Category: weeknotes

weeknotes, 4/25

another good, full week of recharging and catching up. there was a lot of review and planning for work, a lot of rain outside… but not much else, which suits me at the moment. wintering is in full swing around here!

for christmas, my brother gave me this “egg storage thinguie” that he 3d printed, and it’s brilliant! it holds lots of eggs and saves space on the fridge. knowing someone with a 3d printer is the best of both worlds. he also 3d printed these bookmarks, which i find really pretty:

i don’t know if you can tell, but the colors are printed in layers, so there’s texture to them:

i love them so much! i feel like reading a paper book for a change, just to have a chance of using them.

this week, we cooked this squash and tofu dish that was featured on the to vegetables, with love newsletter and it was very tasty! i also got the ingredients for the addictive cabbage they mention. next week is chinese new year, and so we went to the chinese supermarket in albufeira and got lots of nice things! i’m excited for the feast ahead, but also for a chance to re-start the year at home, mindfully.

last year, we noticed we were having pizza a bit too often, so we started a new rule: we only have pizza once every 2 weeks. we were due one this week, but then noticed our local pizza place was closed for holidays… so we decided to go to town for it, and then noticed we did the exact same thing last year, on the same day! so we’ve started a new tradition: january 21 is pizza-in-town day. :D their pizzas are actually not bad, and they dust some kind of cornmeal on the crust that makes it extra crunchy. nice!

one last thing about food: at the moment, our raised bed does not have the same exuberance of january 2024, but we still have plenty of chard, lettuce and radishes — including these funky ones! aren’t they gorgeous?

paulo sent me a link to this talk about the aging programmer, and i saw myself in a lot of what is being said in it. i believe in planning ahead, and there’s a lot of good advice there — even for those of us who are not strictly programmers.

we watched ainda aqui estou (i’m still here) at the cinema, and it was a punch in the gut — especially looking at our current politics and imagining where things might be headed. how quickly humans forget history. :(

weeknotes

weeknotes, 3/25

good news: IT’S NOT CANCER!! :D it was just a stupid benign tumor growing inside its stupid little capsule, and which was completely removed with the surgery. hurray! everyone i talked to told me the possibility of it being cancer was small, but it’s still nice to hear that was the case. the final diagnosis was NIFTP which stands for “non-invasive follicular thyroid neoplasm with papillary-like nuclear features”… which is a mouthful! a decade ago, it was treated like cancer, but has since been de-classified due to being super lazy and not really needing all the aggressiveness or radiation that cancer treatment requires. all you need to do is getting it out — and that’s done.

this week brought on a surprisingly smooth surgery recovery, with the the worst part being a nasty rash from the adhesive dressings… but after a few days without them, everything seems to be looking better. i have regained neck mobility and aside from some pain when swallowing, the rest is all good.

we returned home mid-week, and it was just such a relief to be back here, in this quiet corner of the country, with our stuff around, blue skies above and without any external demands on our time and attention. i think what makes me miss home so much is the feeling that this is the only place where we can control our time. so it’s been a week of focus and recovery and just appreciating the quietness. i think i really needed this to recharge my “introvert batteries”.

i’ve been deep into the whole court of thorns and roses saga, which reads a lot like fanfiction and feels quite addictive. but in between that, i finished reading little witch hazel, and it was very cute. nicely illustrated children books are always a big favorite!

this week, i learned that in order to produce vitamin D, your body needs UVB radiation, and UVB radiation does not pass through glass… so you really need to go outside in the sun for a bit everyday, in order to get it. i feel like a foreigner suntanning in winter, but it’s actually not that bad. :)

there was a little street festival in town on saturday, and we sat in the sun with some baklava and knafeh, just soaking it all in. life is good.

weeknotes

weeknotes, 1/25

first week of the year!

ringing in the new year with friends (and their overactive puppy) near arouca was really nice, and i think it won’t be the last time we’ll visit this quiet corner of the country. the mountains and the views were perfect, and we had the first beef day* of the year, featuring doc arouquesa meat.

…but then it was back to the reality of postponed work, family stuff and thyroid shenanigans.

my biopsy results came back inconclusive, which means the half of the thyroid where the nodule is will have to be removed for testing. if it’s benign, then i’ll keep going with half a thyroid. if it’s cancer, then we’ll take out the rest of the thyroid and replace it with synthetic hormones.

the path is pretty straightforward at this point: a simple “if A then B else C” kind of situation. it makes me grateful for competent doctors and a health insurance that lets me speedrun through all these appointments and get things done quickly. i’m feeling fine (physically and mentally), eager to get this done so that i can go home.

also, this marshmallow got a kind of wooden jungle gym for christmas and has been doing her best athletic impersonations. i’m keeping these photos for when she wins some olympic medals and the media wants an interview about her childhood. :D

(*) we eat so little beef these days that i plan to count how many times we eat it this year.

weeknotes

weeknotes, 51-52/24

these were some weird weeks.

we took the train north a little earlier than our usual christmas schedule. being flexible on dates allows us to book cheaper tickets, which is nice, and in retrospect, i was glad we came earlier because we’ve had plenty of downtime to be sick and spend time in hospitals: paulo got some food poisoning just before christmas, i got some high fever that morphed into a pestering throat ache… plus a nodule on my thyroid that we’re currently investigating. *sigh*

other than that, just the normal christmas things: being with family, consuming inordinate amounts of food, seeing friends, reading, kidnapping the little niece for a few days of cuddling.

christmas day brought together several families, and we were 28 people at the table, kids and all! the smaller ones were very excited about santa coming to visit, but cautious and shy when he actually got there ?

i got some nice christmas gifts: books and postal-themed things, handy 3d printed objects from my brother, an underblanket that makes my bed toasty warm, a pijama and an insect bite healer (a sci-fi gadget that makes insect bites stop itching within seconds). plus, a new macbook air to replace my 9 year old one, which was not a christmas gift but felt like it. it’s so smooth and fast! i must have been very good this year! ☺️

i finished a couple of books these weeks, eleanor oliphant is completely fine, and where’d you go, bernadette (both nice reads), as well as a few children’s books that i offered to my cousis. “where’d you go, bernadette” made me want to take a cruise to antarctica, something i’ve always considered a little silly. i’ve even exchanged emails with the group that manages the quaint post office at port lockroy, but now i kind of want to go see it for myself and help count penguins!

on the last day of the year, we rented a little flat in the middle of nowhere to ring in the new year with friends. it was super quiet, with an amazing window into the surrounding mountains. just our thing.

weeknotes

weeknotes, 48-50/24

mostly quiet weeks, brainstorming and buying gifts for everyone, writing a million christmas postcards, tying up loose ends, riding the usual anxiety about the upcoming christmas trip…

i asked my brother if the kid needed anything for christmas, and he said she needed winter clothes… which led me to a shopping spree on vinted. it’s a second-hand marketplace where people sell their old stuff, but it’s especially nice for kid’s clothes, many of which are only used for a few months. i managed to snatch quite a few good deals and became a little bit addicted to it, truth be told. ?

these weeks have been good for reading. i finished the hidden life of trees, which is such an amazing book… you learn about how trees share information and care for each other, and how much they struggle without their forest support group. it really makes you look at trees in a whole new way! i also listened to werner herzog’s the twilight world, read by the man himself in his slow voice, thick with german accent. and i finished she who became the sun, which was intense and beautiful, a wild mix of mulan and some chinese wuxia vibe.

i’ve been trying to get back into running, with the help of the “zombies, run!” app. their couch-to-5k program starts reeeeeeeally slow, with just 15 seconds of running in between 1 minute walks, which feels extremely easy, but i like the storytelling part of it, so i don’t want to skip ahead and miss stuff. there’s a race the family is planning to do in april that i want to try to join for the 10k, if i can keep it up until then.

ever since the conjunctivitis some weeks ago, i’ve had the feeling i had something stuck in my eye, which is not a very pleasant feeling. since it didn’t seem to go away, i went to see a doctor, who scraped my eye a bit (it’s not as unpleasant as it sounds) and prescribed some drops and a cream. it seems to be doing its job and i’ve been feeling less bothered by it.

lately, i’ve been forgetting to take pictures (and make videos) a lot, so i don’t have a lot of pictures to share, but here’s one of tiny niece that my chinese friend qiuyu painted:

isn’t that cute? she’s a wizard with a brush!

these early december days have been sunny and fresh for the most part, around 15 degrees or so. it’s not even properly cold (not like in central or northern europe), but in a house without proper heating, you feel it a lot — it’s enough to throw me into a grumpy, whiny mood and make me dream about escapades to warm places. to curb this grumpiness, the fireplace has been working non-stop, and we’ve holed ourselves in the living room, curtained off from the rest of the house. i wish we could just re-do the whole house and make it better… sigh.