How to call an async function from a non-async function?

With that in mind, would you be so kind as to take a look at my problem Replace threadsafe var with new concurrency model (Actor?) of replacing a ThreadsafeVar with an Actor?

It seemed like a good idea, but the ThreadsafeVar is actually "unbalanced", in that the "getter" is synchronous but the "setter" is asynchronous - whereas an Actor is async in both directions.

Setting the var on the actor asynchronously is no problem - what I couldn't get to grips with was getting the value back.

Or should I stick with what I've got and understand that this is something that actors just aren't meant to be able to do?