the last time we were there she threw a huge tantrum over a band-aid that needed to stay on a scraped knee at all costs… but after awhile (and with the help of a really nice cleaning lady, who fetched us a new band-aid), we were back on the water with the class. 😅

and then the sun started shining again and it felt like heaven. i think maybe we had forgotten what blue skies looked like! the whole country feels radioactively green and blue now — and warm, almost impossibly spring-like in what is still the middle of winter. it feels like hope!

but i saved the best news of all for last: WE’RE BACK HOME! it’s for a short period of time only, but i missed all of this so much these past 2 months — the brightness, the birds, my heated blanket, the salt ponds, my bike, the almond blossoms, our favorite restaurants, the local cine-theatre… and most of all, the quietness of life when it’s just the two of us. <3 words cannot describe it, it’s like the world is right again.

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just life one second everyday

january 2026 — one second everyday

january was all family, all the time. there were hospitals and ambulances and doctor appointments galore, but also some time with little niece and a lot of slow-motion domino games at the nursing home.

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just life weeknotes

weeknotes, 1-2/26

another couple of weeks of minding seniors, trying to find solutions for old problems and a way to move onwards. for a while, things were looking up: one of them is recovering ok from the femur operation and the other was kind of stable for a few days… and then suddenly he was very much not stable, with lots of nighttime agitation, delirium, etc.

while trying to change meds to calm things down, we found out he probably has “Lewy Body Dementia”, a type of dementia that reacts badly to most anti-psychotic meds… which explains why we’ve been in the emergency room 3x in the past 2 weeks, all after trying new meds to ease his crisis. everything just seemed to make it worse, and we were at our wits’ end, sleep deprived and pulling hairs — at least now we understand what is going on. now things seem a bit more stable and we have registered him in an old people’s home — let’s see if he gets a spot soon.

it’s been a bit surreal these past few weeks… like a parallel life that we’ve been dropped into. i’m tired and achy and my blood pressure is shot from being on fight-or-flight mode all the time. i can’t sleep because i keep hearing noises and am constantly on high alert, waiting for yet another crisis to unfold. focusing and getting work done feels impossible in the middle of all this — even staying focused for 15 minutes is a challenge.

i keep telling myself this is all temporary and we’ll get through it —  we can endure difficult things for a season of life. but boy, if this hasn’t been a hard one.