Recently in November '25

November is now behind us, and there’s only one month left in 2025. This year has been going by much faster than I first anticipated, and it has been full of things happening - should I call them events? Maybe that’s what adult life is all about, but, for now, let’s focus on the past month.

🍄 Life

November started with Eindhoven’s habitual light festival: GLOW. Because it was the 25th edition, there was a lot of hype around what they would be doing, especially considering some of the criticism of the previous years: quite repetitive and not innovative enough. Well, to celebrate such a milestone, they brought back favorites from the public!

Some might say that that doesn’t help the repetitiveness, but I really enjoyed it. Many of the light installations they brought back were installations from 10, 15 years ago, that I never had a chance to see, so that was quite nice. I went with Chris and some friends, and we walked the approximately 5 km route in the city center and drank some glühwein and ate olliebollen, staples of this time of the year.

Later in the month, I went to an event in Utrecht organized by the author of a book I read recently, about what we, normal people, can do besides voting. The premise is that voting is not enough, but what are the things we can do, and what sort of future should we strive for? I might write a post about it because I found it to be incredibly interesting, adding some more information than what I’ve read in the book.

💪 Health

I’ve been having some weird shoulder pain for around two months, especially after waking up. I’ve noticed I did not have it while in New York, so I wonder if it’s related to running. The physiotherapist says it doesn’t seem to be related to the muscle, I don’t have pain doing any movements, massages help and the exercises I’ve been getting seem to help too.

Nevertheless, I’m going to skip a few days running just to see if that actually helps or not. I’ve noticed that some days it feels better, some days worse, but I can’t really make a correlation with running yet. However, that’s really the big thing I did not do while on vacation.

On other news, I bought a dumbbell set that allows me to change the weights. I just went for normal cast iron weights, a bit more expensive, but smaller and more durable. Now it’s much more flexible and I have a lot of weights at my disposal at home, instead of needing to buy specific dumbbells. This also means I started doing exercises with slightly heavier weights again, which I had stopped because of my wrists and never came back to them!

🍿 Entertainment

Live concerts 👩‍🎤 were one of the highlights of this month. I had the chance to see Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball in the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam and it was superb. It was a full two and a half hour show, with amazing vocals, amazing outfits, amazing dancers, amazing… just amazing. Probably one of my favorite concerts ever!

Not only did we see Lady Gaga, but we also went to Lorde’s Ultrasound tour, in a slightly smaller venue. It was also very nice and I think the way she used the lights was very smart and on point. Vocals were also very good, despite the singer having a bit of a cold.

When it comes to movies 🎥, we did not see that many. At the beginning of the month, we watched Witte Wieven and Cas at home, but we were a bit disappointed. Later in the month, we went to the cinema to watch Wicked: For Good, which was quite nice, but I think it was too long. I definitely enjoyed the live theater version in the Broadway more!

Finally, series 📺: there’s been quite a lot of them! We watched the first seasons of For All Mankind: a series showing a parallel reality where the space race actually ended up happening. What if Russia had put the first people on the moon? How would’ve the world reacted? Very nice, very interesting, really enjoyable. We also watched Boots, which I do really recommend.

🎮 Gaming

I might’ve started playing RuneScape a bit again. It’s one of those games that have been in my life since I was like… 11 or 12, and that I still come back to sometimes. There’s no other game that has ever that effect on me.

That was it! Until soon!