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. 

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! 🎄

 

Loreena MCKennitt – “A Hundred Wishes”.

I thought we’d listen to Loreena McKennitt today. There are a lot of her songs that I find more relatable than this one, a lot of her music speaks to me. She also has a lot of music which is better just musically. But for some reason, I really like this song.

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! 🙂

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.

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.

Happy Easter, peeps and pets! 😍😻

Hiya people and hhrrru? to all of you.

It’s just a quick, collaborative post of me and Misha who is too sleepy to write on his own, and we’d like to wish all of you a very happy happy happy Easter. I hope it will be a blessed time for all of you and that you will feel the presence of Jesus in your lives, that it will be just a happy, peaceful time for all of you. And Misha wishes you loads of yummy food and some nice presents, but also don’t forget about your pets, Misha loves getting presents and his point of view is that everyone else does too. Or if you’re not celebrating Easter, have a beautiful, fun-filled weekend and enjoy yourselves whatever you’re going to do. 🙂 I’m sorry I’ve been quite behind on blogging, I hope I can catch up over Easter, I’ve been having a lot of time with my family and had been completely absorbed by a work possibility that I thought I found in front of me, which didn’t work out but I lost sight of everything else for the time being hahahaha and got completely immersed in that.

Happy new year! 😊

Hi people! 😊

So finally, it’s 2019. How do you feel about it? As for me, my feelings are kind of mixed, but because last year was sort of rubbishy for me, especially the first half of it, I’m trying to be hopeful that this year will be better and more positive, although we have a proverb in Polish that says basically that what the first day of a new year will be like for you, the whole year will be like this. And if this is true, I shouldn’t expect too much good. I’ve been feeling very anxious lately, and today I’m not only more anxious than in the last couple days, feeling sort of hypervigilant and jittery, but I also feel much more down and like drained of all energy, which is a bit of an exhausting combination. It sucks, but I’m normally not overly superstitious if at all, so I’m going to try to hope it’s not going to be like this for the whole year as much as I can in my current mindset.

Anyway, I would like to wish you all the best in this brand new year. I hope lots of good things will happen to you this year, and I wish it could be one of the best years for all of you my readers, I have an impression that for many people in the blogosphere, at least those that I follow, last year wasn’t too good. If you’re making any long term resolutions, I wish you lots of strength, willpower, perseverance and energy to fulfill them and be happy about it, and proud of yourselves. And if you don’t have any particular resolutions, like me, and are more focused on short term goals or maybe just the present moment, I still hope it’s going to be a productive and fulfilling time for you, be proud and grateful for any achievements you make, and don’t be too hard on yourself if something doesn’t go as you wanted it to go, maybe that’s how it was meant to be, and this way it’s going to be better for you in the end, sometimes good things come out even from our apparent failures, or at least we can learn something new about ourselves from them and know what we are good at and at what we are not. And may all that you wish yourselves for this year come true. 🙂

So, how is your new year going so far? Hopefully not as lousy as mine. 😀

Christmas wishes.

I wanted to send you my Christmas wishes already yesterday, after sharing Enya’s beautiful Christmas song with you and before our Christmas Eve dinner, but it seemed like all the people in my area decided they’d rather spend Christmas Eve sitting with their smartphones or computers or whatever and overload the connection, because the Internet was just so slow I couldn’t do virtually anything without waiting like 5 minutes for a single thing to open or be done. And since then I’ve been of course mostly with my family, so I’m sorry that my wishes are a bit belated, but I didn’t want to write them in a hurry and I hope you are having a wonderful Christmas anyway.

So, I’m wishing all of you – those who celebrate Christmas, those who don’t celebrate Christmas, those who celebrate whatever else, those who celebrate Christ’s birth or just being with their families and having lots of food and exchanging presents, all of you – lots of peace in your minds and hearts, as well as lots of hope. May you have many kind and caring people around you with whom you don’t feel lonely but who make you feel loved and accepted, or if you don’t have any people around you, may you not feel alone. Have lots of yummy food to eat and enjoyable things to do, and may it be a very happy time for you. And may at least one of your dreams, even the smallest, come true. And for those of you who are Christians, please, in all the festivities, don’t forget what the true nature of this holiday is, and don’t let it be something secondary and of less importance than anything else. Oh, wishing you some snow as well, if you want it, we did have some at Christmas Eve and it was quite a surprise.

So these are my wishes to you.

How is your Christmas going so far? 🙂

Question of the day.

If Santa could grant you a wish for the Christmas period, what would it be?

My answer:

Hm… I don’t know really… Right now, it feels like I could have quite a lot of wishes, but I don’t even know how I should put them. So perhaps he could just give me a Celtic harp and teach me how to play it hahahaha. Well I guess it’s not “just”, that would be quite a spectacular thing, even if I had this ability only for the Christmas period. 😀

You? 🙂

Question of the day (26th October).

What do you need but do not want? – ALSO – What do you want but do not need?

My answer:

Hm, that’s tricky for me for some reason… Sometimes I don’t really know what I need, or I feel I need way too much, or that whatever it is that I need, I just can’t get it. I also often haven’t a clue about what I want, despite I know that I want something desperately.

My Mum says I neeed to socialise more, but I definitely don’t want to. I mean, it’s not like I don’t like people in general, I’m just fine with only those I talk to, I don’t need more, and social interactions can be so damn exhausting.

I need to scan all my books someday, but I don’t want to, well, I do, but it’s so time-consuming and I never seem to be able to do it right. 😀

I need to tell a story about Jim to Zofijka – perhaps you remember when I was writing about bed time stories I make up for Zofijka, about a creature, a jimosaurus, called Jim, who lives by helping people and it is his food. So, I haven’t come up with anything lately and didn’t feel like story telling in months, and Zofijka wants her story, but I kinda don’t want to have to do it.

My Dad has guests right now – our family – I think I need to go to them at least for a while just to say hi or something, but I definitely don’t want it. It’s not that I don’t like them as them, I can’t neither like them nor don’t like, I just don’t feel up to it at all at the moment, and, in case I hadn’t mentioned that earlier, I hate socialising. 😀

I know I need to eat something, and that’s another reason I practically should go downstairs, but I feel quite a lot of anxiety since like… last night I guess, don’t know why, and when I’m anxious I don’t really want to eat. I just know I should rationally as the last thing I’d eaten was lunch, which was very yummy, my Mum made a very yummy soup, though, due to my anxiety, I wasn’t really able to enjoy it fully.

I need to have my blog private and control the situation and don’t let my obsessive friends make me freak out, but I kinda don’t want it, I’d like to be able to stay public and interact with people normally and be safe, not need to hide and care what others will do or think.

I want a new laptop, well my current one has been fixed about a month ago, but it could be nice if I had a new one.

I want Misha to be with me, but he’s downstairs now and I don’t need him practically.

I want to go horse riding, I couldn’t this week, but right now in this very moment I guess I don’t need it, and it would be hard to achieve. 😀

I want some new gem stones to my collection, but I definitely don’t need them.

I want to have a long, hot bubble bath but I don’t need it, and I am afraid my skin wouldn’t be too grateful.

I want my anxiety and low mood to go away, but I can still manage, I guess lots of people have it worse, so, well, I guess I don’t need it.

I want to be able to speak all my languages, but I don’t need it.

I want to win the lottery, but I don’t need it.

Well I think there could be many more things I need but don’t want or want but don’t need, but that’s all I am able to come up with right now.

You? 🙂