Done Since 2025-02-09

I survived Valentine's Day mainly by making a difficult phone call (all phone calls are difficult for me) to the SVB (the Dutch version of social security) to get things moving on why I don't have health insurance yet. Should have called a month or two ago; N and I didn't realize that in order to get anything done here you have to make a phone call, or if you're lucky a live chat. Pretty much everything uses phone apps, too. The day wasn't a total loss; it also included a walk with m.

We (N and I, though I did all of the interactivestuff) got our business bank account going. Getting it approved required, you guessed it, multiple chat sessions with support, which also included several narrated screen-capture videos. Never having done that before, I also had trouble figuring out how to stop recording. From start to finish took Monday through Friday. Which of course wiped me out nearly as much as the phone call. I didn't get much else done all week.

I did re-fill two of my fountain pens, with Parker blue-black Quink, in hopes that taking handwritten notes while studying Dutch. Based on this morning's test run, it does seem to help a little. And, having also found my laser pointer in the boxes, I played chase-the-red-dot with the cats. Ticia clearly had it figured out, and lost interest. Bronx, well, Bronx is in many ways a perma-kitten.

There are a lot of links. Many are to list posts, and some of those point to other list posts. Exponential expansion, in other words. I have read very few of the second-level list entries, but many of them might be useful to some of you. I thought about using an emoji or other symbol in place of the @ on, e.g., the political ones. Maybe next week I'll do that.

Meanwhile, there were a couple of useful ones today that I've tacked on to the tail ind of the links; you'll see them again a week from now. And to end on a happier note, here you will find hundreds of animated cat gifs pulled from the wreckage of GeoCities.

( Notes & links, as usual )