Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson – “The Rose and the Lily”.

   Hey people! 🙂 

   Today I have a traditional English murder ballad for you. I am familiar with many different versions of it, but this one is the first that I have ever heard. Norma Waterson and Eliza Carthy are mother and daughter from Yorkshire who are both very prominent English folk singers. This song comes from their first collaborative album called Gift.

   Norma started her career in a group called The Watersons that she formed together with her siblings. Later, she married folk singer and guitarist Martin Carthy who also became part of the band’s line-up. Over time, the Waterson-Carthy family have become such influential musicians that they earned themselves the title of the English folk dynasty, with Norma (who passed away last year)  considered its matriarch. Their daughter Eliza is also a great singer and a very skilled fiddle player.

   I was introduced to the music of both  women through this collaborative album, and I think this is my favourite track from it. Like this song alone, the whole album is also rather dark and sombre overall and the topic of death is quite prevalent throughout it. This ballad is also better known as the Cruel Brother. 

Question of the day.

What is your earliest childhood memory?

My answer:

My earliest memory is from when I was two years old, which some people find strange or impossible, claiming that you can only have real memories from the age of 3, but I believe that when they’re strong and emotionally intense memories, you can remember things that happened earlier, plus I guess everyone is a bit different and it must depend a lot on an individual. Anyway, my earliest memory is about when Olek was born. My Dad and me went to visit Mum in the hospital, and the first thing I remember from that was when we were in the lift and I was a little bit scared of the sensation of it moving. I still avoid lifts if only it’s possible and reasonable, even escalators, because they make me feel dizzy and floaty in an awful way and mess with my vestibular system though I’m pretty sure it was a lot worse when I was younger. Then we went to the room where my Mum was and I remember that she was really weak or something and kind of wasn’t herself really, actually at the time I think I thought she was really sleepy. My Mum had a C-section so she certainly could still be groggy after that. Olek wasn’t in there. Mum let me feel her tummy and I remember it really shocked me and made me feel quite awful. I don’t really remember or know now what exactly was going on with her, was it her stitches that she showed me and my brain exaggerated that, or something else, but I quite clearly remember a HUGE needle sticking out of her tummy and the thing overall looked quite raw and not quite like what I expected I think. And I got ann idea into my head, quite a logical one for a kid I guess, that it was my baby brother who was to blame for that. I must have said it out loud because I remember my Dad laughing and saying what a monster Olek must be. I felt really sorry for Mum. Then I don’t remember anything else, but later on I often thought that this first impression of Olek that I got, before even actually meeting him, could have influenced my later attitude towards him and I felt guilty because of that and still sort of do, though these days this is not the sole reason for why I feel a sense of guilt in relation to him, but that’s a whole different topic. Anyway, when we were little kids, I was really nasty for him. I don’t really remember that very clearly but my parents say I could just come over to him all of a sudden and start frantically bang him with something over the head or bite him really badly, or I wouldn’t let him play with my toys and generally rejected him all the time. I do remember having a kind of feeling of aversion or something towards him and like I didn’t really like him, and that I was very fickle with him. Sometimes I played together with him and we had a lot of fun, but other times I wouldn’t let him play with me. We shared the same bedroom (actually at the time our whole family had just one, huge, open area that we slept in) and sometimes I would initiate some play, because I was rarely sleepy when I should be and as a toddler always got a huge energy shot towards the evenings and it was the best time for playing for me, and he happily joined in with that, or we just talked and laughed like crazy because everything’s always most hilarious when it’s time to sleep. And then in the middle of that I’d suddenly just turn my back on him for no apparent reason and play by myself or start doing something else that I wouldn’t include him in and I acted like I was cross with him or something. Or we’d be talking and suddenly I’d start acting royally haughty and like I was deadly bored and be like: “I don’t wanna talk to you”. Or if he tried to talk to me but I didn’t feel like it, I’d also say something like that, no matter how much the poor kid would try to get my attention. Thinking back to that, I am actually a bit surprised that he wasn’t similarly nasty to me in return, as kids usually are. He’d still make efforts to be able to play with me no matter how jerky I was with him, and no matter how often I’d keep rejecting him he’d continue to try to connect with me and was always very protective of me as a kid, it looked as if my attitude wasn’t even affecting him at all. Sure he liked a bit of sibling rivalry, and would be mischievous sometimes and piss me off totally deliberately, but he was mischievous with everyone so it wasn’t anything specifically directed at me, and I think a lot of kids, if they were treated like that by an older sibling, would at some point just shrug and let go, or start acting the same as their sibling.

How about your earliest memory? 🙂

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.

Hi lovely people! 🙂

I have another question for you about you and your siblings today. 🙂

If you have more than one sibling, are you closer to one sibling than another/others?

My answer:

Definitely! As weird as that may be, I am much closer to Zofijka than Olek, despite she is much younger than me than Olek is. I was never very close to Olek. As a small child, I didn’t even like him, I feel, though it’s hard for me to say whether it was a sort of dislike like you usually have between siblings because of the rivalry and such, especially if there is not a big age difference between you and your siblings and you’re of opposite genders, or was it something bigger. I’ve written on here a few times that my very first memory is that of Olek being born and I didn’t like it at all, and that I was very nasty to him later on when we were both very small, like apparently I could come over to him and suddenly start to punch him with something very energetically for no apparent reason, or I was telling him when he can talk to me and when he can’t, like we would have a conversation and then I’d get annoyed with something or bored or whatever and was like “I don’t wanna talk to you anymore”. 😀 We played sometimes and had fun but as far as I can remember there wasn’t much of my initiative in it. I went to the boarding school when I was 5 so then I had much less contact with him, especially that in the first years of my stay there, if my parents wanted to see me in between school breaks and holidays they’d rather go to me than take me home, and then Olek stayed with grandparents for that time, usually. So we didn’t really get a possibility to strengthen our bond somehow. And we kept going further and further from each other with our lives, it was awkward for us to talk to each other a bit because we didn’t even know such things about each other like most siblings do, like what each other likes in greater detail or thinks about certain things, for example. When I ultimately came home after leaving that school at 17, in a way I felt weird because until then, I was moving between those two places and not really feeling like I belonged to any of them, and now as I was home for good I started to really feel like a stranger in the family in that I didn’t know about a lot of things, my family, other than my parents and Sofi, didn’t even know much about me other than the dry and mostly obvious facts, and it was all just a bit odd. Since then, five years have passed and I’ve caught up on most of those things, at least to some degree, because some things you can’t undo, I still struggle with the sense of belonging a lot, though not as much as I used to, but I feel much closer with my immediate family and have strengthened relationships with some of my extended family like my grandparents. My relationship with Olek is one of those things that haven’t changed much at all. We talk a little bit about casual things when we see each other throughout the day, sometimes will exchange some sarcastic comments on something or talk about what we’ve been doing during the day but that’s pretty much it. It’s very hard for me to initiate conversations with people around whom I feel awkward, and, while Olek doesn’t have social anxiety or anything like that, it must be tricky for him too. We live in one house, but our lives are very different and not very connected, and other people see the distance between us very clearly from what I can notice. I like him, we are kind for each other as fellow human beings should, but I sort of don’t feel the same intensity of feelings to him as I do to the rest of my immediate family. And I feel quite yucky because of it because it feels so callous not to have any deeper feelings for your brother just because.

With Sofi, it is an entirely different matter! We are both very very different from each other, so there’s plenty of conflicts, misunderstandings, calling each other names (more or less humourously), irritating each other etc. especially that Zofijka is rather impulsive so it’s easy to argue with her or make her angry or she goes moody and doesn’t talk to you for an hour or snaps out for no reason and then 5 minutes after that all is OK again. We play a lot, we spend lots of time together. We laugh at similar things, at least when it comes to situational humour, or some objectively childish/immature stuff that other people just don’t get, because they are either too serious (most adult people we both know) or too stupid (most kids and teens we both know) for that and they just scratch their heads in confusion when we suddenly both start choking with homeric laughter. We talk a lot about lots of things, make up silly games (like that Misha can talk via the connection between his brain and the brain of one of us, or creating the most ridiculous sentence, but such that will still make sense, in which all the words start with the same letter, or Zombie invasions, or make our own mock versions of stupid popular TV shows, or just coming up with the worst tortures for each other). Sometimes I help Sofi with her school work, though my patience is very limited in this field so it rarely ends up well, it drives me crazy when she doesn’t even try to think on her own or makes stupid mistakes so I don’t meedle in her school work unless she asks me too because I don’t want to discourage her or make her think she isn’t good at school work just because I get pissed off with lack of thinking in people. 😀 There are things that Zofijka seems to prefer to talk to me about or ask me about rather than Mum, because she feels embarrassed with Mum for some reason, she tends to ask me loads of tricky questions about stiff like sex, divorce or suicide, to give you a few most recent examples. She still wants me to tell her bed time stories and lay in bed with her, before she falls asleep, like seriously, she’s addicted! That often annoys me but we often have lots of interesting night talks because of this. The stories Zofijka likes most are about a creature called Jim, who is 3000 years old, but looks like a 12-year-old boy, he is a Jimosaurus, lives in a forest in Australia, and is the king of all the animals in it. He has a hut deep inside the forest, and, while he can eat normal, human food and likes it, it’s not nutritional to him, he lives on helping others. So when he feels hungry, he jumps on the roof of his hut with his special binoculars and looks around the world if someone/something needs his help. If so, which is of course always the case, he puts on his leather wings and flies there, with his friend Zofijka the Bee, just in case, because she is an excellent healer and nurse and can care for humans and animals and plants. And his monarchal duties are taken up by his friend bear, who is always sleepy and always clumsy and doesn’t have the best memory, so a lot of unpredictable things happen in the forest during his reigns because he doesn’t have any control or authority. Sofi loves Jim since she was 5 and still dreams that one day he’ll come to her and make her knees better so she can rollerskate, or help her with any other dilemma she may have at a given moment. She also likes stories about Misha, and what his life would be like if he was a human. Zofijka helps me too, sometimes she surprises me with her matter-of-fact, dry attitude to some things and in some cases it makes her a good advisor. I was once mentioning her a tricky situation I was having with a friend, and Sofi ruthlessly concluded it: “Tell her, if she has a problem, then she has a problem. It’s not your problem”. Which, in this particular case, was a healthy way of seeing it. Zofijka is also good with clothes and hairstyles and all so she often helps me with that too. Sometimes if I desperately want to watch a film because of something in it, or get a new music crush and want to know how they look like, I’ll rather ask Zofijka than anyone else to describe that person or thing to me. Zofijka is also a reasonably good cook for a 12-year-old, but she always threatens me that she’s poisoned my food. 😀 She can be really scary sometimes.

How is it with you and your siblings? 🙂 If you have only one sibling, are you close with him/her?

Question of the day.

Do you have siblings?

My answer:

I do. My brother is 20, his name is Aleksander, nicknamed to Olek, he is a car mechanic, has started his own business earlier this year. He is very much into cars, but he would more happily be a driver, like the kind of a driver that my Dad is – a tanker driver, or a lorry driver, or a buss driver, you know, such who drives for longer distances, he’s been always fascinated by it. – He is also very interested in WWII, likes watching films and series to do with it or filmed around that time, he would also like to be in the army apparently but Mum is too scared and I don’t think she would let him. 😀 Funnily enough, both cars and WWII are also my Dad’s lifelong interests so you’d think they’d get on like a house on fire but it’s actually the opposite, my Dad’s very nasty to him ALL the time, since forever! Olek also loves football, although nowadays more in theory – plays FIFA and supports his favourite team, Lechia Gdańsk, and goes to all their matches, no matter how much it takes and how far it is, he’s even been to Denmark earlier this month. – He has a lot of close friends that he hangs out with, they often party and drink just in their own company, and he runs his business with his best friend but he’s not really into talking or socialising and says he doesn’t like people. He is bright and intelligent, but not cerebral or anything like that, just thinks quickly, and knows how to make people laugh, I think literally everyone. He is a bit impulsive and still does some mischief once in a while. He dreams about having some big adventures and is quite a materialist, but is also very very traditional in his views on almost everything, and doesn’t need much to be contented.

My sister Zofia or Zofijka, or Zosia for more normal people who do typical nicknames, she usually goes by Zofijka at home and I call her Sofi and loads of other things and she’s Zosia at school, is 12, there is a relatively big age difference between us but we get along really well and always laugh at the silliest things and play together quite a lot, well OK I don’t know if a lot but I don’t know many other siblings with a similar age difference who would play as much as we do. Zofijka is going to go to 6th grade in September. She doesn’t like learning and is very carefree about school, she gets tired very easily of using her brain, has a constant need for company and is very social, extroverted and hyperactive, she is loud and has a very infectious laughter, some people find her intimidating or draining. She is also very sensitive and conscientious, though, and can often be incredibly brave and courageous, but very moody and irritable and not always very pleasant to be around because of this. She has a lot of friends who change approximately every week, she will love you on Monday and invite for sleepovers and on Friday she’ll call you idiot behind your back and will pretend she doesn’t even see you. She is sporty, she used to play volleyball and rollerskate, she still loves rollerskating but she can’t do that anymore or at least right now because of her joint issues, especially with knees. She only does swimming right now and would love to horse ride in future. She is also big on dancing and singing, though, in my humble opinion, doesn’t have too much talent for the latter to be honest. Zofijka is also quite artsy, she can draw and paint really well and make very detailed things from plasticine or similar things. She loves animals, especially dogs, and her current dream job is to be a vet and a dog hairdresser at once, and she wants to have a big spa for dogs, though since a few years she’s been regularly mentioning that she’d like to become a nun and is interested in various religious orders. She likes playing around with people’s hair as well. She loves adventures and constantly needs adrenaline and something big going on – like trips, sleepovers, parties, getting presents, you get it. – Her favourite TV series is “Soy Luna”, she likes crime series as well, is very interested in smart phones, recently she plays Fifa too, a lot, her favourite band is One Direction but she also listens to loads of currently popular Polish hip hop and Spanish language pop and dance music like Alvaro Soler or even stuff like Enrique Iglesias, she would like to live in Spain. She is hugely into fashion and was it up to her, her whole outfit would be from H&M (but my Mum hates H&M). And she loves, loves, LOOOVES eating! Like, seriously, at the beginning of one school year they apparently had some introductions stuff, that everyone had to say something about themselves, and Sofi was like: “So, I am Zosia and, hm, I like to eat…”. 😀 We usually play different make-belief stuff which rather than being interesting in itself is more comical or something, not your typical things definitely, to give you an example last week we played I was Sofi’s daughter, and Sofi was my very snobbish mum and we were going shopping together and making a drama involving all the people in the supermarket, and Zofijka is pretty good at pretending and has some pretty good dramatic skills when she tries. She is also a good observer, especially of people’s appearance and stuff like subtle mannerisms they have. She’s not the brightest and most intelligent kid in the world, which doesn’t mean she is stupid or something, though as I said she doesn’t like using her brain too much, but sometimes she can be really funny and even make my Mum laugh, and my Mum only laughs at intelligent humour.

I also have 3 siblings in heaven, one older and two younger than me.

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

Hi guys! 🙂

This is my question for you today:

When was the first time you remember feeling really angry?

My answer:

I generally wasn’t the type of a child that would easily get angry, not in my very early years anyway, later it started to look a bit different, when I would bottle it all up and then my brain would suddenly throw it all out at once and I’d feel out of control, but when I was very small I remember I was actually wondering why people get so angry so often about everything, and how do they do it, like as if I didn’t even know how to be properly angry. 😀 Yet my very first childhood memory is all about anger. The first thing in my life that I remember is when Olek was born. I was 2 then, and some people tried to persuade me that children don’t remember things at that young age, but, well, turns out that I do, at least this one thing, maybe because of how intense it felt. Mum was in the hospital, and me and Dad came to visit her. I remember clearly when we came in to the hospital and then we were in a very creaky lift and I was a bit scared because I felt dizzy in it. Mum was on her own in the hospital room and we were both very happy to see each other. Olek, like me and Zofijka, was born through C-section, and she showed me her belly, and I saw the wound and all, it looked horrid, and I remember she had a big needle close to her tummy, I don’t even know what it was for, but, at least then, it looked huge to me and it was all just awful, and I was feeling absolutely, seriously mad at that horrible creature who did that to her, I think good for him that he wasn’t there. I was mad at him for hurting my Mummy, and for taking her away from me. I don’t remember anymore of that, but when me and Olek were kids, we weren’t really like typical siblings – yes we played a bit with each other, and yes we argued like all siblings, especially sisters and brothers do, but I didn’t really like him at all, and I didn’t feel anything positive towards him, I was indifferent to him at best. – And, while I don’t remember those things, my parents recall that I would often come over to him and start to beat him with something, or wouldn’t let him play with me or with my things, or wouldn’t talk to him etc. I was real nasty to him. And we still don’t really have much of a relationship at all, which kinda sucks, and is definitely weird, and we both feel pretty awkward around each other and mostly only talk casually. But I no longer beat him, I’d be afraid to do that as he’s at least 30 cm taller than me. 😀 And it’s not that we don’t like each other now, just don’t have a close bond I guess. But while it seems slightly weird, especially given that I have a much more strong bond with Zofijka who is 10 years younger than me, I guess not all siblings have to have a great relationship.

How about you? 🙂

Share Your World – March 19, 2018.

What is your earliest memory?

Many people with whom I’ve shared this memory say it’s impossible to have such early memories, as I was 2 years old then, but anyway I remember it and it is too vivid and subjective to be just something I remember from what others told me, in my opinion, also when I talked to my parents about it they told me they never knew that I perceived that situation this way.

This memory is about my brother’s birth, or rather a bit afterwards. I only remember that me and Dad went to Mum to the hospital, after he was born. I remember being in the lift for the first time and being a little bit afraid, I was often afraid of such kind of motion, something moving up and down, because of my balance issues. Then we came in to the room where Mum lied, she was rather weak and didn’t talk much as she probably still was under the influence of anesthetics (we were all born through caesaeran section). She let me touch her tummy and the impresson of this moment has stayed with me for very long. I felt her stitches and it somehow moved me very deeply. I know I felt like it is my brother’s fault and it has to be very painful for Mum. I told them he had to be terrible if she now looks like this and my Dad was laughing he surely is an absolute monster. Then I remember us leaving and being n the lift again and going out of the hospital and nothing more about it. But I’ve often thought this situation had to have some significant influence on me. My parents told me, and I remember some bits and pieces myself, that I was often pretty rude for Olek, yelling at him or punching him all of the sudden and not letting him touch me, although it wasn’t a long period of time, but I guess we never had a proper/normal sibling relationship, mainly because of our limited contact as I spent most of my childhood away from home.

Which way does the toilet paper roll go? Over or under?

Over.

What makes you feel grounded?

Having my feet on the ground, warmth, but not heat, touching Misha and his purr, soft, relaxing music, deep breathing, and for some reason which I don’t really get – the scent and taste of mint.

What did you appreciate or what made you smile this past week?  Feel free to use a quote, a photo, a story, or even a combination.

Misha

, progress in my languages, blogging, strengthening relationship with my Mum. I was doing a lot of self care stuff this week, much more than usual. On Monday I had a very nice morning. Dad needed to do something in the port, he delivers fuel, often to ports, and has other things to do there related to his work as well. He offered my Mum to go with him and as she agreed, I decided to go with them too. While Dad was in the port, we were at the Sea

and it was very nice and beautiful and we had a great time together, we also spent a lot of time together after we got back home. Yesterday we all were in a restaurant and had a big dinner, very yummy. It was anxiety provoking, it is always very anxiety provoking for me to go out and there was a lot of people, I also find it rather stressful to eat among many people, but despite all that anxiety it was very nice, I can’t remember when was the last time before yesterday that I was in a restaurant. 😀 I guess more than a year ago. and although overall my week was rather uneventful, it was mostly good.

This challenge is hosted by Cee

. Thanks so much. 🙂

 

Happy birthday, Olek and Mum!

So as I wrote a while ago today my brother Olek and my Mum have their birthday together. Olek is now 19 and I can’t believe it’s my Mum’s 45th birthday. She definitely doesn’t seem her age for me.

Besides having completely sleepless and very anxious night, I’m doing well. I could catch up on sleep in the morning which I did. It’s crazy to fall asleep at 7 AM, innit? 😀 But I’m glad I fell asleep finally, I prefer to sleep during the day than go around looking like Zombie and feeling totally rubbish, especially that with all the celebrations we had quite an eventful day. Although I doubt I will sleep tonight too, but well, we’ll see.

So right now we had a full house with lots of family, they came around 6 PM and I stayed with them for a few hours, but then me and Misha took a French leave before nine and are both in my room together. We have loads of delicious food, my Mum’s spectacular dessert which everyone likes and which never is boring – meringue with fruits (today peaches and billberries), a cheese cake, chicken wings, gyros salad and chops with chilli and mushrooms and other stuff, and some nachos and breaded nuts. Misha loved the chops.

Earlier today when I woke up we went with Zofijka to the shop and bought Mum a blanket she wanted to have. It looks really cosy and snug. I got some money for Olek as right now it seems to be the thing he needs and dreams about the most, plus I just hadn’t got any other idea honestly.

Also I will get some music for Mum as she mentioned to me she doesn’t have anything new to listen in the car.

As for other things, on Thursday I had an appointment with that OM doctor who is also a dermatologist and about whom I wrote some time ago, this time I saw him as a dermatologist because of my dry skin and the infection I have on my leg, but he didn’t really tell me anything which would be very new to me. He said I shouldn’t take showers but rather baths and don’t use a usual soap. I stopped taking showers last week already and we all always use black soap which is natural, also I try to make my baths possibly short most days. He also told me I should moisturise my skin and he prescribed me something moisturising. I moisturised it before as I thought it’s logical when you have dry skin, but I did it with oils, so maybe that cream he prescribed me will be more helpful, I didn’t collect the prescription yet though. And he told me the issue should ease a bit as the winter will finish which he told me last time too and which I’m really hoping for. I showed him my leg and he said he also thinks it may be because of my dry skin, then I mentioned to him that I showed it my GP two years ago and she said it might be staphylococcus and he said that yes it might be this too, but didn’t even suggest to make any tests or didn’t prescribe anything specifically for it, so looked pretty much like he didn’t know what it is. I told him I try to treat it with tea tree oil which seems to help and he said I should continue with it as it helps with healing. So, both me and my Mum, who also has dry skin and he says it’s genetic, we felt a bit like we wasted our time going there.

Yesterday I had “brain drainage” in the evening – that’s how I call Maths because I always really feel brain-drained afterwards 😀 and I hate it – and because I was feeling so drained I decided to have some self care time. I had a long, oiling, moisturising and relaxing bath with olive, coconut and sunflower oil and Epsom salt. I felt a bit like I was sitting in some mediterranean dish lol, Greek salad or something, wondered whether I maybe should put some feta cheese or olives into it too 😀 it was really oily, but I felt a bit desperate to do something with my skin as it pisses me off more and more. It’s strange that it never was so hardcore until this year, I’ve never realised I had dry skin before. So I spent there about 15 minutes listening to Plu and relaxing and even took a drink with me to the bathroom and drank it, it was Jack Daniels with Pepsi. I love Jack Daniels (not only because it’s Jack 😀 ), this is actually the only alcohol I drink, and I didn’t have it for ages, since September, but somehow I felt I’d like to drink it that evening. It was so good to hear Gwilym singing and drink Jack. I felt very moisturised afterwards and also very relaxed and warm, so I think it was a good idea, although I think I should probably repeat it once or twice as I felt itchy again later at night, but not as horribly as it used to be recently. The doc said I may feel more itchy when I’m stressed and I was definitely very anxious at night so I think that could be a reason for it.

So yeah, the evening after Maths was definitely fabulous for me.

The night was pretty rough as I mentioned, my Mum suggested it was maybe because of Jack still circulating in my blood and I also think that’s possible. I felt somehow very agitated and anxious, sometimes even panicky and it was very exhausting. Misha wasn’t with me, I looked for him for a while but felt too overwhelmed and scared in general to walk around the whole house and look for him everywhere, I hoped he’d come to me later on but it didn’t happen and everyone was asleep so I didn’t call him with food as it makes a bit of a noise.

I still felt that anxiety staying with me for most part of the day, also probably because of so many people around, but now I’m not anxious almost at all.

How is your weekend going? 🙂