TToT (about apples, sleep, Misha etc.)

   I feel like writing another gratitude list on here rather than just in my diary, and as part of it, I’m participating in the Ten Things of Thankful linky. In no particular order as always. 

1.    Misha. Currently, Misha is sleeping on my bed, curled up in a little ball and seemingly very content with his life right now. That makes me very happy because he seemed a bit off earlier this week. I’m not sure if he actually was or if I was being hypervigilant as I often am in regards to Misha, but he wasn’t much interested in his snacks and isolated himself a lot, while now he’s decidedly more cheerful, if mostly very anxious but that’s pretty much the norm unfortunately. I check on him every now and then, more for my own benefit than him really needing regular supervision during sleep lol, and I seriously wish I could make a close-up recording of all those cute sounds coming out of him – his sleepy purrs, his fluttery heartbeat, all the funny gurgling sounds in his tummy, his gentle breath and little “Hhrrru?”’s when he stretches in his sleep – and show y’all, but I don’t think any of my devices would be able to pick up such mini sounds. 
2. My room. Today I feel especially grateful for having a room which I don’t have to share with anyone (except for Misha obviously, I always tell him it’s his room too because he doesn’t have his own, but who would mind Misha?) because later this weekend I’ll have to lend it to my parents’ guests. Late last summer, my Mum invited her acquaintance – my aunt’s sister-in-law who really likes my Mum – to come over to us for a weekend. Back then she slept in my parents’ room, and they slept in the camper. She was really appreciative of how my Mum hosted her, so appreciative, it seems, that she wants to come again, this time with her husband, who normally works in France, but for a shorter time. Except this time round we don’t have the camper because it’s having some sort of maintenance stuff or such done, so they’ll have to sleep here and Bibielz will sleep with Sofi in her mini room). I can’t say I don’t mind, because I do (even though her husband is called Jacek), but this makes me even more appreciative of having a room just for myself the vast majority of the time. And aside from simply being my own room, it’s also a really cool room, so I’m sure they’ll like it here. Perhaps so much that they’ll come for another weekend sleepover in two months’ time. 😀 
3. Going back to horse riding. I don’t know when exactly I’ll go yet, but I know I want to do it again. It may be the worst sport for me given my abilities (or lack thereof actually) and both mental and physical health situation, but it’s the only one I actually like, and I miss it despite the anxiety that has always been associated with it for me. I miss the stable and my regular horse and my instructor, and I want to give it a go again. Perhaps less ambitiously than before and more hippo therapeutically after all, but I really do. But the ultimate thing that actually made me make this decision was something else, which I won’t write about now but probably will quite soon. 
4. My fazas and generally my faza life. The past year or so, my faza life has been very… well, weird, chaotic, tumultuous… I don’t really want to get into the details, plus it wouldn’t be fitting for this particular post because it would take up most of it, and I don’t really have enough distance to it to be able to write about it publicly like that at this point, but things have been really weird and a little confusing sometimes I’d say, and both good and bad. But this week has been pretty good faza-wise, if very intense, and I wonder if perhaps things won’t be becoming more stable from now on. I’d quite like that finally. 😀 ANyway, I got a massive peak on Gwil this week totally out of nowhere, and you regular people on here know that a peak is a great thing and works like the best natural antidepressant for me, so having a peak means I’m doing really well mood wise. No spectacular highs like peaks cause sometimes, just a serene, calm sort of happy feeling. 
5. My Apple Watch. My Apple Watch may not be the most useful of my devices like my iPhone or Mac or PlexTalk, it doesn’t really bring anything extremely new to my life or its quality or whatever, but I just like it. This week I attempted to sleep with it for several nights to see how accurate its sleep tracking is, in particular sleep stages. I didn’t expect much because I didn’t believe a device like that could be reliable at all in tracking something as elusive as sleep, and because my Mum was saying it didn’t work too well and seemed very random to her, and claimed that it can only track your sleep during the scheduled sleep time, so if your alarm goes off and you’ll just turn it off and go back to sleep it won’t notice it. Well, my experience with sleep tracking seems to be better than my Mum’s. As far as I can tell, it’s oddly accurate. It knows very well more or less when I fall asleep, even if I fall asleep before my scheduled sleep time starts, and it knows quite precisely when I wake up, and it’s not because I use the Apple Watch right when I wake up, because even when I do check the time when I wake up I usually do it on the PlexTalk out of sheer habit. I obviously can’t objectively verify the accuracy of the sleep stages thing, but again, as far as I can tell, it’s pretty good. Like last night I kept waking all the freaking time and felt like I was sleeping very lightly, it did show that my sleep was very fragmented and I got only half an hour of deep sleep. After I let Misha out at half past four and went back to bed, I remember having a lot of dreams and Apple Watch said I kept switching between REM and core sleep pretty much til I woke up at almost 11 AM, and I remember having a very vivid dream right before I woke up and woke up with a raging headache, and Apple Watch says I woke up from REM sleep. Apparently it’s a thing to get headaches when you suddenly wake up from REM sleep like that. Also because I fell asleep at half past two last night and then didn’t really get the best quality sleep, I still felt very sleepy by the time my alarm went off at 8. I tried to snooze it, but must have done something differently than I originally wanted because Apple Watch turned off the alarm completely, while still staying in sleep mode and it knew that I was sleeping. So my Mum was definitely not right that it will only log sleep during the schedule, although I guess Apple Watches are still unaware of such a thing as naps. So yeah, overall I’m quite positively surprised and, who knows, maybe I’ll end up sleeping with my Apple Watch every night, after all. Not that knowing the sleep stages gives me anything really, but it can be just good to know. I’m also very curious if it’ll notice anything weird during my sleep paralysis. I already had it once with the Apple Watch on, but it was past my set sleep time schedule and I didn’t know yet that you can prolong it like I did today, so it wasn’t tracking my sleep. It was very helpful though because as I was in sleep paralysis, at some point I got an email, so my Apple Watch vibrated and I woke up. Which, while we’re at it, makes me also very grateful to the email sender, although I don’t remember who that was anymore. 😀 
6.    Speaking of Apple – apple pie! 😀 – My Mum made one last weekend and we ate it during the week, but we couldn’t eat it all so in the end Mum had to freeze it. It was very yummy though. 
7. And speaking of sleep, that dream I had earlier this week. That was really ridiculously hilarious. And yes, I find myself really liking the name Helenor. The next gem stone I get is going to be named Helenor (for all the new people here, I give names that I like to my gem stones because I don’t plan on having children and even if I did, many of the names I like are unusable for children). 
8. My fluffy overalls that I got from Mum a couple years ago. She made them for me and they’re very warm and comfy and I love wearing them when it’s relatively cool weather like it’s been recently. 

Noticeable Welsh progress this week. I wonder if it isn’t the aforementioned faza peak doing this to me, because I haven’t really been doing anything any different than last week or the week before. The power of peaks. 😂 Anyway, I really appreciate it because while my Norwegian learning has been mostly a stroll in the park because of Swedish, Welsh, with all the related excitement and my feelings for it, has been quite an uphill struggle compared with my other languages, so even the smallest leaps of progress are very much valued by Bibielz. And Welsh-language music. Even now I’m listening to Blas Folk Radio Cymru and I’m really grateful that there are ways for people like me who live someplace completely different to also discover music in minority languages. 

1. Chips for lunch yesterday. Mum was trying some new experimental recipe for chips, which didn’t sound all that good to me from the beginning, and eventually we both agreed that they turned out quite crappy, but then my Mum made «normal» chips, and these, as always, were very good. Good chips always deserve appreciation. 

   So, that’s my gratitude list. How about your thankfuls? What nice things have happened to you this week? 🙂 

TToT (Misha, Traditional Latin Mass, pillows, etc.)

   I thought that today is a good day for writing a gratitude list. I always try to include things that I’m thankful for at least once a week  when writing in my personal diary, but I think I haven’t written a grateful blog post in quite a while and I feel like it today. I’m linking up with Ten Things of Thankful. 

1.    The fact that I’m feeling well physically. My family – that is Sofi, Dad and Olek – have been mildly sick with something and while it isn’t serious, no fever or anything, it seems to be dragging on for quite a while, especially for Sofi. So far, I’ve been spared. Jack the Ripper is visiting me this week and I had two migraines, but overall I’m feeling well. 
2.    Misha spending a lot of time with me, particularly at nights. Misha has recently taken a particular liking for my armchair and sleeps at night either there, or on my bed as usual. I always love it when Misha sleeps with me, his mere presence instantly creates such a pleasant, peaceful, Mishful atmosphere. But this week I’ve been particularly appreciative of it as I’ve had some yucky dreams and night time anxiety, and waking up in such Mishful atmosphere makes things so much easier. 
3.    That I’ll probably soon be able to get a new cable for my scanner. I haven’t been scanning anything for a long time, because it’s such a huge hassle and difficult to do well on my own. But now that I’m attending Traditional Latin Mass, I sorely feel the lack of quality Catholic books in accessible formats, especially older ones, and feel almmost envious of my Mum who keeps buying herself all kinds of such books. They are very useful for prayer, reflection or even simple reading as a form of deepening your faith, and I always have to go looking for things like that on the Internet, which in the end means that what I find won’t necessarily be traditionalist at all. I have always struggled with focusing during prayer, and not having materials to help me out and help my mind go in the right direction makes it even more difficult sometimes. Even the missal that I have in epub is a lot shorter than the one my Mum has as a physical book, and I’m limited here anyway because I can’t just take my Braille-Sense with the missal with me to church like all the other people take their books because that would be super unpractical, I have to read it before the Mass at home. So my Mum has wanted to help me out and scan at least some of her huge collection of these “saintly books” as she collectively calls them for short, but then we couldn’t find the power cable for the scanner absolutely anywhere, and it appears to be such a niche cable that it can’t be replaced with just any average cable. So Mum phoned the company that distributes those scanners and asked if there’s any way of getting another cable or something, and they said that next time they’ll be ordering from the company that produces those scanners which is in the UK, they’ll order a cable for Bibielz as well. So Bibielz can’t wait for it and for all them saintly books. 
4.    Speaking of TLM, I still feel so incredibly grateful to God every time I think about it, that we’ve been able to become part of the Catholic Tradition and attend this beautiful Mass and generally change our lives thanks to this. It will soon be a year since we “converted” as my Mum puts it and Mum and Sofi and me often reflect on how much things have changed for us since then, not even only spiritually but generally in how we think, and laugh at the difference sometimes. 

   My pillows. Yeah I always love my pillows, but today is a good day for being grateful for them because I have new pillowcases. Not for the regular, big pillows, but two smaller ones, one of which I put on top of my big pillow when I sleep and keep my PlexTalk  under it, and the other is for all kinds of unexpected needs and situations and for Misha when he wants to sleep in the bed rather than on it as he usually does. And then I also have three larger, additional pillows just in case, haha, but that’s not relevant here. Anyway, the pillowcases I had on the two, smaller pillows got badly torn as I had them for ages, and before I got some new pillowcases for these  pillows, for some time I slept without an additional pillow and that sucked because I’m totally not used to it – my Dad only sleeps on one, flat pillow and now I’m not surprised he has sleep apnea, I think it wouldn’t take long for me to develop it sleeping like that all the time – so then I got a different pillow, which was bulkier than the one I usually put on top of my regular pillow, so then in turn it felt way too high, and it muffled my PlexTalk quite effectively. So I was really happy and relieved when I finally got brand new pillowcases  and could sleep with my actual pillow. The right or wrong pillow can really make a huge change. 😀 

1.    That I can be helpful for my Mum with her iPhone. I really like it when I can be helpful for people, and while my Mum likes her iPhone and says that it is indeed a lot more comfortable than any of her previous Android phones, she also needs a bit of help or a tip on how to do something with it quite regularly. Even if I don’t know how to do something, it looks like it’s easier to research it for me than for Mum. Perhaps because I always automatically do it in English and there’s more info on most topics in English online. Funnily enough, since last week, she’s been saying that perhaps she’d like to buy herself an Apple Watch, because it would make it easier for her to take calls when out and about and she hopes it would be better for measuring how many kilometres she runs and bikes. I think it’s funny at what pace we’re becoming the Apple family. 😀 I am very seriously planning to sway Dad to the Apple camp by the end of next year as well, just cus why not? Olek will be all alone with a Samsung. 😀 I know it’s beyond my abilities to convince Olek as his choice is fully conscious and informed, and because of that I wouldn’t even want to change it as it wouldn’t make too much sense. I already told Dad how Apple has CarPlay and that seems to have appealed to him as a lorry driver. 
2.    doing relatively well mentally. July and August were awful for me with loads of what I call sensory anxiety for the purpose of this blog, which was going up and downn a lot and which was mostly caused by an unusual amount of sleep paralysis episodes that I had at that time and that they also were quite unusually intense and long, so that things felt quite out of control and I had a hard time functioning normally. Lately things have calmed down significantly and for long enough that I think I can say this month has been better, even despite horrid dreams and anxiety at night afterwards that I had earlier this week. 
3.    Lots of yummy fruit. We still have raspberries in our garden! They haven’t been very sweet this year, but are still good, and it’s always nice to have home-grown raspberries rather than have to buy them from someone/somewhere else. We also have loads of pears, more than we can eat, in fact, so Mum is making some sort of mousse from themm or something. We also have a lot of apples (as befits the Apple family lol). And even blueberries, though these aren’t home-grown, Mum just bought a lot of them a while back to freeze. So we eat a lot of fruits and it’s really nice that we can do it. 
4.    Chilly weather, which is chilly and cosy enough for me to be able to wear my fluffy overalls in the evenings again. For me that always means that autumn has properly started. 😀 
5.    My language progress. It hasn’t felt like anything huge, but I’m always grateful even for a very little bit that my brain absorbs. Also what I feel particularly happy about, and what is particularly tangible for me, is that because of my Norwegian learning, I can feel my Swedish strengthening significantly as well. I was kind of worried it would be the oppposite and that I’d end up having a jumble of the two and would regret my silly out-of-the-blue affair with Norwegian. I’m so glad that it’s not the case, as well as that, for that matter, my relationship with Norwegian has definitely become a steady one by now, as we’ve been together for over a year now. 

   How about you, lovely people? What are you grateful for this week? How has it been for you overall? 🙂 

Ten Things of Thankful.

I thought it’s time to do some gratitude list post, as I haven’t done it in a while. As usual with such posts, I’m linking up with

Ten Things of Thankful (TToT).

1.    That my immediate family are more or less healthy again. We had a wave of Covid going  through our house in the last couple of weeks and we suspect we all might have been sick with it, to a varying degree. My parents certainly were, and it was them who were particularly badly ill. I was especially worried about my Mum, who has episodic asthma, and has been in the midst of an episode when it hit her, so she had really awful cough, but was also generally quite unwell with awful muscle pains and stuff. Thankfully, my Dad is completely well now and back to work, and my Mum is a lot better. She still can’t feel smells or tastes and has worse cough than her usual asthma cough, but other than that she says she’s feeling well and it shows. I’m really glad this is over, as it was quite depressing having a mini hospital at home, and like I said quite worrying at times.
   1. 1. 1. Good sleep last night. My sleep has been very up and down lately, and yesterday I had quite an awful anxiety day. It took me ages to settle down to sleep and I was really scared to fall asleep, but when I eventually did fall asleep I got solid ten hours of it and didn’t even wake up all the time as is usual when I’m having bad anxiety.
2. Mum’s help. I’ve been having a lot of stuff to do this week – some Christmas shopping, writing and sending cards to people, some banking stuff etc. – and my Mum helped me with it all, which I am the more grateful for given that she’s still recovering. I’ve got a HUUUUGE collection of English-language cards that my Mum stocked up on for me years ago so that I can send them to people abroad, as I only send cards to people abroad at this point. That card collection is also something I’m grateful for, so that I don’t have to worry every single year whether I’ll be able to find the right cards for people in the shops but just pick something from my overflowing box. 😀 Christmas shopping is also so much easier for me with my Mum because I’m terrible with money and stuff like that, even when shopping online. Not to mention banking. 😀
3. Lots of snow. We’ve been having a lot of snow since the end of November. Well, not like A LOT, but surprisingly much for this time, we usually don’t get proper, fluffy snow that would stay around for a longer time until about Christmas. And this early snow has been very fluffy so you can make snowballs and snowmen and whatever you want from it. We’d been in quarantine and now Sofi’s school has their classes online because a few teachers are sick, so Sofi’s really happy with the snow and we both play in it together with Jocky, and Jack Frost haha. It also means that I can wear my comfy fluffy overalls in the evenings that my Mum’s made for me for Christmas a few years ago, and it’s the season for tea with ginger and other amazing things like that. Tomorrow, provided that Sofi won’t lose interest, we’re going to make gingerbreads.
4. Misha. I am grateful for Misha’s existence each and every day, even though today I haven’t even seen him yet because in the morning he played with Sofi and now no one knows where he’s sleeping.
5. Tasting Christmas food. My Mum’s made a start to making all our traditional Christmas dishes, but because her sense of taste is non-functioning at the moment, it’s been quite challenging for her. Thus, Sofi and I kindly offered our help with the gustatory part. It was mostly meant to be for our current benefit – so that we get to taste all the Christmas food before Christmas actually comes – but now I’m really glad we thought about this because otherwise some of the dishes would be really quite insipid haha. I mean, Mum said she seasoned everything but it must’ve been some truly minuscule amounts. I really hope Mum’s senses go back to normal until Christmas so she can actually enjoy Christmas food.
6. Medication. I’m grateful for having pain killers, as well as my migraine and anxiety medicines available. I had a migraine on Monday, which was pretty shitty, but I’m sure it would be even shittier if I didn’t have the migraine meds. And like I said I also had quite high anxiety yesterday. I’m absolutely used to dealing with anxiety with no meds, as that’s what I did for most of my life until I got my diagnoses, and I still try to take my PRN med only when things get really bad because it’s Xanax (except it has a different name here) so it’s highly addictive. It only takes the edge off it most of the time, but that’s still a very welcome difference and I’m extremely grateful for that, as at least it helps me to focus on and see other things in life beyond my little Bibiel brain bubble.
7. My little Bluetooth speaker. Well, I’ve had it for over a year now and I’ve always loved it, but the reason why I mention it in this gratitude list specifically is that recently, for some mysterious reasons, it had stopped working for me. Basically, this speaker always gets a little freaky when I get a phone call, like it doesn’t know what to do about it. Sometimes its volume will go all the way up and it will play the ringer sound at the same time when my phone’s already playing it (best way to be woken up at night, and wake up everyone else), or it’ll turn off and never turn back on or anything when I finish the call. Sometimes when I answer the call I’ll hear it through the speaker, other times through the phone. So overall it’s just very unpredictable in how it behaves with phone calls and I don’t really know why, but normally I don’t care much because I don’t talk to people on the phone much. And earlier this week, I was listening to music when Sofi called me, and I heard a very weird popping sound from the speaker and then it turned off. I talked with Sofi, and wanted to turn the speaker back on when we finished the call, but it just made that popping sound again and wouldn’t play despite it looked like it was on. I tried to reset it but again it would only pop when I turned it off and on, and nothing beyond that, despite several trials, literally nothing I came up with seemed to help. I was really disappointed because it’s a really good speaker and I’ve been really happy with it so far. It has a smooth, bedroom-y sound, which is what I was looking for because I mostly wanted a speaker that I could listen to music from at night, but at the same time, unlike most speakers specifically branded as bedroom speakers, it sounds very clear even at relatively low volumes, and very neat when you turn it up as well. Also everyone says that it fits my room aesthetically for some reason. And my Mum always says she envies me it, which I totally understand, haha. And it’s from B&O which are known to make good devices overall so I wouldn’t have expected that this speaker would have such a short life or be so prone to serious malfunction, especially given its price, and I also have headphones from B&O so I was wondering if I should also prepare for their time to come soon. I was planning to get in touch with B&O somehow, but in the meantime my speaker was totally useless. Then yesterday I tried to turn it on once again, and, surprise! it worked! I’ve no idea what was wrong with it but now it works completely fine. I even got Sofi to call me again while I had it connected to my phone and it didn’t freak out. I’m really glad to have a functioning speaker again, and now I appreciate it even more that I don’t have to rely on the iPhone’s built-in and rather unfriendly-sounding speaker all the time. 😀
8. That we have the possibility to attend traditional Latin Mass every week. I recently wrote about our discovering and kind of “conversion” to traditional Catholicism, and you can read about that here.  I am also grateful for all the resources that help me develop my faith and for all the grace that God gives me to make it possible for me to do so.
9. My language-learning progress. This week has been rather low-key in this department, but I’ve been listening to a lot of Norwegian podcasts and have become a lot more confident when it comes to my listening skills in this language. I have also learnt some interesting new Welsh words. Fun fact for y’all: there’s such a word in the Welsh language as clusfeinio (klis-VAY-nee-aw in the North or klees-VAY-nee-aw in the South though I’m never quite sure how to represent Welsh sounds in English phonetically) which means to listen attentively, as well as to eavesdrop. I think it’s cool that there’s a language in this world that has a special word for the particularly attentive kind of eavesdropping, as this is something I do a lot. People-watching, blind edition.

What are your thankfuls this week? 🙂