Question of the day.

Hi people! 🙂

Is there a type of candy/dessert etc. you absolutely hate?

My answer:

Sure! Just as I love a lot of candy, desserts and stuff there are also such that I hate. I hate any kind of candy filled with alcohol, they’re gross. I hate strawberry-flavoured chocolate, in fact I dislike a lot of flavoured chocolates with fillings, plain milk chocolate or with hazelnuts or dark is best. I hate anything banana-flavoured. I hate marzipan. As I mentioned in response to Kacha’s comment in an earlier post, I hate tiramisu, anything with mascarpone really. That’s what first comes to my mind.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

What is your favourite type of sweet drink?

My answer:

For a long time I’d say something like either Pepsi or Cola, but I think lately it’s been orange juice. I’ve always loved orange juice –
though I’ve had quite a long time where it was a no-no because of my emetophobia as I once felt very awful and threw up after it and no matter how much I liked it, I would not have it, but over time my emetophobia has lessened enough that I can drink it with little to no emotional problem and I’ve figured it couldn’t be the orange juice that had caused it because there were many more factors involved – but recently I’ve been drinking a lot of it and I really love it. Another sweet drink I love but had a similar emetophobia-related association with is cocoa, and since I started drinking it again, I love it even more. So actually I don’t know which one I like more, cocoa or orange juice, but I have orange juice much more often. And when I drink cocoa it has to be strong so it isn’t all that very sweet.

You? 🙂

Question of the day (27th September).

What is your favourite type of dessert that is NOT cake, pie, or candy?

My answer:

I don’t know if it counts as a cake or pie or not but I love meringue with whipped cream and fruit, especially blueberries and peaches, but a lot of other fruits work well with this too. If this doesn’t count, hmm… I like a lot of things really, haha… perhaps muffins? Muffins are great!

What would you choose? 🙂

Question of the day (27th September).

What is your favourite type of pie?

My answer:

My Mum makes very good apple pie, and pies with other fruits as well, like blackberry pie. I think these are my most favourite.

Yours? 🙂

Question of the day (26th September=.

Hi people! 🙂

Recently we talked about our favourite cakes, so let’s talk some more about yummy sweet things.

What is your favourite type of candy?

My answer:

I have very many favourite types of candy, but the ones I’ve been particularly loving recently are Bomilla caramel hard candies. We’ve got a lot of these for ourselves with Sofi and still have a large supply. I don’t even know if they’re called Bomilla any longer because now that I’ve tried searching for it to see if Bomilla is a thing anywhere else it turns out it was a Polish brand and actually doesn’t exist any longer, but I’ve always known this type of candy as Bomilla since Bomilla was the first brand of them that I had and these are pretty much identical with the Bomilla ones.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

Hi people! 🙂

We’ve had similar questions before, but I thought there’s never too much of a yummy thing and perhaps there will be some new peeps who’d also like to answer.

What is your favourite type of cake?

My answer:

I think my very most favourite would have to be toffee cake. It’s really sweet though, so you can’t each much at once, but it’s such a delicious cake!

Yours? 🙂

My core strengths.

A while back, I wrote about

my core values

using Hannah Braime’s book The Year of You as an inspiration. Today, I thought I’d publicly tackle the very next prompt from the same book, which is very similar and asks about “What are your core strengths? (…)”.

The author suggests using the

Via Strengths Survey

for those who are not familiar with the concept.

I did this prompt in my diary before, and was not familiar with the strengths thing, so I did the test, and if you haven’t so far and would like to know about your strengths and share them in the comments – give it a go. 🙂 – Unlike many other personality tests, it seems to be quite reasonable or at least my results make a lot of sense to me. So here’s what Via Character thinks to be my core/signature strengths and what I think about it, join in and let me know about yours and how you feel about them. 🙂

      Perspective.

Perspective is definitely something important for me. I like to look at things from different perspectives and angles, think out of the box, put myself in others’ shoes. Via Characters says that if your core strength is perspective, it means that people come to you for counsel and advice. Well yeah, a lot of people do and I sometimes wonder why because I’m not that very experienced in life at all. It especially makes me laugh how a lot of people, including my own mother, come to me to rant or ask for advice when they have problems in their relationships with their significant others. It’s funny because I’ve always been single and people ask me sometimes as if I was some couple therapist or something. It’s funny and sometimes I find it challenging because if a person has come to me with this they expect some sort of help and I’m always worried that I won’t be able to do that so I try my best to empathise with them and imagine myself in the same situation even if it’s very abstractive because I never experienced anything like it. But if people ask me so often, I figure I must be good at it, after all. No idea if that’s true though. 😀 I like to imagine how it must be to be other people, which helps me to be more empathetic. I think I am more empathetic because of my imagination than because of actual ability to feel the same things as others do. I like my often broad way of thinking. But I must say it was a surprise for me that perspective is my #1 strength.

   Kindness.

This was another sort of surprise for me, because, yeah, I do try to be kind and helpful to people, but I somehow wouldn’t think of it to be as strong a trait in me to be considered a core strength. On the other hand a lot of people tell me that I’m kind, and my Mum is always extremely kind to people and goes out of her way to help them so I may have it after her to an extend. I often find it difficult though to be as kind to people as I’d like to be and express my kindness fully, because of my struggles with human interactions and expressing emotions, so to some people I come across as icy and not particularly kind.

   Humour.

This is a trait I feel really grateful to have. It is one of my most helpful and most used coping skills. I think if I didn’t have a sense of humour and a distance to things my life would be much more difficult. As it is, things can still be difficult, but I can find funny/absurd things to it anyway and I don’t have to put an effort into finding them which would be difficult when you’re depressed, I just notice them anyway. I believe it must be so much worse to have depression in particular when you have no sense of humour to help you out, not even the most cynical and dark one. Actually after some thinking I realised that what I just wrote sounded like cynical or dark humour is worse than any other but in fact I think it’s far more superior and practical in life. 😀

   Creativity.

I’m no artsy type, or as Sofi hilariously calls it “plast plast” (as in plasticine, there was a TV programme years ago called “Plastelinek I Przyjaciele” (Plastelinek And Friends), where Plastelinek was a sort of creature made of plasticine and he encouraged kids to do art and visited schools and when he was excited about something he exclaimed “Plast plast!) Sofi is very plast plast, but I never was and never even particularly wanted to be. I used to do some music but was very mediocre at it, perhaps except for singing judging from people’s reactions but I didn’t particularly enjoy in the long-term any of the ways of making music that I tried, and decided that I feel much better as a listener and observer of it rather than a performer. I’ve done some creative writing but have always felt very self-conscious about it and don’t think it’s particularly good, and now I do much less of it. Yet I still consider myself very creative because of how I think. I have lots of ideas, I am a synaesthete and I love to play around with words. I have weird associations with things, even beyond the synaesthesia, which enable me to see things differently than most people may. I have (or at least used to have, as I’m still in a very painful limbo) fazas, which have always been a huge boost for my creativity. And I’m very imaginative. I think it’s enough to have the right to call oneself creative.

   Judgment.

I consider myself a good judge of character indeed. Other people seem to agree with that a lot too. I think it’s a very useful trait to have. I like to observe people and think what they might be like. I also have the whole name and personality theory that you know about if you’re a regular reader, and if you don’t, better don’t get me started as I can’t go on about this for ages. 😀 I used to trust in this ability of mine a bit too much though, usually without even realising it, and instead of thinking that the person might be as I think they should be given my observations/any other evidence for that that I may have, I readily assumed that they must be how I imagined them to be. A lot of the time, I was right, but I had to have a few strong reality checks before I realised what I was actually doing and that I didn’t have to always be right because people can seriously be so complicated. I still love to figure out people’s characters and play around with the name characterisations but it’s not like I start out with the assumption that it has to be how I think, it’s more like a help for me with what I can possibly expect from a person but I don’t form my opinion about people based on what I imagine they must be like. It’s also a good coping skill for me which is why I used it to such an extend. I like to know what someone may be like, their reactions to things etc. in advance, it feels safer. This judgment thing also prevent me from disliking people. A lot of people who are socially anxious or struggling with similar things say they don’t like people and I can very well understand it. But while mingling with people is an awful chore for me, I love to analyse their behaviours, observe people, they can be so very fascinating! So I just can’t say I don’t like or hate people! I am also very careful when making any more important decisions, and careful with everything really, and have to consider everything when making a decision. Like yesterday, I was facing a potentially at least somewhat life-changing decision and I’m still digging deep into it, learning about all pros and cons and still haven’t made the final, actual decision.

In conclusion, overall I think this was pretty accurate, and I feel very grateful for these strengths I have and that I can make use of them.

Now you tell me about yours. 🙂

 

 

Question of the day.

If you could gain perfect fluency in any language instantly, but only one language, which would you choose?

My answer:

Oh my, this one’s so hard! I’d like to be perfectly fluent in ALL my languages, as quickly as only possible. But… one language… I think I’m going to go with the most difficult one out of the ones I want to learn, which I guess would be Sami, especially considering the small amount of speakers and even smaller of resources. If I could be fluent in any of the Sami languages (preferably Luleå Sami but any will do) that would be very helpful.

You? 🙂

Question of the day (23rd September).

Does anyone in your family speak a language that you don’t?

My answer:

As I wrote earlier, my Dad speaks Kashubian, as does my gran and a lot of other people on my Dad’s side of the family. Some people in my Mum’s family who have lived here for a while have also learned enough of it to speak fairly well, apparently my grandma’s brother speaks Kashubian so well that no one can tell that he’s not a Kashub and some people who have married into my Mum’s family are Kashubs and can speak more or less Kashubian. My gran also speaks some German as she has some German heritage and was going to a German-speaking school but she remembers very little of it now. My Mum knows some Russian from school. When she was going to school, Russian was an obligatory language at schools here rather than English so everyone learned it, but while my Dad for example doesn’t remember almost anything, my Mum still has some vocabulary and often says she’d like to learn more of it, she can also read the Russian alphabet well and understands much more that she can say herself, my mum also has Russian roots since both my maternal grandparents do, she has a kind of sentiment for Russian language, culture and literature. Because of this, it’s not surprising that my maternal grandparents can also speak some Russian, I guess my grandma’s is actually quite decent and since she was born in what used to be Russia back then she also still has a very distinguishable eastern accent as do all of her siblings. Also both my maternal grandparents have been forever fascinated with France and studied French and seem to be good at it as well, and my grandad knows Latin very well. Some other of my family members also know some bits of Latin if they had it at uni like my Godmother but my grandad actually makes use of it. Sofi can speak bits of Spanish but can’t really communicate. She has started learning German this year at school as well and so far it’s surprising that while she’s not doing well with English, she’s doing very well with German even though it’s objectively a more difficult language from a Polish perspective. My one uncle works a lot in Norway and can speak some Norwegian, pretty well as far as I can tell, and my other uncle works in Germany and knows a little German but not too much. My grandma’s relatives can speak Belarussian as she also has Belarussian heritage. It’s funny with my cousin, who has learnt Italian since early school age and has always loved the language. She later discovered that she has a calling for religious life and has joined the Salesian sisters a few years ago, and this year they sent her to Italy for novitiate. So it’s definitely proven very useful.

How about your family? 🙂

Question of the day (22nd September).

Did you ever study a foreign language by yourself?

My answer:

Sure, I think that’s the best way of learning a language if only you can manage to do it this way because no one knows what works for you quite as well as you do, and no one knows as well as you do what things you enjoy so only you can make your language learning thoroughly enjoyable. I’ve been learning English by myself since I left the blind boarding school when I started hanging around the Anglophone Interwebs and realised what I was already beginning to think years earlier, that school, any school really (at least I haven’t encountered a school over here that would be really good with languages unless it specialises in it but even then it’s no guarantee) isn’t going to teach me a language, and if I want to communicate in English and understand people I’d have to do it by myself. What school had done so far was it only managed to discourage me in some way, but thankfully more from English as a subject, which I found infinitely boring, rather than English as a language, but it was very close to it as well. I was pretty good at English at school most of the time and that was part of why I disliked the subject, that a lot of the time I had little to no constructive stuff to do in class.

Sometimes I feel like a kind of jerk when I say that I’ve taught myself English, first because I was going to school for so many years so surely it must have had some impact, and also I don’t really feel and never did like I put a whole lot of effort into my English learning, like most people do when they teach themselves anything. And yes, I did get the beginnings from school, as I wrote in the last post, I’m absolutely sure it all wouldn’t go as smoothly as it did if I had to start from scratch completely on my own. And I am extremely grateful for the bits and pieces that school did give me. But with what I got from school, while I had very good grades at English and could have a very basic conversation with someone with a lot of good will on both sides, I wasn’t really able to communicate effectively nor comprehend English very well either when reading or listening. I also don’t think it’s something fully due to my own merrit that I’ve managed to learn English to the extend that I did and as smoothly and easily as I did. I don’t believe in a “linguistic talent” because if it was the matter of talent we would have much more mute people or people with all sorts of language/speech disorders than we do, we also wouldn’t have had as much migration because people wouldn’t be able to learn another country’s language. But there are certainly some traits that people may or may not have that may make it easier to absorb languages, like a talent for catching the phonetics which I seem to have. And I think that has simplified the whole thing for me a whole lot, I also like learning languages and if someone does not, it’s typically going to take more time.

But even if I do have some particular language skills, I still feel like my English learning was kind of miraculous and insanely speedy given how little conscious effort I put into it. I immersed myself a lot into English, listening to different accents and just a lot of stuff in English and wanted to learn to distinguish different accents better than I could, and possibly also imitate them. I read a lot in English on the web so that it quickly became my habit that if I was googling something I did it automatically in English rather than Polish and still do. – I changed the interfaces of the devices/apps I used to English. I wrote my journal at least partly in English. Later I started penpalling which was at first very strenuous indeed for me to understand people and write in a comprehensive way, writing to a pen pal would take me ages but after that my brain would be buzzing in English for the next 24 hours so it was clear that it was doing me a lot of good, and over time, not very much time at all, it became less of a chore and much more of a pleasure and I think it’s penpalling and blogging that has been helping me the most. Then when I was already able to communicate quite well I also started this blog which had been my dream for years. Later yet, I started to read some books in English when I got access to them, and nowadays, I think the amounts of books I read in Polish and English are quite equal, and it has also been a very smooth transition, although it still requires more concentration from me to read books in English, but not the point where it would be uncomfortable or something.

While in my final year of college/high school I had briefly English classes with a private tutor, I thought it could be more helpful to show me what exactly my level is and what I have still to do, or at least help me to prepare for my finals. It did only one good thing for me. My teacher was super chatty and we talked a lot, so my conversational skills have improved. That was good as generally my daily, serious use of English evolves around writing, reading and listening (by “serious” I mean excluding talking to myself and conversating with Misha). I was already good with accents and such but nevertheless not particularly confident in speaking, and talking to him helped me to feel more at ease with it, at least in terms of language skills, as of course there’s also the whole socialising and peopling stress involved which is a totally different thing and can also affect things no matter in which language. Thanks to this, he certainly helped me to prepare for my oral English final exam as well. But other than that, it didn’t really take me anywhere further than I was and my general English level didn’t change because of it. So yeah, I think with English, I learned the most by myself. It’s been about six years since I left the boarding school and thus since I seriously started to learn English on my own, and I’ve learnt more in these 5 years than I did during English classes.

I am also currently learning Swedish by myself, although I started out with a tutor and, unlike school and the English tutor, he did a whole lot for me and I’m sure that if I didn’t meet someone like him, I wouldn’t be able to learn Swedish nor any language on my own now. He worked with me for two years first since I was 10, then we had a long break when I had to go back to the blind school as the integration school didn’t work out and that meant there was no way for us to meet up really. I avoided even the slightest contact with or any mention of Swedish as fire while at the boarding school because I felt like if I couldn’t learn it anymore it was pointless to think of it and it only made me feel extremely depressed, frustrated and angry. I forgot most of what I learned at least on a conscious level. But then I got the faza on Cornelis Vreeswijk when I was 17 and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. The more my faza developed, the more I felt almost literally how all the stuff I forgot was flooding my brain again, and I kept accidentally learning new, sophisticated words from his lyrics and poems, then I even managed to translate totally spontaneously a few of his poems with the little Swedish I had and these translations were really quite damn good as for my generally very poor Swedish skills by then. As it happened, the year I got that faza also turned out to be my last year at the boarding school, and in the autumn of that year I reconnected with my Swedish teacher. During our first lesson, he asked me to just say a few sentences in Swedish, whatever I was able to say, and neither of us was expecting much but I was actually able to express myself fairly coherently. He was very surprised and at first thought that I was learning by myself at school somehow or managed to find another tutor there after all, but then I told him that I was only kind of learning since about May but not really in a very serious way, and he said my brain must have somehow skipped over the most basic stages in no time because I actually knew more than what we’d covered in the past when I was in the integration school. That was weird, but that’s fazas for you, make your brain do strangely intense things without feeling like you’re doing much at all. 😀 I loved it and I kept skipping like that for a while yet.

But, skipping or no skipping, I certainly wouldn’t be able to be where I am with my Swedish and with other languages where I am now if he wouldn’t take up the challenge and try to teach me even though he had no idea about teaching blind people and even though back then when we were starting I didn’t even have an idea about any technologies or stuff so it all was really complicated. Most language teachers I’ve encountered are much more of scaredy cats. I just wouldn’t have the confidence that I am actually able to do it.

Now I’m no longer having lessons with him since a few years and I can learn Swedish on my own. With the help of emails from my Swedish pen pals, the Swedish Internet, some Swedish books, mostly children’s, that I can get, and loads and loads and loads of listening. That trip to Stockholm I once went for has also tremendously helped me, as well as my friendship with Jacek from Helsinki and meeting different people through him. I get very little practice in form of writing or speaking these days and somehow can’t figure out how best to change it, at least in terms of writing where it is more doable, in a way that would feel good and not like a chore, which makes me feel that my Swedish is kind of clunky and that it could be better, and I somehow feel like it has regressed a little bit since when my English has started improving so rapidly but I am definitely able to communicate with people and understand everything I read or hear unless it’s extremely sophisticated or someone speaks very fast with an accent that I don’t really get, like Scanian for example. 😀

And now I’m also learning Welsh by myself as there’s no other option, as for many of my other languages. I’d actually like it if there was someone in my area who could teach me so I wouldn’t have to think about resources and stuff but it could be just as effective as all of my English classes in the past so perhaps it’s better that I’m dealing with it oon my own. The biggest problem is that there aren’t overly many resources but since I’ve found a website for Welsh learners with a lot of courses and stuff it’s become much easier and structured for me and I don’t have to constantly be on the look out for new things in case I run out of the resources I have now or they stop being helpful. It’s also fairly accessible. Listening is definitely my main way of learning Welsh as it’s kind of a priority in my courses, I’m terribly slow at reading and my vocab could be better but at least with the latter I’m sure I’ll get there in time. I’d also really really like to be better at listening as my brain is kind of sluggish when processing auditory input in Welsh haha. So far, despite I’ve had a Welsh faza, I haven’t had such a speedy jumping like with ENglish and Swedish, with Welsh it would be even better because it’s more difficult, and I’ve actually found learning it much more strenuous than the other two languages, but no less exciting.

And with all of my other languages, I think I’ll also be learning them by myself.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day (21st September).

Did you have foreign language classes in your school?

My answer:

I had English classes from the beginning of primary until the end of my formal education, and German kind of on and off since fourth grade in primary until the end of secondary. But I don’t feel like the classes gave me much beyond teaching me the very beginnings of English which could perhaps be hard if I didn’t have them at school.

How was it with you? If you did have language classes, do you feel like you actually benefitted from them in any way? Or maybe quite the opposite? 🙂

Question of the day (20 September).

What other languages do you speak, if any?

My answer:

This is another thing that I’m sure a lot of you know about me as I write about it a lot and my languages are an important part of my life. But if you don’t, or doon’t remember, so far, other than my native language and obviously English, I can also speak Swedish, I’d say on an upper intermediate or advanced level or thereabouts, and Welsh, which I think would classify as lower intermediate. I also used to learn German at school but my actual knowledge of this language these days is very poor and most of it that I know is by similarity of the words with other languages that I know.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day (19th September).

Hey people! 🙂

Let’s talk languages for a while. Simple question for now:

What’s your native language?

My answer:

As most of you on here surely know, my native language is Polish. My Dad is Kashub and can also speak Kashubian but I only know little bits and pieces of it and can’t understand anything substantial if someone speaks really fluently and fast, also I don’t really identify myself strongly with Kashubian. But I do love Polish to bits and I’m so glad that it’s my native language. It’s cool, beautiful, and a great language to start out with if you want to learn difficult languages. 😀

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

Do you have any siblings? Do you fight or get along well?

My answer:

I’ve written about my siblings more extensively many times before, so I won’t here, but yes, for those of you who don’t know, I have a 21-year-old brother Olek (Aleksander) and a 13-year-old sister Zofijka (Zofia). With Olek, we neither fight nor get along particularly well, it’s all very very neutral. With Sofi, we both fight and get along well, depending on an occasion. We have a lot of differences, but at the same time it also means that we complement each other well. I don’t always believe in that opposites complement each other well in terms of people but here it seems to work a lot of the time. Whether we do the former or the latter, it’s always quite intense though.

You? 🙂

Question of the day (17th September).

Hi people! 🙂

Have you ever had couscous, or do you like it?

My answer:

Yes, I have had it. But let me give you a bit of a backstory first as I guess it might be interesting. The first time I had couscous was around the time when I started primary or perhaps during nursery yet. I had an aunt back then, who wasn’t my real, biological aunt, but I always called her aunt anyway and will always think of her as such. And whenever I think about couscous, I immediately think of her. 😀 She lived very close to my boarding school, and at some point during nursery, when my Mum realised that I was struggling there and wanted to do something about it, she was looking for a flat or a room to rent there so that she could be closer to me and so that we could live there at least temporarily and some of the time during the year. The prices were really high though in that part of the country and there weren’t that many satisfying offers anyway, and so finally during her search my Mum phoned just another real estate agent, who didn’t have anything to offer for her but felt really moved by our situation as it seemed and offered that, since she lived so close to the boarding school, she could be like my aunt and visit me or I could visit her and perhaps having someone like this would make things easier for me even though it wouldn’t be my actual family. Mum was euphoric, though I remember being rather skeptical about the idea. But it actually turned out to be a great thing, we got along very easily and I grew very attached to her. It wasn’t quite like as if I lived with my family and it didn’t resolve all the problems, but it did make things easier. I absolutely adored spending time in her house which was very different from my ownn or from any houses I had been to so far. I visited her on weekends or we went out somewhere. When my Mum couldn’t be at stuff like different contests, Nativity plays or other such that I might have taken part in, she would often come and cheer me, despite she neither had to nor actually should as she was chronically ill and had something with her immune system so it was a bit risky. When my Mum came to me for the weekend or longer rather than took me home, she let us stay at her home upstairs so we didn’t have to continuously spend the time in the boarding school. She was extremely altruistic, to the point that you could consider it foolish or extremely naive. My family and her had a lot in common, though also at the same time she was very different from them which attracted me all the more to her, and also we both shared a passion for figurines, which I collected at the time, mostly porcelain figurines, and so did she, and we exchanged a lot of our figurines. Sadly though, this relationship didn’t last too long, because over time she felt worse and worse physically and had a lot of familial problems, so couldn’t see me as regularly as she used to, and finally, some two years or so since we first met, she moved out with her daughter to the city. I tried to keep in touch with her and called her infrequently but regularly when I was at home and could do it, as I felt very grateful for what she did to me and knew she was struggling with a lot of things and of course my family also encouraged me to show my gratitude towards her, and she continued to have more and more health issues of her own and also her two granddaughters were very ill. And then at some point we lost touch. Both me and Mum tried to find her, as it seemed like she changed her phone number, and we both wanted to show her our gratitude and perhaps help if possible, but from what we could find out it seemed like she might just as well have moved out somewhere else and we were unable to trace her. So it’s been very many years since we’ve last heard from her and this sucks a lot, as I’d like her to know how very helpful she had been to me, and I’d like to be able to reciprocate somehow. Since she was in her early fifties when we were in touch and as I said she was already struggling a lot with her health, I’m not even sure if she’s still alive.

Anyway, she was also a real foodie and quite sophisticated in general and, during my stays at hers, I got to try a lot of things that were totally new to me. Like the couscous, for example.

Interestingly, I found it absolutely delicious and I was a real fan of couscous. But when, years later, I asked my Mum to make it and she did, somehow it wasn’t quite as good, and my Mum found it even more unpleasant. My Mum is a fab cook and often makes various grains so I wonder was it just that it wasn’t so new and exciting anymore, or did my aunt make it in some special way that made it have a bit more character or have I just grown out of couscousmania. Whatever the reason, these days I find couscous incredibly bland, and so does everyone else here, so we don’t really eat it in our house. Perhaps we’re just not classy enough hahaha. I know that, because it’s so neutral, you can combine it with a lot of things, but either we haven’t combined it with the right things or it’s just not our thing because no matter the additions, spices and stuff the couscous itself always feels bland.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

Do you like lime or lemon juice more? How do you drink it?

My answer:

I’m gonna say lemon just because I drink lemon juice more often, but they’re both pretty much equally good for me. I add lemon juice to water when I need a really refreshing drink, preferably also with some ice, or sometimes to fizzy drinks that I like. Occasionally I drink water with lemon juice and honey in the mornings. And I used to have lemon juice with alcoholic drinks when I drank those more regularly, like I’d drink Jack Daniels with Pepsi and some lemon juice, or just Jack Daniels with lemon juice. These days I don’t really have drinks, or extremely rarely because we no longer have that tradition of drinking with Mum when watching movies or stuff, and I no longer feel like it and I figured drinking always makes me feel incredibly crappy quite quickly, so I don’t do it even, or especially, when socialising with more people.

How about you? Do you like either lemon or lime juice at all? 🙂

Question of the day (15th September).

Hi people! 🙂

Do you add salt to your food if it does not necessarily need it?

My answer:

It’s not a rule, and I don’t have to have lots of salt on my food to enjoy it, but yes, sometimes I do it. Both me and my Dad are salty spicy people and we seem to have higher tolerance or something to more salt and more spicy stuff than most people I know.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

What are you thinking about?

My answer:

That after writing this post, I’m gonna go sleepy sleep. I’ve been feeling quite dreadful today because finally, after like half a year, Jack the Ripper, aka Jack the Butcher has come to visit me yesterday, and he’s been catching up on all the lost time. Although from what my gynaecologist has told me in the past it’s not overly concerning yet, especially if you have some hormonal problems to begin with like I do with pituitary not to have your period for about half a year, I was beginning to get a bit concerned very recently and Jack must have read my thoughts and came yesterday showing his full potential. I’ve had a terrible headache all night and most of the day today and am feeling achy and lousy overall, and I’ve actually slept already today, which is not like me because I normally don’t nap during the day and avoid it for all costs, but I still feel like bed is the best place to be in right now. But hey, at least I didn’t seem to get any bad PMS symptoms, and am feeling okay emotionally and mentally today, that’s a big plus! Perhaps tomorrow will be the other way around. But I better not say it if Jack can seriously read my thoughts. Well I was a bit mood-swingy lately but not so that it would be a problem or that I’d even noticed it could be PMS. So yeah… 😴

Oh but speaking about all things hormones, have I told you guys about my thyroid ultrasound? I mean the results? Well I don’t remember now so if I did, I’ll just tell you again. As I wrote before it I was a little worried that something may be wrong, but the ultrasound doctor said it was totally normal, so I’m happy. Even the socialising wasn’t too bad, somehow I managed to get along with him without much difficulty, perhaps because his daughter apparently is also called Emilia, lol, and it went more smoothly than it always did in the past back when I was going to Medical Academy for all sorts of pituitary and thyroid testing when I was a minor, the ultrasound there always took ages and something about it was super stressful so I was very surprised. As always, defensive pessimism paid off.

Okay, your turn now, my thinking brain is shutting down so I have nothing more to say on the topic. 😀

Question of the day (13th September).

Hi people! 🙂

What are you listening to?

My answer:

Currently nothing really. But as for what I’ve been listening to a lot lately and have been listening to a lot today as well, it’s a new radio station I’ve discovered a few weeks ago thanks to my iPhone and the TuneIn Radio app. On my computer I use Radio Sure and I thought that I already knew of all the Welsh language radio stations that exist out there, but turns out that there was one that was not on Radio Sure, but is on TuneIn Radio, that I had no idea about, and I’m glad I finally learned about its existence as, similarly to Cymru FM and BBC Radio Cymru, I’ve already made some interesting music discoveries thanks to it. It’s called Blas Folk Radio Cymru, and, just like its name suggests, it plays folk music and it’s generally very traditional folk music, no folk rock, folk pop and other such fancy stuff. As is usually the case with radio stations, I don’t necessarily like all the music that they play, but there seems to be a whole lot of harp music and generally a lot of instrumental music. And so because even though I have my iPhone I still like to listen to my favourite stations during the day on the computer, and am not going to use TuneIn on the computer, I decided to add |Blas Folk Radio Cymru to the Radio Sure’s database and it is in it now. So yeah, there have been and probably are still going to be some nice Welsh music discoveries for me.

How about you? 🙂

 

 

Question of the day.

Hi people! 🙂

Do you have any weird animal facts you can share with us?

My answer:

I am certainly not a wealth of knowledge about animals and don’t know how weird this is going to be for people, but recently, in the Polish cat literature anthology I’ve read that I’ve been mentioning a lot, there was a piece about how allegedly all cats sometimes make a sort of half-meow, as if they were about to meow but change their mind in the last second. Apparently the desired effect of it is immediate –
it results in total melting of the human heart. – I found that very interesting because, while obviously I can only hear when Misha’s meowing but can’t see when he’s about to meow but doesn’t actually do it, somehow it seemed questionable to me whether it’s indeed “all” cats who do it, I’ve never heard my family talk about Misha doing things like this, and he really does have a very wide and rich repertoire of manipulative strategies. I asked my Mum the next day and she said no, Misha doesn’t do it, unless involuntarily, like when he’ll yawn at the same time when he wants to meow or he’s been asleep for so long that his larynx has to relearn how to work properly and what it’s actually supposed to do, it’s very funny when Misha is so sleepy and can’t speak yet, or sometimes Misha will meow and sneeze at the same time and that’s really cute. But he never seems to do such things voluntarily and I really don’t get why would this be so particularly heart-melting and neither does my Mum, I mean everything about Misha is cute but I don’t know why this meowing but not meowing would be supposed to be more than anything else. Perhaps he spent too little time with his birth mummy –
Hansa Luft (yep, that’s apparently her name) – and she didn’t have enough time to teach him such sophisticated details, and now Misha has literally no contact with other cats as he seems not to like it at all so he has no way of obtaining such knowledge. So yeah, that’s my weird fact about my apparently weird Misha.

How about you? 🙂