Tech for the blind! go fund me!

Please help Carol Anne to raise money for specialised tech stuff which she needs as a blind person. Share it with others if you can. πŸ™‚

Therapy Bits

So I have made a go fund me page. To raise money for the tech gadgets that I need, which are very expensive as they are specialised!
Can you all reblog, and or share this page with your friends? I’d really appreciate it!

https://www.gofundme.com/tech-for-the-blind

thanks guys!


View original post

A short round of this or that with girls names.

Here’s another, a bit shorter this time, round of this or that. Have fun, and let me know which ones you prefer, either in the comments or in your own blog posts. You can find my choices after all the names.

Charlotta or Carry?

Eeva or Ewa?

Elaine or Elizabeth?

Eline or Elyze?

Grace or Ginger?

Hannah or Anna?

Hanne or Hannia?

Harper or Molly?

Hedvig or Hyde?

Holly or Hope?

Honey or Heather?

Ida or Ivy?

Ila or Frida?

Ingrid or Isla?

Mai or Miki?

Maria or Margarita?

Miranda or Mariah?

Sarah or Samantha?

My choices?

Charlotta or Carry?

Charlotta.

Eeva or Ewa?

Eeva. I’m not a fan of either, I generally somehow dislike names from this family, but I particularly dislike Ewa. I don’t really know why, but the fact that it is quite overused here in Poland doesn’t make things better. Eeva is a bit better for me.

Elaine or Elizabeth?

Elizabeth, though both are lovable.

Eline or Elyze?

Eline. Elyze looks interesting, but is a little bit pretentious in my opinion.

Grace or Ginger?

Grace.

Hannah or Anna?

Definitely Anna. I love it so so much.

Hanne or Hannia?

Hannia looks nicely exotic so I’m going with it, but I’m rather neutral about both. Hanne is a bit too harsh imo.

Harper or Molly?

Harper.

Hedvig or Hyde?

Hyde is kinda odd. I saw it for the first time compiling this list, and at the begining I thought it was Hydee, you know, some anglicised form of Heidi. Hyde looks like hide, so despite I don’t like Hedvig at all, I choose Hedvig.

Holly or Hope?

Holly.

Honey or Heather?

Heather.

Ida or Ivy?

Ida, but I’d rather pronounce it in Polish – EE-dah. IE-dah sounds pretty weird to me.

Ila or Frida?

Ila, though again, I’d rather pronounce it with EE than IE like in Isla, because that’s more obvious to me and it sounds cute. Yes, I like Ila.

Ingrid or Isla?

Hm, I like both, but they have such a different feel to me so, I guess I like both similarly much but each in a completely different way. I guess Ingrid.

Mai or Miki?

Definitely Mai. I like this name because it’s a bit magical, and Mai means May in Welsh. While Miki is much more a male name in Poland, usually a diminutive of MikoΕ‚aj.

Maria or Margarita?

Maria.

Miranda or Mariah?

Miranda.

Sarah or Samantha?

Sarah.

Come on guys, play along. πŸ™‚

Lisa Ekdahl- Papillas Samba (Papilla’s Samba).

This song was originally written by one of my music crushes, Cornelis Vreeswijk, and appeared in the film “Svarta Palmkronor” (Black Palm Crowns in Swedish), where Cornelis also played. I, however, want to share with you another version of this song, sang by Lisa Ekdahl, a quite known Swedish artist, mainly jazz artist. I can’t say I like her music, quite frankly I don’t like most of it, but I do like this song in her version a lot. The song in her version appeared on a compillation in tribute to Cornelis Vreeswijk called “Den Flygande HollΓ€ndaren” (The Flying Dutchman”, the title is in referrence to his Dutch origin.

Question of the day (28th September).

When was the last time you had to follow instructions?

My answer:

Today, from my Mum, when I was learning to clean our little kids’ new litterbox. It’s the kind I can clean, when you shake it the poo is separated from the sand so you can take it out easily.

How about you?

Song of the day (28th September) – I See Rivers – “Barefoot”.

Hi. πŸ™‚

ANd I’m behind again! Sorry for not posting this yesterday.

I See Rivers are a newish band to me. They’re three Norwegian girls living in Wales, and doing really interesting music. This is my favourite song from them.

I am just so darn lucky! πŸ˜ 

Guess what? I’ve got the skin infectionn on my leg, again. I was writing about it early this year, that I get very weird skin infections, or whatever it is, on my calves and I can’t, no one can’t, figure out the reason. I’ve been to three dermatologists and two surgeons with it and everyone is kinda clueless. I thought it’s maybe allergy, but I can’tfigure out what could I be allergic to that I don’t know of, and I don’t apply any chemicals on my skin nowadays consciously, most of the cosmetics I use are homemade by our lifestyle guru – my Mum, the rest are either al natural or hypoallergic, if I need to use anything else which is extremely rarely. Hell my Mum even got me tested for diabetes because we were worried it’s healing for so long, but I don’t have it. I’ve been told I once had staphylococcus in it, but not much more, and I’ve got a lot of meds for it, which worked sometimes more, sometimes less, but always very slowly.
It doesn’t look too bad because it’s always small and I’ve never had any complications, but as I said it heals for ages, like a few months, and I have scars after that shit, I have it twice a year, so if it doesn’t stop, I wonder how my legs will look in ten years time. It’s also pretty painful most of the time and makes long walking or standing a bit hard.
I’ve felt my leg hurting since last night but I didn’t figure out it can be that until I saw it bleeding when I was going to shower a few hours ago. I was mad.
I wouldn’t be whining at all, after all I kinda got used to it and many people, including me have to deal with worse and more important things, but this time it drives me crazy for a reason.
It means that, AGAIN, I won’t be able to ride for God knows how long. Some part of me is starting to wonder whether I actually should still insist on riding if there have been so many things speaking against it over the years. Maybe it would be wiser to give it up, or maybe there’s something else that God has planned for me, but I can’t accept it, and won’t. Not yet at least. I guess I just have to wait some more. Maybe then I’ll get some luck with riding finally. But OMG I’m so angry with this!

Question of the day.

So this week is the week in which you…?

My answer:

…feel a bit better than last week. Have a lot of changes to get used to. Have my laptop back and am catching up on things and getting used to all the new things in it. Am getting to know my new cat Sasha and still worrying about Misha. Thinking hypothetically about a new name for Sasha because Zofijka now says she doesn’t like Sasha, and although I think the names match well together, I also am not sure now if Sasha is actually a good choice. We’d like a Russian name, although Zofijka comes up with loads of very common-sounding names like Lucky, Rocky, Happy, Ozzy. Ozzy’s good, but, uh… Ozzy Osbourne… I have mixed feelings. And it certainly doesn’t match Misha at all. Misha and Ozzy… Meh. We thought about Dima, Mitya, Pyetya, Nikita, ugh, no, it doesn’t fit him at all. My Dad suggested Grisha, but it’s way too matchy, he even suggested Putin, but, oh well, do I have to comment? πŸ˜€ So we just don’t know, I silently hope he stays Sasha, even though I’m doubtful myself if it’s the right decision. Am looking forward to horse riding, but still don’t know when that happens exactly.

How about your week? πŸ™‚

Frida Andersson – Jag Saknar Dej (I Miss You_.

This is a beautiful song in my opinion. I’ve translated the title as “I Miss You”, but in fact it is “I Lack You”, though I wasn’t sure if such phrase actually exists and is natural in English, it doesn’t look like it is. There even is a line in the song that “I don’t miss having you here any longer, but I lack you”, so I guess we should differentiate missing from lacking. So do Swedes, so do we Poles, and maybe the Anglophones do as well but I just don’t know. πŸ˜€ As for Frida Andersson, she is the moreinteresting for me that she is from Finland, and she is a Swedish native-speaker. For those of you who don’t know, yes, there is a Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, of people who speak Swedish as their first language, and Swedish is also another official language of Finland after Finnish, and also is teached in school as a second language, compulsory, I guess, and don’t worry if you didn’t know it and think you’re ignorant, because I – a Swedophile and Finnophile – didn’t know it until just like 2-3 years ago, I learned about it years after my fascination with the Swedish language started. That’s ignorance! πŸ˜€ And even my Dad – who is a very good geographer and taught me capitals of all the European countries and which currencies they have and other stuff – he was very surprised when I told him that. Finns are way too secretive. πŸ˜€ I say it’s interesting because Finnish accent in Swedish sounds very interesting. It’s actually cute and funny to me, doesn’t sound so serious, elegant and regal as Swedish in Stockholm for example. I like it, I like different words they have for things, like for example in standard Swedish the phrase a little bit is “lite”, but Finns often say “pikulite”. Or they have a word “pirrig”, which means jittery (or something like this πŸ˜€ ) and from what my teacher told me it’s used by Swedish-speaking Finns, though I’ve seen it used bo non Finns too.

Anyway, putting my Finnophilic musings aside, I was going to, and tried, to make translation of these lyrics, as they’re not very difficult to understand, but I find it rather tricky to translate stuff from Swedish to English or vice versa, so I left it, still though, the song is beautiful.

Song of the day (26th September) – Fiona Bevan – “Slo Mo Tiger Glo”.

Hi guys! πŸ™‚

The song for yesterday seems to be very catchy, I can’t get it out of my head since I heard it recently. But to be very honest I don’t try very hard because of course I like it, so I don’t mind. Hope you’ll like it too. πŸ™‚

I’m back!!!! A little ramble.

HEY HI PEOPLE!!!!

How have you been doing? πŸ™‚

Yes! Fortunately, or not, depends on who you’d ask, I’m still alive. I’m sorry I’ve been MIA for so freakin’long, but, if I’m honest, there was little to no influence I had on it. As you probably know from my earlier posts, my laptop got screwed up, I guess it wasn’t anything major, but I wasn’t even able to use my screen-reader, so it needed to be fixed, and also it’s just plain old so it needed some refresh in general. It wouldn’t last so long if I’d send it right away to the company I finally sent it to, they’re a company mostly distributing specialised equipment for the blind across the country, but they also do servicing sometimes. I sent my previous laptop to them and they did a brilliant job. But before I sent this one to them, I tried with my local IT specialist, who doesn’t have a clue about screen-readers nor anything typhlo it-related, but I hoped he’ll be able to fix it. He wasn’t. And then when I finally decided to send it to that company, there even were issues with the post office, so the actual fixing was the shortest of all that.

It was so frustrating to me, and I was bored to death. Also wasn’t doing well mentally with very very high anxiety and quite a huge mood dip, which I’m still not fully out of.

Maybe you remember I wastrying to blog from my Braille-Sense, but it turned out to be not a good idea, because it was freezing so often it was way too arduous, especially when it was freezing so badly that I had to reboot it and write stuff from the beginning.

I’ve got a new keyboard to my laptop – as well as some other new stuff and while it’s good, I find it a bit hard to get used to all the changes – I actually never had any problems with my old keyboard and it was just fine, but the guy who serviced my laptop suggested I’d rather get a new keyboard because in his opinion it’s getting old and uncomfortable. This new one’s pretty cool, although I guess the Space key is somewhat sluggish or I’m just typing too fast or too gently, or maybe it just needs time, anyway if you’d see some words without spaces you now know why, sorry, I’ll try to reduce it but I may not notice everything.

So to finally step away from the IT, I’d like to update you on two little things, that in fact are pretty big and new to my life.

First thing is sad, or actually part of it is very, very sad. This week I had therapy on Monday – I now have it on Mondays, not Fridays – and after that as we were riding back home, we drove past the stud where I’d been horse riding, but havent’ for like half a year or even longer, at first because of some health issues I had myself, then exams, and then my tutor being busy and – as it turned out, having financial and other issues, hence she didn’t get in touch with us for so long. So Mum said maybe we’d look for her and ask what’s going on, if something happened, ’cause you never know, maybe she lost our phone or just waits for us to contact her… I agreed it is a good idea and she just went on her own to look for her and Mum told me she – my riding instructor – was kinda emotional, she was telling her about the issues they’re having, looking quite miserable, which just astonished me so much, because she’s always such a dynamic, spontaneous and lively person. And Mum asked her whether then there is any possibility I could get back to riding at her’s, because it’s highly unlikely we could find someone as versatile and knowledgeable as her. And she then bursted with tears, as my Mum said, which is even more not like her. And she told Mum that my horse, I mean my regular horse on which I was riding most often, and for longest – he died… From what she said it had to be a while ago, but she still can’t get over it, neither can I, although somewhere in the back of my head I had a creepy suspicion that that might be the reason why she isn’t contacting us. My Mum told her something scary, that for me it doesn’t matter on which horse I ride, I just want to stay in her stud. I mean yes, I still want to ride despite my lovely “little” horse died, but it sounded so insensitive to me when Mum repeated it to me, as if I wouldn’t care at all. I do a lot, and can’t accept it either. My Mum didn’t intend to say anything bad though, she just doesn’t realise how you can have the bond with a horse, she’s afraid of them and doesn’t understand them at all. I’m only glad that ŁoΕ› didn’t have any particular illness that killed him, he was just very, very old, although when I last saw him he had bronchitis and I was scared it was that and that he could live even a little longer if not that. But luckily it wasn’t bronchitis. I so regret I couldn’t even say goodbye to him. I kinda feel like some little part of my soul has died, only a little one thankfully, because we weren’t always training regularly, and it was only an hour a week, nevertheless a very important part, and i feel weird without it, thinking I’ll never see him again. 😦 It made me think a lot about Misha, and what will I do if he dies. That would be so scary if I left him. And I think a lot about my instructor, she was so bonded with him, they were like one, they knew each other so well and trusted one another so much that it was visible even to me. NO wonder she’s devastated. 😦

And another news is good, I suppose, we’ll see what comes out of it long term. We have a new family member. A new friend for Misha. A first real life animal friend for Misha. It’s another Russian blue, he’s not even 4 months old, it’s his first day with us, and his name is Sasha. He’s a complete opposite from Misha. He’s very very cuddly, purring very loudly, while Misha’s purr is rarely heard if you don’t lie very close and tight to him, and he’s very brave. He’s already adapted I suppose. And it’s just a day. In Misha’s case, he didn’t let anyone come closer to himfor a day, and meowed desperately and heartbreakingly for like two weeks I guess. And my Mum says he’s never fully adapted, as he’s still so timid and incredibly anxious and would rather be alone. I just think it’s the way he is, and he wouldn’t change anywhere.

We – me and Zofijka – saw an interesting relationship between our cats and us two. You see – Misha is officially my cat, because it is me who is his actual owner and buyer. Unofficially, he used to be mine and Zofijka’s, so that she wouldn’tbe jealous, though of course everyone here likes Misha at least a bit, gives him snacks so in practice he’s the cat of all of us obviously. Now though as Sasha is with us, he’s a bit more Zofijka’s than anybody else’s, just like Misha is a bit more mine. And here’s what we saw.

Me and Misha are incredibly similar to each other, and now it turns out so are Zofijka and Sasha are too very similar personalities. There has to be something true in what my Mum says that the cat is just like it’s owner. πŸ˜€

We – me and Misha – are both Aquariuses, to begin with, his birthday is just two days before mine, we’re both loners, tend to be anxious and avoid other beings than each other and some safe people, but practically I don’t know if we haveany really completely safe people, there’s always risk involved, right? We both like and want to be close with others in theory, but in practice it’s way too scary to even try so we run away before we even can be touched, unless there are some special circumstances. We both HATE strangers and spend hours isolated from the world after a major stress. We’re both sensitive, we both hate noises and being completely lonely without anyone else in theΒ  house. We’d rather be with someone, but a proper distance needs to be kept, usually. We are both night owls. We both have quite acute senses, though in Misha’s case it’s more visible, however I don’t know how much of it is his own trait and how much is just because he’s a cat, and a Russian blue, still, he’s very alert and acts a bit as if he was overstimulated sometimes and then he either retreats or gets kinda elated. We both are curious and like to observe our surroundings carefully, but again, preferably from some distance, as it makes for a much better view. We both can walk very quietly (well unless there isn’t anything unexpected standing somewhere on the way, as for me πŸ˜€ ) which is useful for the above mentioned observing surroundings, even though neither of us intends to “slink” really, and is funny sometimes because people are deaf and dont’ hear us so they get scared as if we were ghosts. We both are somewhat picky and whimsical which manifests itself in different things for both of us. etc. etc. etc… boy, he was even born via Caesarean section just like me. And we’re both accused of being haughty while we’re not. πŸ˜€ And we highly value our privacy. I strongly believe he has quite a good sense of humour, and so (as I strongly believe) do I!

We can’t say much about Sasha at this stage, but what we know makes him a perfect match for Zofijka already. They’re both Gemini, Sasha’s birthday is actually a week after Zofijka’s. They’re both very brave and adventurous – so is Misha, but in a different way, Misha’sΒ  more of an escapist, as I see it. They’re boh very playful and energetic, Sasha is much more energetic than Misha. I always thought Misha is like a volcano, but in comparison to Sasha, he is almost like an old guy, I think though Sasha will energise him a bit, he needs it. Both Sasha and Zofijka are quite big for their age, not very big, but slightly bigger than the norm would predict, he’ll be bigger than Misha when he grows up probably. They both like to be in the centre of attention, like making friends. They’re both cuddly and crave a lot of love and warmth. They both eat like horses and seem to like changes, I can’t say it about Sasha for sure, the more that Russian blues apparently rather don’t like them.

I think maybe Sasha will be able to in a way replace ŁoΕ› for me, he came into our lives just in the right moment, and very suddenly. My Mum just in one of her frequent impulses phoned Misha’s former breeder and asked if she could make a reservation for a second cat. He said that it actually won’t be necessary, because there’s a little one who should’ve be taken to a new home, but the guy who wanted him didn’t come despite a few days passing. So we had him home just the very same day.

What I’m worried about is Misha. He seems to be very unsettled. He has never seen a single cat before other than from the window or on the TV or pictures or stuff. Heseems to feel rejected, and afraid of Sasha, even though he’s older, and Sasha doesn’t care much about Misha’s hostility and wants to play with him, or just ignores his uncle happily – yes, Misha is Sasha’s bio uncle hahaha. Despite he’s afraid though, Misha protects his territory quite fiercely and we can see emotions flooding through him. Man I didn’t know he can make such creepy sounds. He just growls at him, not even just hisses. It sounds scary. Old, scary, possessed uncle Misha. πŸ˜€ I want my little Misha back. I’m kinda afraid he won’t accept him, but try to think positively, after all everyone would be unsettled seeing some being of their own kind after nearly 3 years of peaceful life as The One And Only. And it’s slightly better than it was in the morning or last night.

OK, so it would be all from me for now I guess. Hope I’ll be finally able to write the daily series posts and some more tomorrow.

So happy to be back at the blogosphere. Missed y’all terribly.

I’m gonna check what our little kids are doing and maybe one of them would be willing to sleep with me, at least Sasha, I guess Misha is still too overloaded to be able to think about sleeping with someone, he’s even barely eaten today.

Rare Classy Girls Names

I love rare classic names, many of them. And maybe you, my readers, will find some that you like too on this list.
My most favourite is Cordelia definitely. I love Cornelia, and that’s probably the reason why I love Cordelia too. πŸ˜€ Plus the Anne Shirley association, and I love the nickname Delia, and the meaning daughter of the sea is gorgeous.
I also like Flora and Moira.
Which are your favourites?