Category: General

Happy New Year to all the peeps. Plus the new My Inner Mishmash playlist.

   How’s your New Year’s Eve going? Or maybe it’s already 2023 where you are? In any case, if you’re celebrating anything in any way today, I hope you have lots of fun, and that the new year will treat you kindly, graciously, serenely and compassionately, and maybe sometimes a little mischievously but not maliciously. My Mum and me have a bit of a tradition going on that we always wish each other lots of new discoveries each year. Because what is life with no intriguing, fascinating and fun discoveries? Deep, bottomless rabbit holes to dig through (not the gloomy kind, no! The engrossing kind)? Obsessions to keep you awake at night and give you inspiration? I hope you’ll learn loads and loads and loads of new things and your brain will grow as a result (not literally, of course, I wouldn’t necessarily wish you megalencephaly). But yeah, I hope that this will be an interesting year for you, but not too turbulent or anything, unless you feel that you do need some radical change. 

   Misha wishes you a lot of peace, rest, good food and a comfy blanket to wrap yourself in when you’re blue, like he appears to be right now. I just got a huge blanket for him yesterday (well, for both of us really 😀 ), it’s a fleece blanket and as wide as my double bed, so finally he can stretch himself out here to his limits and roll around and still feel the blanket underneath. Previously I only had a piece of sheep skin for him, and a synthetic blanket, but he seems to enjoy that one a lot more and has made himself a little, tight cocoon so that I even wonder how he can breathe, and he sleeps like a little baby in there and sometimes lets out a quiet, shaky sigh. But he also seemed sad in the morning and made very sad, mournful sounds so perhaps he’s sleeping this blues off. 

   Traditionally, I’m including a Spotify playlist with all the songs (that are on Spotify) featured in the song of the series this year, and you can look up other playlists on this page if you feel like it. 

Christmas Wishes and Mishes (and a bonus, Christmassy song of the day).

   It’s Christmas Eve, so, as regular peeps on here will know, it’s the time for Christmas wishes here on My Inner Mishmash. Because in Poland, as in many other European countries, we actually start celebrating Christmas today already. In fact, this is in practice the most festive day of Christmas over here, at least when it comes to the external festivities. We eat a big, festive, meatless Christmas Eve supper, and then later on go to the Midnight Mass. Most people also open their presents on Christmas Eve, but since a couple years, we decided to change that in our household and we only do it after we come back from the Midnight Mass, so that’s practically Christmas Day already. 

   But, regardless of when exactly each of you, lovely people, starts your celebrations, I would like to wish you a very happy Christmas. Not necessarily merry, because, in my view, this word is a little superficial and not everyone can force themselves to be merry just because it’s Christmas time, for example if you have depression or something difficult is going on in your life at the moment, and Christmas isn’t exactly about being merry (though if you do feel merry, that’s amazing, I think I do too this year, for once 😀 ). Generally though, I wish you more of a joyous, innerly peaceful, thankful kind of happy Christmas. Or if even that is hard to achieve for you and where you’re at in life, a very hopeful one, at the very least. That’s a must, or else it’s hardly Christmas. I wish you to remember what Christmas is actually celebrated for and why it’s called Christmas and not Wintermas or Snowmas or Loads-of-Yummy-Food-mas. I talk about this every year on here, but I really do think it’s so sad that it’s Jesus’ birthday, and so many people want to celebrate it, yet a lot of them seem to totally ignore the birthday boy. 

   Whether you’ll be celebrating alone or with family or friends or whatever other company, I wish your Christmas not to be lonely, neither in a alone and lonely way, nor in a lonely in a crowd way. And I really hope it won’t be boring or overwhelming or under-/over-stimulating, or stressful, or all those other things that we know Christmases and other such holidays can very often be. 

   I also wish you a cosy Christmas, loads of yummy food, and that you can give and receive some cool presents. Who wouldn’t like that? 

   To all the non-Christian people who are also celebrating something, be it Christmas without the Christ- part, or having time off work, or some other religious holiday, I also want to wish you a happy, cosy, and memorable holidays. 

   And for all those who aren’t celebrating anything, I wish you hope and inner peace as well, and that you have a cool weekend. 

   Misha wants to wish all pets and peeps the best food in their lives, and hopes you can all catch up on sleep and keep warm, either inside your own fur, or some fluffy clothes, and that it’s not gonna be too noisy in your house and that you can spend a bit of time just with yourself. 

   And, yeah, traditionally, I’ve got to share some Christmas song! Last year I thought I’d ran out of all my favourite Christmas songs to share, but over the course of this year I remembered about a few that I’ve never shared on here and heard some new beautiful Christmas pieces. The one I’m sharing with you today belongs to the latter category. 

   This is a  Welsh Christmas carol called “Ar Gyfer Heddiw’r Bore” (On This Day in the Morning), written by David Hughes in 19th century. It seems to be very popular at what is called Plygain in Wales – a traditional Christmas service held either at night or early in the morning where people gather to sing carols, of course in harmony since that’s the only way Welsh people can sing. 😀 – This tradition has been apparently going through a bit of a renaissance lately and it sounds really cool. 

   However, the version of this song that I want to share with you is a little different. It is sung by Gwilym Bowen Rhys (yeah, one of my faza people and yeah, that renewed October peak is still going strong and I’m really glad that my faza life seems to have gone back to normal after like two years of weird chaos) as part of a project called Celtic Beethoven initiated by the Galician musician Carlos Núñez (I believe largely online-based), which involved a lot of musicians from Celtic countries and regions performing Celtic songs arranged by Ludwig van Beethoven. This carol is usually sung to a different tune, but in the recording below, Gwilym sings it to the tune of a Welsh song called The Vale of Clwyd, arranged by Beethoven. And I think this is absolutely stunning, and gives this carol more of a soul! Personally, the original melody makes me think of the Pentre Llanfihangel  song, which is the first thing that I ever heard sung to this tune (by Plethyn), and Gwilym’s version sounds so much more like what I think an old-ish, Christian piece like this should actually sound. 

   If you’d like to know what this carol is about and find out more about Plygain as such, or hear a version of this carol in its original melody, I recommend you visit this blog. 

I can’t believe.

   I am writing this post in memory of Ashley Leia whose family shared the above post on her blog and which I have just found out. I don’t even know what to say, because I feel utterly shocked and can’t think, but I really wanted to mention this on here because not only was she a great and very competent blogger in her niche of mental health, but also was a regular on My Inner MishMash and a two  times (that is every single time, so far) MIMRA winner.

   Ashley had been MIA for several weeks, which I had a very bad feeling about, so finally wrote to her a few days ago. Turns out I was way too late… 

   I can’t imagine what her family must be going through. 

   I hope you are at peace, Ashley… I miss you and will be praying for you a lot. 

Li’l announcement.

   Just wanted to let you know that Bibielz will be MIA for the next couple of days, not sure how long exactly, but most likely from tomorrow until Tuesday. My Dad’s on holiday from Monday, and he actually wanted to go to Sweden once again (didn’t realise he liked it so much the last time we were there). Except we’ll go to Warsaw rather than Sweden after all. It’s because Sofi’s going to have some model casting there. Last year when she was out shopping with Mum they were approached by a scout who says that Sofi has a potential for a model and gave her his business card. Mum didn’t feel for a long time like getting Sofi into that sort of thing, even though Sofi was all for it, and we were worried if it could be a scam. But the guy was called Jacek, so he gave me good vibes and  I looked him up and it seems to be a legit agency, but my Mum still wouldn’t want to hear about it. Only recently, almost a year later, she changed her mind for some reason and they contacted him and he said he’d be happy to see Sofi next week Tuesday at 2 PM, and that agency is in Warsaw. My Mum is still a bit of a chicken for driving such long-distance (it’s 4-5 hours from us), even though she rode there a lot back when I was at the boarding school because it’s near Warsaw, so since my Dad is on leave they decided it would just be a camper trip and meanwhile Sofi would have her casting. I’m curious how it goes for her. We’re also likely going to stop by some lake in Masuria which is an ever so popular region with my family, because it’s been roasting hot all over the country. 

   But you’ll probably be thrilled to hear that Bibielz aren’t so cruel as to leave my readers completely lonely, because Bibielz have scheduled posts for the next three days in both of the daily series (yay! 😀 ), so hopefully that’ll be enough until I’m back, and if not, perhaps I’ll be able to write something on the go but generally would rather not, because I only take my iPhone and Bluetooth keyboard with me and that’s not fun for writing longer or even medium things. 

   Until then, I hope y’all will be doing well, and lemme know if you’re also going for some trips or other stuff like that soon. 🙂 

The happy new year post, plus the new My Inner Mishmash playlist.

As this current year is about to vanish into the past very soon, I wish all of you, my lovely readers, a very happy new year. Not necessarily happy as in that you should actually be super happy all the time, as that’s hardly realistic, but hopefully happier than this past year, and simply filled with moments, events and things that you’ll appreciate and enjoy. May you learn a lot of new things this coming year and make loads of fascinating discoveries. This is what my Mum and me always wish each other for new year, because it’s such a fab feeling when you discover something absolutely fascinating and possibly even life-changing in a good way. May it also give you plenty of opportunities for development in areas in which you need it, and maybe even in some in which you don’t yet know that you need to develop. 🙂 I hope it’ll be an interesting year for you, but also peaceful at the same time, as peaceful as it can be in our current external circumstances, pandemic and all. If you’re making some resolutions, or perhaps goals or anything like that, I am hopeful that you’ll be able to stick to them. And also, I wish you a lovely New Year’s Eve, regardless how you’re spending it, and a fabulous New Year, because apparently what your New Year is like says what the entire year will be like for you. 😀

Misha is wishing all the pets and peeps alike, as well as himself, some exciting adventures this coming year.

On my blog, New Year’s Eve is also the time for officially sharing my playlist with songs that have been featured in my song of the day series in the past year. So the playlist for this year is now ready and you can see it below. Also if you want to see the previous playlists, you can go to my

Blog Playlists page.

Christmas wishes, plus a bonus, Christmassy song of the day.

It’s Christmas Eve, so while a lot of people in a lot of countries aren’t celebrating Christmas just yet, for those who do celebrate it at all I’m sure the atmosphere is already very Christmassy anyway. If you’re a regular on my blog, you know that here in Poland we start our Christmas celebrations on Christmas Eve afternoon/evening with a very festive supper, and then a lot of people go to Midnight Mass, particularly if they have young children. In fact, it’s fair to say that in the whole Christmas period, it’s Christmas Eve that is most celebrated and festive here when it comes to traditions and the like. So I always like to send people Christmas wishes on Christmas Eve already.

I wish you all a very joyous and peaceful Christmas. May it be a blessed time for you, filled with a bit of everything good – prayer and true joy because of Christ’s coming, beautiful Christmas music, time with your loved ones if you have them around this Christmas, whether in person or perhaps only virtually, time alone, God’s presence in your life and thoughts, yummy food, amazing presents, joy from giving something to others, love, fun, rest, laughter, relax, sleep, snow, cosiness, some funn book or film etc. etc. – And please, I’ve already mentioned Him, but don’t forget whose birthday we’re actually celebrating. I think it would feel very rude for most if not all people if like a half of the world declared they celebrated someone’s birthday and yelled about it for a month in advance, but the person in question wouldn’t even get any attention from most of the birthday guests on the actual day but instead people would just give presents to each other and consistently ignore the birthday boy/girl.

For those of you who aren’t Christians but are also going to have some relaxing, festive sort of time, or for whom it’s going to be life as normal, may it also be a really good time for you and may you find something in it that will fill your heart with joy.

For those who identify with some other religions and perhaps celebrate some other holidays soon, or those who celebrate Christmas a bit later on, may you have just as peaceful and joyous and fun-filled holidays.

And for those for whom this Christmas season will be difficult for some reason, whether they do celebrate it or not, because they’ve lost someone, or because they can’t be with their family, or because it’s a very difficult time for you every year for whatever reason, I wish you hope, strength, and that despite the difficult time, you may also find a bit of comfort in it. At this time of the year there’s a lot of mostly very superficial, sickly sweet and toxically positive talk about how “magical” and merry it is, but it’s totally okay if you do not feel on cloud nine if for you this happens to be a time of grieving, or bad mental or physical health, or loneliness, or exhaustion/overwhelm due too many people around and perhaps also needing to cook for them or something.

Misha doesn’t really care about Christmas as such very much, but he likes all the comotion around it, especially wrapping presents and Christmas decorations, and the Christmas Eve supper because there’s a lot of fish, and a lot of good food for him throughout the Christmas period. So he’d like to wish all the pets a happy Christmas time, hoping that they’ll also get a lot of yummy food and maybe some nice presents and that they’ll have a lot of fun.

Since our actual song of the day today wasn’t Christmassy, I thought I’d do the same thing as last year and share a bonus Christmassy song in the Christmas wishes post. I had a bit of a problem choosing one though, because it seems like I’ve shared all of my absolute most favourite Christmas songs in the previous years. Finally I decided on a song that perhaps isn’t among my absolute favourites, but that I really like to listen to around Christmas ever since I first heard it on BBC Radio Cymru. And unlike last year, it’s not a carol but just a lay Christmas-themed pop song about snow and how beautiful/unusual Christmas time is, although I don’t understand it in its entirety so it’s a very generalised summary of it I suppose haha. Since it’s from BBC Radio Cymru, you’re right to assume that it’s in Welsh. It’s called “Nadolig Oer” (A Cold Christmas) and is sung by Ifan Siôn Davies, who is most known as vocalist in the Welsh indie rock band Swnami which I really like and whose music I’ve shared a few times before. The Christmas music period on my blog is really long though (goes from the beginning of Advent all the way to Candlemas) so maybe I’ll still fall in love with some new to me Christmas carol or song and share it.

Happy Christmas! 🎄

 

A quick announcement about My Inner Mishmash Readership Award.

I’m just writing this very quick post to let you all know that, after a lot of thinking, and now also discussing it with my Mum, I decided that I won’t be sending out My Inner Mishmash Readership Award packages this year. My Mum helps me a lot with the whole process of preparing and organising MIMRAs, coming up with ideas for their contents, finding them, and in particular with sending them out, but because this year has been quite difficult for her health-wise due to yucky menopause and now also her episodic asthma flaring up, I feel it isn’t fair to pressure her with MIMRA on top of that, though I was really looking forward to this as I was in the two previous years and it feels sad that this year will be without MIMRAs, as I find making them very exciting even if there’s a fair bit of pressure involved and a lot of things to do. Unfortunately I am not able to do all about MIMRAs without my Mum’s help, and have no one else who could help me with this here , so this is how I feel it has to be at the moment. Hopefully MIMRAs will be back next year. 🙂

Reading Wrap-Up (January 4, 2021) #IMWAYR

And the first MIMRA is with its winner now!
I’m thrilled that Astrid received her readership award today, which she mentions in this post.
It’s her reading wrap-up post, so go check it out to find out what she’s been reading lately, and is planning to read next. Maybe you can find some books here that you’d also like to read. 🙂

New Year wishes, plus a little New Year something for all my readers.

At the end of this weird, and very difficult for many, year, I’d like to wish all of you a fun New Year’s Eve – regardless whether you’re doing something to celebrate it or not really. – If you are like my Sofi and really love celebrating occasions like New Year’s Eve, but aren’t able to do so the way you normally do, or perhaps at all, because of a lockdown or some other restrictions that are currently in place where you are, I hope you can still have a great time. Regardless of what this day is going to look like for you, hope it’ll be enjoyable and pleasant. 🙂

And of course me and Misha would both like to wish you a happier, better new year. May it be peaceful, regardless or how much or little you have been affected by various difficult things going on for people around the world this year, and may it bring something good, new and exciting into your lives. 🙂 May you all be healthy and have helpful, loving people around you who care about you, or even just one such person. 🙂 And if you’re a blogger, may it be a good year for the development of your blog and may all your blogging plans work out. Thank you for your presence in my little Mishmashy world this year. 🙂

And now for the other New Year “something”. 😀

I’ve got a spontaneous idea a few months ago that I’d like if all that song of the day archive that has grown on my blog over the last three years could be organised. If not for any other reason then at least just for myself so that I could have it all in one place rather than just scattered all around the blog. And some of you who perhaps like this series could benefit from it too. So I thought it would be fun to make some sort of a playlist with all that music. And now that I’ve got my iPhone, I finally learned how to make Spotify playlists quite effortlessly. 😀 Yes, I’ve been using Spotify for years with very little idea about how to make playlists. That’s because in the desktop app, using my screen reader, adding songs to playlists is quite cumbersome. On iPhone this is much easier.

And so, I’ve created playlists with all the music that I’ve shared in the song of the day series, obviously except for what is not available on Spotify, and thought I’d share with you in case this would be fun for someone. I’ll be sharing a new playlist at the end of each year, or the beginning of a new year, once it is completed.

Apologies for those who like the idea but don’t use Spotify, I do not use other streaming services so wasn’t able to create them elsewhere. Aside from this post, you can always find the playlists in the Blog Playlists page, which is where I’ll be adding a new one every year.

My Inner Mishmash 2018:

My Inner Mishmash 2019:

 

My Inner Mishmash 2020:

Additionally, I’ve made a HUGE playlist for myself which I thought I’d share with you too in case anyone would be interested in such a thing. It is very raw, very huge and very disorganised but who cares. I called it originally Bibiel’s Playlist For Sleep, although I don’t really use it for sleep as it’s too varied for that, but the title kinda stuck and I don’t have a better idea. It contains all the music created by my faza subjects (Enya, Declan Galbraith, Cornelis Vreeswijk, Gwilym Bowen Rhys and all the bands with which he collaborated) that I like (for example you won’t find Enya’s Orinoco Flow because this is the only song by her which I dislike), all the music that I like from artists that are somehow related to my faza subjects – like their family members, so there’s for example Clannad because I like most of their music and because they’re Enya’s family and she had collaborated with them for a while, or a Welsh band Y Trwynau Coch in which Gwilym’s dad was the vocalist – various covers/interpretations of their songs that I like, or even other versions of some traditional songs they have interpreted in other interpretations that I also like, plus lots and lots and lots of harp music, because harp is my favourite instrument, with particular emphasis on Celtic harp, but there’s also orchestral harp, or even autoharp or Finnish harp aka kantele, and also there is some music from people who are harpists but that doesn’t feature harp. So the criteria for something to get into this playlist are rather lax. It just has to have something to do either with my fazas, or harp and harpists/harpers, and I have to like it. At this point there are some things in there that I don’t like all that much because I was adding a lot of things collectively and haven’t yet sifted through all of that, but generally I love most of it. It has no specific order but it doesn’t have to have because I listen to it in shuffle mode anyway. It is still under construction and will probably always be. So if you’re interested in that sorta raw, wild mix of music, come along! 🙂

My Inner Mishmash Readership Award #2! And the winners are… *don’t read if you got a pingback and like surprises* :D

Hi all you lovely people you! 🙂

Phew, it’s been quite an intense week! I know it’s super late compared to last year and am very sorry for that, but finally, it’s time to reveal this year’s winners of

My Inner Mishmash Readership Award!

My Inner Mishmash Readership Award (or MIMRA for short) is an idea that I came up with last year, where each year, around Christmas, I award three of my

most involved, insightful and engaged readers of My Inner MishMash as a way of expressing my gratitude and appreciation for their presence on My Inner MishMash, and also simply as a way to have some more fun on here for all of us, pre Christmas. Of course I do appreciate every single reader of my blog and am so happy for all of you who are stopping by, but quite obviously I can’t award everyone who visits my blog, so in a way this is also a more symbolic way of appreciating all of my readers.

So, without further ado, I am exxxtremely exxxcited to announce that the winners of this year’s My Inner Mishmash Readership Award are… *applause, drumrolls, fanfares, confetti etc.*

Meg of Where Good Advice Happens,

(and this is her second MIMRA)

Ashley Leia of Mental Health @ Home

(and this is her second MIMRA as well)

and

Astrid and her whole system Astridetal of A Multitude of Musings

.

Meg and Ashley are literally as lucky as they can be, because you can only win MIMRA twice in a row! Although Sofi is trying to convince me that it should be thrice, so… I don’t know… we’ll see next year I guess. But you can lemme know what you think of this idea if you want.

Thank you so very much to all of you, the winners, for being such engaged readers of My Inner Mishmash, such great supporters of Misha and me and such cool people overall! And thank you to all of my regular readers for all their extremely valuable input! 🙂 And HUGE thanks to my Mum for helping me with this whole thing, brainstorming ideas with me, designing the cards etc. because it just wouldn’t work out without her! 🙂 Last, but by no means least, thanks to Sofi, thanks to whom there are some pics with this post that you can enjoy. Sofi has made some of them and then today has helped me a lot with selecting the photos for this post and captioning them. After she captioned them, somehow I lost or couldn’t find her very descriptive captions after transferring the photos

This MIMRA has just been sent out and I had no clue which photo was which and got really annoyed and was about to give up on the whole photo thing, but eventually Sofi helped me once again change their names to something more descriptive than img0185 so that I knew what I was posting, lol, and do alt texts properly. All that despite she’s having a really awful day today because she’s sick.

I sincerely hope it’ll arrive to people at least very shortly before Christmas, but since I sent it out almost a whole month later than I did last year (guess I’ll have to start the preparations in August rather than in September next year 😀 ) because of the delay with the cards company and some things that have been going on for me personally as well as for my Mum, and since the mail in many countries is overloaded due to Covid and people ordering a lot of stuff online, at least from what I’ve been hearing, it’s possible that, if that’s the case with the mail in your country, you may need to wait for your MIMRA a bit longer than that. Even without such complications, I remember that last year’s MIMRA for Meg was going very slow, but that’s probably because our mail here always tends to be slow with foreign mail for some reasoon, at least in my experience. 😀

As a compensation, the MIMRA packages this year have a bit more content than the year before, but to be honest it wasn’t really even planned. Here are some pics (but with the MIMRA boxes closed, so you can’t take a peek in this year, ha, ha, more details about the content later)

Misha is sitting on the stack of grey MIMRA cartboard boxes which are next to my wardrobe. He is looking at you.

Misha sitting on the MIMRA boxes, which are decorated with three Christmas baubles from Sofi's tree, one bauble is grey and the other two are white.

And here’s a little bonus for all of you who like to look at Misha and often ask me about his pics, just because I had one more at hand and because it’s a special, exceptional day when images are being posted on this blog, lol, though it’s unrelated to the award itself.

Misha stretched out on the sheep skin on my bed.

I won’t be telling you what’s exactly in the MIMRAs, I myself am not a huge enthusiast of surprises but I figure most people do like them, but to give you a bit of an idea, there are some Polish edible goodies in there. My goal with MIMRA is to introduce people to new, yummy things that are only a thing in Poland, because I think it’s fun to see how each country has its own candy and stuff. And we generally have a lot of yummy food here. Only it’s so universalised these days (plus I myself haven’t been abroad much which may be an important factor here as well) that sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s Polish and what’s just somehow adapted or something. Last year’s MIMRA winners may remember that one of the things in the award package were biscuits with chocolate and jelly which are called Delicje over here. I was absolutely convinced they are a Polish thing, until last year’s MIMRA winner

Carol Anne of Therapy Bits, and some of the littles in her system,

enlightened me that they are also in Ireland, under the name of Jaffa Cakes, and they do appear to be in many other countries as well! So this year I did a bit more research and hopefully these things are actually exclusively Polish, or at least you haven’t tried them before, but even more importantly that you will like them. However Meg told me that she really enjoyed these Jaffa Cakes and she can’t get them anywhere and would like them in the MIMRA again. I originally didn’t plan it to be so, but because I found something that I thought could be a fun thing for Ashley and Astrid but maybe not necessarily for Meg, she did get a package of them eventually. Ashley and Astrid have something else instead. I’ll just say that it’s something to have a bath with, and I remembered that Meg can’t have baths with such bath products so I think it’s fair enough.

I hope you guys will like your MIMRAs and enjoy them at least as much as I did making them, and that they’ll bring some happiness to you for the Christmas time. 🙂

 

Post share – Blocking the Block – Cyranny.

So, have you guys already heard about this new WordPress block editor thingy? How do you feel aboutit?

If you feel similarly to me and much prefer the classic one, go over to

This post by Cyranny

and speak up about it, share the post with your readers so that we can have control over our blogs.

They say that we’ll be able to switch between the old and new editors, and if so, it’s great, but the message from their post on this seems to be a little contradictory imo, and I wonder for how long we will actually be given the choice.

As I already commented on the Cyranny’s post, I’ve just tried the new editor out to see what I should brace myself for and if it’ll be as bad for me as for many others, and found it really unfriendly and not really particularly cooperative. It took me about half an hour just to get out back to the classic editor, and it seems like the fact that I did it was only a sheer accident, haha.

I know that there were huge issues in the past with this block editor’s accessibility for screenreaders, and I have to say that, while it isn’t particularly user-friendly and intuitive, the accessibility with my screenreader (NVDA) isn’t bad, as much as I could tell from just testing and not writing an actual post and not being a huge tech savvy, which was a positive surprise, however I’ve heard that apparently there are some significant problems accessing it with another popular screenreader (Jaws). I can’t see for myself if that is the case and to what extend it is unusable as I don’t have Jaws (and even if I could, I’m not keen on the idea of voluntarily interacting with that thing again 😀 ) but if it really is, something seriously must change here.

 

Happy Easter, pets and peeps!

Hhrrru? 😻

This is Misha. I am soon going to sleep because all my peeps are soon going to sleep, but before I do that I wanted to wish all of you, on behalf of the Emisha team – that is Mila and me – a very happy happy happy Easter. I hope it will be a very joyful time for you if you are Christians and if you are not and are just celebrating for the fun of celebrating something I hope you will be able to have as much chocolate as you can keep in. And if you are not celebrating I hope you have a lovely, beautiful Sunday and won’t be stressing too much about that human plague thing. If you are a pet like me I hope it will also be as happy day for you as it’s going to be for me and that your peeps will stay at home even though it is a holiday and spend some more time with you, but hopefully they won’t be too noisy and intrusive and will let you have a bit of time for yourself too. Happy Easter to all our readers. 😻

Emisha 💜 💚 💙

New year wishes, plus, you’ll just NEVER guess what happened today!

Hey guys! 🙂
So, first off, I’d like to wish you a very very happy new year! If you make any resolutions, I hope you can keep them for the whole year and achieve what you want, and in any cse, I hope this year will be better for you than all the previous years, and will be peaceful. I’m sorry I haven’t posted a new year post earlier but things are rather hectic, I spent all day yesterday with my extended family and it wasn’t bad but felt a bit overwhelming for my brain, so today I was sleeping lots in order to recharge. Here in Poland we have an old saying that says what the first day of new year is like for you, will show what the whole year will be like. So how’s it been so far for you?
On a bit different note, you guys will just NEVER, EVER guess what happened to me today… but maybe you fancy to try anyway? 😀 … I was just a bit sarcastic. It’s very predictable. Any ideas, anyone?…
I hope that if there’s truth in that saying, it doesn’t extend to the second day of the new year. The truth is, my dear Readers, that it is very sadly not the end of my irregular blogging, and of the troubles with my brand new computer which is supposed to last for 10 years even, but so far I don’t see any evidence of it being likely. 😀 As you perhaps remember, there were problems since the beginning – first it got damaged during the delivery and was not usable anymore, so the delivery company has covered the costs for me and I got the same but new one. Then when the new one arrived to the company that has been helping me out with this (they’re a distributor of specialised equipment for the visually impaired and while a computer is technically not a specialised device, they have also done some repairs for me in the past when there was something niche going on that “normal” technicians were too clueless about, and I’ve been buying various other things like Braille-Sense or Plextalk through them, so I asked them for help with this too) it turned out that the motherboard was faulty and the guy who was completing and setting it all up for me had to get a new one. It all took over half a year and caused me a lot of anxiety and after finally the computer arrived to me, there were plenty of issues with configuration many of which I absolutely wouldn’t be able to overcome and figure out without Olek’s help, and even Olek resolved most of them rather accidentally and after a lot of digging blindly.
Then more recently as you know, just a couple days ago, when I felt like things were finally settling down and I was slowly getting used to the new computer and new system, and all the novelty and changes in general, there was that major system issue over CHristmas which again rendered the computer unusable, about which I wrote in some earlier post. Olek took it to his friend who is apparently quite knowledgeable in those things and he managed to restore the system to some mrevious point, like before it crashed, and all was well. Until today. Because today it crashed in just the same way. At first, various programmes were going crazy, there were some strange errors popping up in both browsers I use and in my email client – well maybe not particularly strange, they just stopped working and needed to be restarted or had very random problems with opening websites but the amounts of those errors were rather suspicious and reminded me of what was happening right before my system crashed on Christmas. My screen-reader went crazy too, as every once in a while it kept crashing with no apparent reason, and then restarting, or just completely stopped working at random times, even when it wasn’t practically working, when it was just running but I wasn’t using it, so I had to reset it. Or icons on the taskbar were randomly disappearing etc. Finally, after an hour or so of all that random crashing of different things, which made doing anything on the computer a bit of a pain, it started to feel alarmingly similar to the situation from just before that last system error that happened over Christmas. I remembered that then, the last thing I did before it stopped working completely was opening a website in Google Chrome. I just experimentally opened Chrome and – here we go – everything froze in a very spectacular way, and after a couple seconds the damn thing switched off and then was trying to restart endlessly but failing at it. It felt so ironic that my first reaction was that I started laughing, and so did Olek when I announced the news of the day to him, but it’s not funny if you want to know my opinion. It’s freaking exhausting. I did not expect Olek to fix it and he didn’t, I think I’m going to send the thing to that company who got it for me, maybe they will do something, we don’t even have an idea what’s the root problem, what’s happening there. I suppose I could give it to any technician because it’s not something to do directly with screen-readers or any typically blind related things (I guess, but I’m clueless), and this way would be faster as that company is on the other end of the country, but I guess since they got it for me, they may know better what’s up, and I want to have it fixed once and for good, I don’t even care now about how much time it’ll take, I just want to have a clear situation. We could probably do the same thing again – restore the system to a previous point – but that is only a temporary resolution and not something I’d be keen on doing every week at all. The last time it happened, my Mum sent the guy from that specialised equipment company a screenshot of what’s showing up when you start up the computer and I described to him what was happening before, and he said it could be some programme not installed correctly causing system issues, but I have no idea what it could be, and especially not this time as I wasn’t installing anything since that last crash as all the apps were already set up, unless such weird things can start happening a week or more after the installation which would be rather odd.
So now that you know what’s up you can also figure out that I’m writing from my Braille-Sense, which doesn’t allow you to do much but at least is more reliable, and that it also means my blogging will still be very irregular if any, for an indefinite time. It’s just after 7 PM but my sleep/wake rhythm is in some hypersomniac phase lately, which is cool in a way especially at times like these, and I’m feeling quite knackered by all that chaos so I think the best thing I can do now is have a shower and go to sleep. Sleep is the best.

Jinxed it! Another blogging/Internet hiatus.

Hi people! 🙂
I’m really sorry to say that, but things are shitty again. Writing this from the Braille-Sense. I guess I was too quick in saying that my hiatus is over, it seems like it may take a while yet.
I really don’t know for sure what exactly happened or why but I must be some genius in destroying hard drives in no time I guess, maybe I could make some money with this unique ability, I suppose it’s the drive not working, well, Olek does, I have no freaking idea. Won’t be getting into details since that doesn’t matter here anyway and I’m fed up with tech stuff but my computer was perfectly fine in the morning, to completely stop working in like two hours time. Things started crashing big time and finally it just switched off and there’s no way you can get it going again for longer than 30 seconds. Olek was trying to help but couldn’t figure it out and I suppose it requires someone more knowledgeable. I’ve been really stressed out by all that computer chaos going on for over half a year and now I feel massively frustrated and like there is some major emotional overload pending, it’s extremely mentally exhausting.

I’m back! Merry Christmas! 😄

Hiya people, and pets, and everyone in between! 🙂

Just a short note to let you know that my new computer has arrived on Friday and since then I was very busy setting it up (with tremendous help from Olek without which I’d be completely lost), and I’m still very slowly catching up on everything and even slower getting used to all the novelty and change, which is not always only positive, although it’s definitely much better to have a new computer than not to have any. It’s been causing me a lot of distress and anxiety, resulting in excessive nail biting thanks to which I’ve apparently got something called paronychia – an annoingly sore, swollen and throbbing finger – but it’s slowly and gradually getting better, I mean the anxiety. It will probably take some time before I’ll write some more concrete posts.

But most of all, me and Misha would like to wish all of you a very happy happy Christmas. I hope it will be a very wonderful and joyful time for you during which you can do lots of cool things, spend quality time with your family, or perhaps recharge and have time just for yourselves. I hope Christmas will fill your hearts with joy and hope and make you feel that your life is meaningful. 🙂 Misha says he wishes you lots of delicious food and relaxation time and hopes it will be the cosiest Christmas ever for you. 🙂

I also want to thank all those of you who read my blog and who were emailing me when I was away from the blogosphere, I appreciate it so very much and it’s been a huge help for me to get through that, you’re all really great friends! 🙂 If I didn’t get back to someone it’s either because my Braille-Sense was freezing or didn’t display it.

A li’l announcement.

Hi people!
You haven’t seen any posts from me in a few days, and I just wanted to let you know that it might be the case for a couple more (or possibly weeks) and the reason for it.
My laptop has finally stopped cooperating with me completely, doesn’t even want to talk to me now, for whatever reason. As you may remember, I’m still waiting for my new computer to arrive, since August, and for now have no idea when that will happen, but there’s no point in fixing my laptop because of that. I do have my new-old Braille-Sense that I’m writing this post from, but what I can do on it online is severely limited and much slower, both because of the way it simply is, and because the browser on it is outdated so not all websites work or are fully functional, and it requires quite a bit of time and determination from me, because a lot of things that you can pretty easily do on the computer are much more roundabout on the Braille-Sense, or I have to do manually a lot of stuff that you normally don’t need to. That’s why you probably won’t hear much from me, I may post something once in a while especially if it all takes longer but only via email and without links and such, I can read most blogs as it seems and I do, but can’t comment, so I’ll be much less active in the blogosphere. It’s Friday so Misha’s day on my blog, and I’ve been wondering if I’ll let him write something, but since his posts are usually long, I think he’ll have a hiatus for now ’cause Braille-Senses like to freeze when you’re typing a lot and we don’t want to lose his scribbles mid-sentence and start over possibly a few times. 😀 I just hope this forced hiatus won’t be as long as last year in September when it took over a month, and that it won’t make my brain feel as understimulated as it was last year, keep your fingers crossed guys. 😀