I haven’t written anything here since July and my last newsletter was in May. It is the longest I have gone without writing in over a decade. The irony is that I started my monthly newsletter 11 years ago to write off my health stress. But this year it is the health stress that kept […]

Sometimes I firmly believe if I wasn’t deaf that I would listen to many podcasts. I still remember years ago when the first podcasts started popping up and I was already deaf by then, how frustrated I was when blogs I liked to read switched over to podcast. Transcripts wasn’t even a thing back then. […]

Needing an escape from my warm apartment due to the unprecedented heatwave going on in Europe, thanks to global warming, I went to an early evening movie showing in the cool cinema and even treated myself to a slushy! I haven’t drank one since I was a kid. I gave myself two chest freezes by […]

I’m not hardcore into travelling, maybe because every year or other year I travel to Aruba and Curaçao to visit family. This takes a bite into my vacation time and travel budget. Being a deaf solo traveller with a chronic illness also means I prefer travelling to cities that are accessible. I mostly take a […]

Social media gets a lot of bad rep, most of it deserved. For me, social media, specifically Instagram, is a way to meet people and find connection and meaning. Being late deaf has isolated me a lot from society, but thanks to Instagram I can keep in touch with people I meet in real life, […]

My resolve to keep my iPhone Mini 13 until it dies is crumbling. I still love the small form factor, but the battery capacity and small screen are becoming more and more of a hinder. Putting in a new battery won’t make things much better, as the iPhone Mini is known for less battery capacity. […]

This late morning while drinking a glass of water after waking up to rehydrate, I was of course scrolling social media and saw a post about Julia Roberts mentioning Morrissey, cancel culture and art. Besides thinking, I see her point, I thought about that one girl whose blog I used to read 22 years ago […]

Three years ago, I bought my first smartwatch after convincing myself it would make life easier. I wrote two posts about the Apple Watch and how it helps me with deaf accessibility. Before getting an Apple Watch, I wore an analogue or digital watch since I was 10-years old. I can’t leave the house without […]

Toen mijn neefje het jeugdjournaal begon te kijken, besloot ik de Instagram-account van het jeugdjournaal te volgen om te weten wat hij allemaal binnenkrijgt aan nieuws. Handig om te weten wat een 9- of 10-jarige allemaal al weet van de wereld. Dat ging prima, leuk account ook om snel nieuws binnen te krijgen. Alle...

Thanks to a random YouTube street photographer vlogger whom I happened upon just as they started vlogging, I picked up analogue photography again. He was on a trip to Japan and went to one of those tiny second-hand camera shops where he purchased a Yashica T5. He then proceeded to take most of his Tokyo photos with...

This year, I was asked again by Vasilis van Gemert to work with a group of students who followed his Human Centered Design course at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The students were tasked with designing visual captions for me for a movie of my choice. I asked them to pick a scene from ‘Odd […]

Every birthday I get to celebrate is kind of a big deal to me considering I have a rare chronic illness consisting among other of a transplant kidney. To still be healthy enough to work, albeit part time, to travel and just to be able to walk to the grocery store. Never underestimate the privilege […]