Aggressive behavior in the Netherlands reaching new lows

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.*

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Need some air?

Air, I said!

92 minutes

Sigh. Where did this come from?

Happy now?

People, where have you been? Have you been hiding? In your big houses?

People, after the rain, will your life, will it ever be the same?

Oh, people, what will you do, when your luck, when it turns on you?

People, after the rain, will your life, will it ever be the same?

After the rain… We forget!

We get René Aubry’s mesmerising sunlight!

And more air.

Near Barcelona, perhaps…

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Raisin girl remembers

So, what I wanted to post here was a deadmau5 and kaskade track. It’s called “I remember”. In Firefox, on my tablet , I’m seeing tracks by The Travellers in this post on the website. In Chrome, in the WordPress CMS, the first track is Celia Baron’s “Tomorrow”. When I tried to post the video again, the intended track showed up in the CMS in Chrome.

The term “raisin girl” refers to “Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos.

Wtf? This again. Nothing wrong with Celia Baron, but this video wasn’t the URL that I copied.
I used to play so much music. Lots of Little Dragon, too, after the rain, and lots lots more.

Dutch ageism

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.

I’m a little worried

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.

Milton’s turned into a Cat 5 again

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.

OMG. Tampa Bay is going to be hit by a Cat 5 hurricane off the Gulf! OMG.

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

This is great, was: I don’t effing believe it!

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.

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Just like in Portsmouth

My emails either don’t reach anyone about 75% of the time or people’s responses don’t reach me about 75% of the time.

It’s part of the reason why I couldn’t support myself any longer eventually after I moved to Portsmouth.

And about 10% of the 25% responses I do get are mocking me and not giving me an answer. But that could be AI bots. “Can you please tell me what kind of card you are talking about?” repeatedly. “Thanks for letting us know xyz. It’s good that you are telling us xyz. Bye now.”

15:21 The password for one of my email addresses has changed. What else is new? 😴