Hey guys! 🙂
For today, I have for you a set of three Scottish tunes from harpist Rachel Hair’s and guitarist Ron Jappy’s collaborative album Sparks. All of these tunes are reels, and the first two are traditional, whereas Jamie Shearer’s was composed by Scottish fiddler and dancing master James Scott Fiddler.
Hhrrru? 😻
This is MishMish. I just woke up. I slept for most of the day. Guess what? Mila’s got me very yummy sausages, and I can have one every day! Just one… 😦 Isn’t it a shame? But I am glad anyway that at least I can have one sausage, they are very yummy and smell heavenly, but the peeps say they are super smelly, as if there was something very poisonous in them. I don’t believe it. I think they exaggerate as always. For them everything is smelly. Even me, sometimes. Zofijka says I have bad breath! How dare she?! Mila says that Zofijka shouldn’t say that I have bad breath because it’s not my fault but theirs, because they should care for my dental hygiene more. But even I don’t care about it and to be honest I really dislike that weird stuff they put on my teeth when they do that, and that I have to sit still and they put their big peep claws in my mouth. I always do a big drama of it. And it pays off as you can see because then they don’t want to do it anymore. But it’s also awful of them because it’s like they don’t even care if I get gum disease or something like that and die! Or my teeth fall out and I’ll starve myself to death! Russian blue cats get gum disease easily, but noo, my peeps are too lazy to care. And then when my gums will start to rot, they will be all acting innocent and like: “Oh, poor Misha, we wonder why his gums are so bad, and why he is so smelly!” as if they had nothing to do with it. But that’s of course humans for ya…
But I didn’t want to rant about that. I wanted to rant about something else. Also closely peep related. I overheard a conversation Mum had with Mila and Zofija in the morning. She said: “I’ve got an idea. I think it’ll be worth trying to finally make some space for Misha to go out on the terrace, so that he won’t run away. I think I’ll do it today”. As you can imagine if you know me, and hopefully you do by now, my heart skipped with joy. Yayyy, yaaaay! I will go out. I will play in the sun. I will look at the big world! I will catch magpies and seagulls and give them to my peeps and eat them every day for dinner – the magpies and seagulls, not the peeps! – They will see how brave and strong I am, and not as they say – “That clumsy Misha can’t even catch a half-dead fly.”! – Mum went out somewhere, I thought in preparation to make a “space” for me, and, full of happy, fuzzy feelings, I went to sleep. I slept for a long time. I woke up at dinner time and looked around to see how’s Mum’s work going. There were no signs of progress, though. Any progress. None at all. Peeps are stupid. And then I went downstairs and found Mum vegging out on the couch in the living room, in front of the telly. What the f…feline?! And then I overheard another lovely peep convo. “So what’s with that run for Misha?” “Ah, no, I thought it through” – said Mum – “and I don’t think it’s worth the effort. I’d have to climb the ladder and I think I’m too afraid to do that”. Like, what? What’s so scary about climbing the ladder? Climbing anything really? Climbing’s so, so much fun. I wonder why the peeps – who are so cocky that they are smart and know waaay more than me –
haven’t discovered the joys of climbing yet. “And other than that” – Mum continued – “what if I’d do it, and make it for him, and he’d be bored after a couple of days, as he often is? My effort will be even more worthless. And I just don’t feel in the mood” Me? Seriously, me?! I may get quickly bored by boring things, but I will never, ever, in a million years, get bored of the outside. It’s just so frustrating they don’t get such simple things. She isn’t in the mood… It’s not the matter of mood, for Russian blue heaven’s sake! So I went back to sleep, and, as you know, I just woke up. And I feel very sad and disappointed, still. I think I just have to get used to it and be happy with just looking through the window. Sometimes what you have just has to be enough for you and you either accept it, or continue being constantly grumpy and unhappy for the rest of your life. If it’s up to me even a little bit, I’d better try to be happy and satisfied with what I have.
How has your week been, pets and peeps? Any frustrations? Or was it a happy week for you?
Mishpurrs. 💜 💚 💙
Misha
And today I have the following question for you:
What’s the worst thing that’s happened this week?
My answer:
Rant ahead! If you happen to also have emetophobia, or simply are not in the mindset for reading lots of pessimistic stuff loaded with anxiety, I’d recommend proceeding with caution.
For me, ugh, quite tough thing. My Dad got stomach flu, or whatever else it is, with similar symptoms anyway, and for me it means something quite close to end of the world. ‘Cause, for those who don’t know yet, I have emetophobia so such things scare the shit out of me and it’s incredibly hard to settle down after such a thing.
THe ironical part of all this is that he got sick yesterday very early in the morning, and yesterday was his birthday. Also ironically, although I usually keep the door to my room closed at night that night it was open because I left it for Misha, having seen him a couple nights before curled up at my door, waiting for someone to show mercy and open it so that he could go to bed… And I woke up startled and horrified, just had no idea why and then realised there are some very strange sounds downstairs, then I heard Dad going back upstairs to his room so I asked him what’s up and what he’s doing and he said he’s “pooping and puking” so I was absolutely horrified. Then I couldn’t fall asleep for quite a while but was reluctant to get up with so much anxiety and feeling depressed ’cause why should I and as a result I slipped into sleep paralysis for good 30 minutes or so, and there were also some stuff involving vomiting, I was just shattered waking up again so then it seemed even more pointless to get up and I just felt like a piece of bloody shit so stayed in bed until well after noon, which even with my messed up sleep cycle is not much like me, I try to be normally a bit more disciplined but yesterday it just didn’t make any sense. Finally, when I thought that lying in bed actually doesn’t make much sense either and can be even worse because I might get into sleep paralysis again I decided I might as well get up because it’s equally pointless and equally risky and I did. It looked like Mum went out somewhere so I called her to check what the situation actually is and maybe it’s not that bad as I thought. I asked her where she was and what’s with Dad and she said he got poisoned, probably with mushrooms he ate for supper which were probably just undercooked. That still wasn’t a good news, but as long as the poisoning wasn’t serious and the mushrooms weren’t toxic themselves I could breathe a huge sigh of relief because at least it wasn’t contagious, ’cause while pretty much anything related to vomit is more or less scary to me, the thing that is most triggering to me in this regard is being sick myself. I did feel greatly relieved even though I still had my guard on. I really can love someone to pieces but when they are sick and vomiting, especially when infecting, I’d rather be as far away from them as possible. But since it looked like my poor Dad’s illness isn’t contagious and he didn’t vomit any longer, I actually felt a bit guilty because I was vegetating in bed for no apparent reason and he was suffering in loneliness on his birthday and maybe needed some help or whatever. So now as I felt almost sure that being around him is relatively safe, I could play a sister of Mercy. Even though even looking at him being just sick overall made me feel shaky and sick myself. He didn’t want anything from me only to keep him company for a while, which I did, but still tried to keep a safe distance between us, as much as it is possible without being rude when you for example wish someone happy birthday – you won’t do it from a mile away and with your head turned in the opposite direction, right? But I tried to comfort myself that all my altruism and dedication won’t be for nothing and he’s not infecting for sure.
Unfortunately, looks like he does. ‘Cause despite him going to the loo a lot for various purposes and thus getting rid of all the possible mushrooms he could eat, he was still sick and having some flu-like symptoms like muscle aches and such so for my Mum, and with time for me too, it was clear that he got a tummy bug. So, yeah scary.
And it was his birthday, mind you, so, it was a shattering day for me. My Dad being sick, having to be around him, guests, socialising, loads and loads of food, and during the party, when Dad was already feeling better I was sitting next to him, and he was making us drinks, gosh I would most happily just run away screaming as far and fast as I could and hide somewhere in the ices of Lapland until the new year, and it still feels very tempting. And my uncle came before the rest of the guests, just for a short while, and said he was “feeling kind of sick”.
I think I didn’t have such a strong hit of emetophobia since a good couple of years, I think this is one area in which I made a lot of progress for sure, but now it feels like a relapse, I don’t really get why it’s so bad this time, maybe it’s because in general I’ve been overthinking a lot and just an anxious mess overall. I’d never had any particularly compulsive/obsessive behaviours, not even at school when my emetophobia could be really hard to live with at times especially if I didn’t want anyone to realise I was struggling with it, and now I do feel a bit “OCD-like”, feeling like I absolutely need to wash my hands after pretty much anything that I consider even slightly “risky” or before eating whatever. I wasn’t like that and I just hope things get back to normal when the Christmas season ends. 😱 By the way what is with this Christmas season?! It’s not the first one when someone in our house has stomach flu. And because there’s so much food and socialising I definitely feel like it’s the worst possible time for this stuff. If there’s ever a good time I mean.
Dad is feeling OK today and doesn’t have any symptoms, but I definitely don’t, and it’ll be probably be a while until I settle down even if no one else follows, I’m really tired of feeling so intensely anxious already but can’t stop it, still feeling compulsive, eating fairly restrictively and drinking apple cider vinegar despite I actually hate it, but I’d rather drink a sea of it than got sick even without throwing up. It may not help me to keep away from the viruses but at least if I’ll get sick maybe it’ll be milder or in the worst case my overall health might somewhat improve and my metabolism will speed up thanks to it, well I can’t complain about that anyway, but it won’t do me any harm and people are so crazy about its natural properties. My Mum as a true natural health geek drinks it every day or mostly every day and so will I at least until Christmas is over.
So I think that’s the worst thing, I can’t say this week is particularly good in general, but that’s definitely the worst.
And how about you? Feel free to rant if you wish. 🙂
Hi guys.
I was just about to do the song of the day post for today but it looks like I won’t be able to do it. The song I planned to share with you is for some reason only available on Spotify, not Youtube or even SoundCloud or anywhere that I know of, and neither I have it in my personal collection so I can’t even simply give you the Dropbox link or anything. And as we are at that, I think it’s so very exclusive, because then people who don’t have Spotify can’t listen to the whole song unless they sign up, I am not sure if it really helps their marketing, ’cause to me it looks rather discouraging, but that’s another thing and not what I’m so concerned, frustrated and anxious about today. The reason is, my Spotify stopped working completely! ANd I just need to rant plus maybe I’ll be lucky and someone who might have any idea what’s up with it will stumble upon it and be so nice to give any hints. I think there was some update to it yesterday because when I opened it on my PC, it looked like it’s going to update, but then there was a message that the installer isn’t working or something like this, I can’t remember what exactly it said, anyway I had the option to try again or cancel the update. When I tried again, it was just the same and Spotify wasn’t able to update, so I cancelled it and it just opened in the older version that I had installed. But the same happened again when I ran the app later that day, and then today as well. So finally I decided I will reinstall it and maybe that will help. So I uninstalled it and downloaded the latest version, and tried to install it, but every time I open the installer, it just closes after a little while without installing Spotify or even without any information like that something is wrong, it just closes. I still have the installer to an older version, from the last time I installed Spotify on this laptop, so I tried to run it, and when I did it, and every time I try to do it, it looks as if the installation was in progress, progress bar is showing, then it looks like the installation is complete, and it suddenly closes, but the application isn’t actually installed.
I even got my Mum to look at it, thinking that maybe there is something my screen reader isn’t able to read, but she said it’s just that – you open it, and it closes, without installing.
I looked around the Internet if anyone has similar problems after the last update but I couldn’t find anything that seemed relevant. I even thought that maybe they stopped supporting Windows 7 and my laptop is still running on Windows 7, but when I looked at the list of systems Spotify supports win 7 was included plus it would be rather malicious of them to stop it at this point because I guess there are still many people using computers with win 7.
It drives me crazy! Well, any kind of tech issues drive me crazy, regardless whether I have any clue what to do about them or not, even though I am not that very techy, although my Dad thinks I am probably the most techy person in the world hahahaha. But it drives me particularly crazy! because I just need Spotify and I need it on my PC! You could think if I have my own huge collection of music it shouldn’t be that important, but it is, even just because I like to explore new music, and because I can’t have everything I like in my collection, and there are also other reasons for it.
I wonder what I can do with it now. If I had some constructive information about what’s wrong, maybe I could do something to eliminate the issue, but when it just closes… yeah, just frustrated. I hope it’s solvable and that I won’t be left without the desktop version.
Maybe I’ll get Olek to have a look at it after work, (Olek is the techiest person in the world in Mum’s opinion) but I am slightly apprehensive keeping in mind that the last time I had some computer issues – in August, when I had such a long so called hiatus from blogging for over a month – it was Olek who screwed it up even more, of course genuinely trying to help, but, you know… I’m not sure whether I want to be without the computer for another month just because Spotify is not working. Grrrrrrr my brain is turning upside down. Why do such relatively small things make me an anxious mess? Recently me and my Mum have been thinking a lot about my apparent autistic traits (that’s a thing for another post that I’ll perhaps write but now don’t feel perfectly comfortable with it yet), and now when I have a situation like this I can definitely see them, those that I don’t normally notice every day, like that in fact I do have some routines, which maybe aren’t so very very inflexible, but still i hate when something major interrupts them. I just hate changes, even relatively minor like this, but more or less important to me, although that’s no secret to me, I never liked changes, and just thinking about this, noticing these things in me I mean, makes me feel kinda depressed for some reason. I hate that even such little things can sometimes affect me so much, and I think that if my brain won’t slow down after a while, I will have to quiet it with my anti-anxiety med to stop overthinking this constantly, and I wouldn’t like to be forced to do this because… it would feel like I can’t even manage such small things on my own, without some bloody pills.
Anyways, if by some miracle anyone has an idea what could be the reason of this peculiar behaviour of my Spotify (other than it simply revenging itself and sulking at me) I’d be very grateful if you’d share them. I even tried to be diplomatic and talk to it in Swedish since it is Swedish, and I like talking to everything, but it is still not one bit more conciliatory. Rant over. Thanks a lot for reading, regardless of if you have any ideas or not, it always means a lot to me. 🙂 And sorry if it is slightly chaotic.
Guess what? I’ve got the skin infectionn on my leg, again. I was writing about it early this year, that I get very weird skin infections, or whatever it is, on my calves and I can’t, no one can’t, figure out the reason. I’ve been to three dermatologists and two surgeons with it and everyone is kinda clueless. I thought it’s maybe allergy, but I can’tfigure out what could I be allergic to that I don’t know of, and I don’t apply any chemicals on my skin nowadays consciously, most of the cosmetics I use are homemade by our lifestyle guru – my Mum, the rest are either al natural or hypoallergic, if I need to use anything else which is extremely rarely. Hell my Mum even got me tested for diabetes because we were worried it’s healing for so long, but I don’t have it. I’ve been told I once had staphylococcus in it, but not much more, and I’ve got a lot of meds for it, which worked sometimes more, sometimes less, but always very slowly.
It doesn’t look too bad because it’s always small and I’ve never had any complications, but as I said it heals for ages, like a few months, and I have scars after that shit, I have it twice a year, so if it doesn’t stop, I wonder how my legs will look in ten years time. It’s also pretty painful most of the time and makes long walking or standing a bit hard.
I’ve felt my leg hurting since last night but I didn’t figure out it can be that until I saw it bleeding when I was going to shower a few hours ago. I was mad.
I wouldn’t be whining at all, after all I kinda got used to it and many people, including me have to deal with worse and more important things, but this time it drives me crazy for a reason.
It means that, AGAIN, I won’t be able to ride for God knows how long. Some part of me is starting to wonder whether I actually should still insist on riding if there have been so many things speaking against it over the years. Maybe it would be wiser to give it up, or maybe there’s something else that God has planned for me, but I can’t accept it, and won’t. Not yet at least. I guess I just have to wait some more. Maybe then I’ll get some luck with riding finally. But OMG I’m so angry with this!
My Inner MishMash 