For those of you who don’t know this, I recently ended up in the middle of an actual care home. I suppose that this was very hard for me also because I watched my mother suffer for years and then die when I was 14. But that’s an aside.

The huge housing shortage in the Netherlands made me click on a place for which I was placed first on a waiting list of 2600 people in the housing allocation system. I clicked on another one – max 2 allowed – and visited that too, in Amsterdam, but it was being renovated and should have been ready. It wasn’t. I needed a place to live. (How bad could it be?) My apartment was supposed to be a pretty normal apartment. At least, that’s what I expected. It wasn’t. It was anything but. Things were pretty bad from the beginning and were getting worse and worse and worse. It’s not the people who live there who are the problem. The other wing on my floor had dementia patients, but they were not the problem either.

I couldn’t stand it any longer. I wanted my life back. I want my life back.

A man and a woman are living somewhere nice. They are both elderly. He’s fine mentally, but weak physically. She needs a lot more care.

Their physician recommends that they move into a place where care is easier to access. Their daughter asks if they can move into a home in her town because she can’t do much right now because of the distance, she says.

The two listen and move.

Now they are stuck in an apartment (and place) that they don’t like at all and their daughter still doesn’t visit. They can’t get out any longer.

I could and I did, and I really needed to, to save myself. Easy? Hell no, but all sorts of things were really getting out of hand, as you may have noticed.

This story is part of the misery that I was seeing, or sensing.

The creation of ghettos for older adults often constitutes cruel and unusual punishment for being of a certain age. Look up the definition of the word “ghetto”.

I had to get out. I really had to.

I so wish that I had never moved in there and that I had insisted on waiting for a home in Amsterdam. (It would not have come with all the craziness that goes with living in such a place, apparently.) I’d felt I had no choice. I guess I was wrong again.

(When will I ever learn?)

I was increasingly shuddering with misery and revolt, but doing my best to keep it at bay. I had to get out. I really had to get out. Staying would have been a big mistake.

So there’s that.

I’m so pleased that I got out. Things are already looking up, and even though I am physically tired, I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I was about to wither away and die there. I deserve better.

I’d already had fifteen years that were a lot like this behind me. Ugh. No more!

I know a woman who just like me had a small business for approximately as many years. We’ve cooperated a few times, I know her from a network for women in science and technology. She has a PhD.

She too is getting some kind of benefits now. She’s in the Netherlands, but not in Purmerend. She has a very well managed bipolar disorder. She gets to talk about what she would like to do in terms of work. In a normal relaxed atmosphere.

No people are climbing onto her balcony either.

No people are suggesting that she has dementia or whatever. She’s slightly older than I am. She’s divorced these days, living on her own.

I feel HOUNDED and HARASSED, by contrast. HATED. I’ve never before felt this hated. Not even in Portsmouth.

I think that that’s because this is supposed to be my home country. This is where I should be able to expect to be treated like an equal. To discover that my civil rights get violated just as easily here is very painful.

The Dutch say that they want to treat people equally in equal circumstances. This last bit holds the clue to inequality.

I want to feel safe again. I have not been able/allowed to feel safe in a long time, I think. The first two or three weeks after I moved from Southampton to Portsmouth, perhaps. That was at the start of 2009.

What can I say? I’m doing a lot of physical stuff and I am no longer 30.

Please do not euthanize me yet, you “voltooid leven” people. That would really be about 30 years too early.

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Besides that I’ve been dealing with completely bonkers and often pretty aggressive and extremely biased behaviors from people at the local municipality (civic offices, council), there is also a trend here to use EXPLOSIVES when people aren’t getting along.

Portsmouth is pretty tame by comparison. It’s hard to believe that I really just wrote that.*

nohoooooo, that is not what I meant … 😂

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/oct/19/fight-save-vulnerable-uk-children-school-exclusions-lawyers

❤️🙏🏻👍🏻

It’s part of what drove me out of the country in my thirties when I still looked like I was barely 20, at most, but was already considered too old on paper. Age discrimination is illegal in the Netherlands, but it’s still considered perfectly permissable to require someone’s DOB for a job application.

When I was in the US in the 1990s, I learned that your DOB and marital status had no place on your CV because they have nothing to do with your suitability for a job. The Dutch were later appalled to find that I had adopted that habit. Thirty years have passed, and little has changed in that respect.

Your way around such biases? Also racism etc? Be your own boss! If you are worth your salt, you can do it. Move abroad if you have to. Go where you are appreciated. Don’t stay where you may be merely tolerated either. You deserve better.

So RIFT (Renewable Iron Fuel Technology), a startup that works on developing the concept of iron fuel as an alternative source of energy, has just won 11 million euros in investments. Previously, it already received financing from Bill Gates’ climate fund.

For the local flat-earthers: No, it’s not the only thing that I am really worried about but I have been dealing with this stupid issue and its disastrous effects for over 16 years. 😡

In fact, my recently purchased laptop turned out to be running AnyDesk. Why on earth would it be running AnyDesk?! I mistakenly thought it had only the install option sitting on it. I should have known better. (But that is not the point. This relentless pursuit of me, this remote obsession with me, needs to stop. I want my life back.) Maybe there is an innocent explanation for it. I hope so. But I started exploring when seemingly unusual things began happening.

“U ben gewoon aggelijk, mevrouw” does not resolve this. It does not help me in any way.

The place that I used to call home is pretty much under water, I guess. See the screenshots below from the CNN website. Tampa and St Pete got the worst of it. St Pete looks pretty much wiped out?

It’s rainfall though that’s the problem, not the storm surge (yet). A 1-in-a-1000-year rainfall event. Over 16 inches. That’s over 40 cm.

That said, about an hour ago, the water level in the Bay was dropping. That has to do with which quadrant of the hurricane that the Bay was in. The eye came ashore slightly south of the Bay. That water will slosh back in again.

So I have to assume that my last address there is surely flooded. I was a flight up at my other addresses there.

Ryan Shea. Never heard of him.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Oh, crap: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/01/239624/the-transhumanist-diy-designer-baby-funded-with-bitcoin/

And Sam Bankman-Fried was involved in that transhumanist institute in Oxford that was just shut down, as was Elon Musk. Described as “eugenics on steroids”.

Ryan Shea: https://ryan.shea.io/

Speeds had briefly slowed down. I know that these things can suddenly change track right before they hit land, but this one appears to be so huge in size that it probably wouldn’t matter much.

You have this giant vortex of winds around the eye, so depending in which quadrant of that vortex you are, the wind direction is different. So when it passes, you can also have problems because of this change in direction. You can for example mistakenly believe that you’ve had the worst of it, when it can still push up waters and send a water mass your way, depending on where you are relative to water.

I’ve seen differing reports as to when it is supposed to hit land but apparently it is going to be this night Florida time. (Tomorrow morning, mostly?)

No, I can’t simply ignore this.

Even though I was about to heat some soup last night and then realized that my soup mugs are packed too, of course. I’m making a lot of progress, but I also must take care not to wear myself out physically and continue working on securing my future. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day in that respect.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-happened-when-a-man-signed-work-emails-using-a-female-name-for-a-week_n_58c2ce53e4b054a0ea6a4066

Update: I’m not the only earth scientist freaking out (see video at the bottom)

This was the thing that we all feared and planned for but that never happened. Until now.

OMG. OMG.

But apparently, it will be losing energy? Odd. Hurricanes usually do that over land and speed up over water.

I do know that they can change direction at the last minute, and where and how they hit land can make a big difference.

(Remember, I used to live there. I’ve prepared for a few but the only one that I experienced came from land and brought what I considered typically Dutch weather with a lot of rain. The university was closed, though, and so were many other places.)

18:43: CNN agrees

A reminder to innocent readers: Someone DID go into my apartment while I was in a meeting at the civic offices in August. (I had briefly wondered why that meeting had to take place THERE.) I did not dance to their tune – but they had incorrectly pegged me as a pushover, apparently, and had not expected that – and it got people to become so frustrated that they then revealed a little too much of their real sentiments. (Such as wishing me misery and suffering.) See also the essay that I published. It’s available from Amazon.

You can download it here: https://angelinasouren.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/household-debt-assistance-the-dutch-way-paperback-print_proof-23september2024.pdf

(For Stichting Humanitas: This is a later version than what I sent to you.)

They also said that I had not replied to this and that and I said that when I did that, I would either not get a reply, people would simply keep referring to each other and even sometimes say that they were not allowed to reply to me. And then I was told that this was because what I had written online about them (i.e. the Google review) and that I should be pleased that they were now still willing to talk with me.

Among other things, I told them that the way that they tend to treat the over55s is simply not on.

One of my cousins runs a large real estate outfit – worth over a billion – and just out of curiosity, I later checked how they deal with negative Google reviews. Very differently, I can assure you!

(I used to get along very well with that cousin, but I haven’t spoken with him in 30 years. We are not a close-knit family. I think that’s mostly because several of our parents died young, in our family, and it means that you socialize less. There’s a lot of cancer in my family, but it’s all different cancers, so there is not a massive hereditary factor. Or maybe we are not a close-knit family, period. Or maybe it plays and even bigger role that I am like my mother’s cousin Céleste, from the branch of the family that spells its name differently.)

I’ll be gone soon enough. (Of course!) No need to freak out. Stop playing stupid games that cause delays for me.