Our Afvalpass is Working!

Here in Amstelveen, garbage and recycling goes into underground containers that get emptied by truck once in a while. The recyclables are all open-access, but the garbage container requires an RFID card to unlock.
Our card stopped working last week, so we've had a bag of garbage sitting in the hallway outside our unit since, like, Thursday. (As far as I can tell, we're the only people living in our 3-unit apartment cluster above the electronics store, otherwise I wouldn't have left it out there.) Miriam called on Friday to find out what was up, and they said they'd call us back on Monday.

Turns out that, in Amstelveen (and probably other places that have them?), the garbage cards (afvalpassen) are tied to addresses. When you move, you leave the card in the apartment/house for the next residents. Ours, though, was assigned to apartment C instead of our unit, A. C just reported their card missing (why now after we've been here a year? I still never see anyone there) and got a new one, so ours was deactivated. But ours is supposed to be working again today (it takes a day to process through the system), so I can bring our stinky garbage out. Yay!

---

Also, still playing the old gold box games. I made it through Pool of Radiance and am on to Curse of the Azure Bonds. The interface improvements are *so* good!

Anxiety/depression

I am losing significant portions of time to feelings of fear and anxiety. I will make it through this MLIS. Hopefully it will even get easier as I go and reacclimate. But right at this moment, I'm essentially paralyzed by fear and anxiety. It's a familiar enough set of feelings that I know it will eventually reduce to a manageable level and I can get things done, but it would be really nice if I could just skip to that point. Which is, of course, what some of the goal of therapy has been for me; improving my general state of mind, giving me tools like focused breathing to get my brain under control.

There's also petting and brushing Seregil. That helps too. I'm going to do some more of that right now.

The Healing Masters

Another fun bit of Dutch stuff:

The nearest hospital/clinic (the Amstelveen Ziekenhuis) is on a road called Laan van de Helende Meesters. This is approximately "Avenue of the Healing Masters" in English. I'm pretty sure that ziekenhuis, though Google Translate says it is hospital, is basically sick(plural) house. Is that literally something like place for sick people? I do remember similar things in German like "krankwagen" (sick-wagon) meaning ambulance...

One more bit of silliness:
"Boon" in Dutch means bean. So whenever my partner's name appears after being run through an autotranslater, she is Dr. Bean. No relation, as far as I know, to Rowan Atkinson.