Lots of changes

Posted on 15 October 2024 in Uncategorized

About two and a half months ago, in late July, my girlfriend, Annemieke, and I broke up. It was her decision, not mine. I was devastated for a while, and to tell you the truth I’m still not dealing well with the breakup. To make matters worse, only a few weeks after that, on 15 August, my friend Harry passed away. He was 77 and had been struggling with his health for the last few years. Harry was the first person I met after I moved to Nijmegen in 2018, and had been a very dear friend to me, almost like a father.

With two such events happening in short succession, my life has been turned upside down a bit. I haven’t been able to get much work done, apart from one episode of De Krodkast and one issue of the newsletter. My day job has been taking up all of my attention lately and it’s been taking too much out of me to do much of anything else. Frankly, just the fact that I am able to write this and post it here represents a step up compared to recent months.

Annemieke was, of course, not only my girlfriend but also my assistant, with whom I hosted De Krodkast, and who helped me with all manner of things, such as the design of this site and administrative tasks. Now that we have broken up, she has (predictably, I suppose) also stopped being my assistant. I am going to remove her from the Professional page. It’s just Ruben and me now. Ruben occasionally contributes, on a voluntary and unpaid basis, mostly with legal advice (he also runs a business of his own), so mostly it’s just me. (Of course, other people have also made important contributions, such as Nico and Yasja, but they aren’t listed on the site. And Annemieke’s sister, Merel, whom we will now probably not hear of anymore either.)

As much as all of this breaks my heart (and it really does—I’m heartbroken), I must carry on. It is now Q4 already and I still have a lot of work to do on Schepie and Events Related to Potential for instance. I will try to publish two or three more issues of the newsletter this year. And of course, I need to make sure the “Make Reality Great Again” hats, which are currently for sale only in the Netherlands, are available in more countries.

There we are. It is October again; I really don’t know why major updates to the site always keep happening in October. This past July and August were so difficult for me that it took all of September, which by the way flew past, to recover. (Multiple people have told me they felt like September flew past, so it doesn’t seem to be just me. Very interesting.)

I don’t know when you will next hear from me or what about. All I can say is to keep an eye on this website. I’ll try to make an English version of the newsletter, but that probably won’t happen until next year, as it’s low on my list of priorities. But whenever the next time is, until then, and I hope you are well.