Zimena

This weekend has been... bad. Where do I even start?

First of all, I managed to catch the cold that two of my friends have also had. That meant that I spent the vast majority of Friday sitting under a thick blanket, drinking warm milk with honey. Or tea. Or, actually whatever I could make myself drink at all, because I didn't actually have the desire to eat or drink much.

Well, I felt a bit better yesterday, so I decided to try to get out for a little while. I had a parcel to post, and perhaps a couple of Postcrossing cards as well. Only, when I was about to leave, I found out that the tyre of my power wheelchair was completely flat. I don't know when or how that happened, but I know that it meant I couldn't get out as I had planned.

Sure, I could have used the manual wheelchair instead, but it sounded like too much work in my state right then.

Yes, I've emailed the repair people, but they won't read that until tomorrow at the earliest. As of now, I don't know when this will get sorted, or when I'll have my freedom of movement back.

Finally, the best friend decided that he can't afford the trip to Manchester that we've been planning since last Summer. We were supposed to go there to see the snooker Tour Championship, and we have tickets for the whole event already. I've not yet decided how I'm going to deal with this, because I suppose I could go there by myself. But there is also the fact that the best friend used to study in Manchester, and lived in the area near where the snooker is being played. Some of the joy of going to just that event was definitely being there with him; seeing the places that used to be familiar ground to him all those years ago.

There's also the fact that I'm still panicking over whether Mark will qualify for the Manchester tournament or not. The Tour Championship is only for the top 12 players of the current season, and he's currently in exactly 12th place. Meaning he's not safe for that event by any means, and being there if he's not playing would feel very, very sad.

For that reason, I'm mildly considering going to a different event instead. There's the Players' Championship in Telford a bit earlier in March, and that's for the top 16, which means he should be good for that unless he completely messes up the next two tournaments before that. I haven't decided yet what to do, but I'm going to check that some more over the next few days - it feels like I need to make a decision pretty soon, otherwise the tickets might be hard to get for another event.

Either way, it feels like this weekend has just been bad news after bad news, every day.

Can we get a new week soon, so we can get out of this stupid pattern?

PS: In other news, I updated my DW profile page. I had made a pretty profile layout with tables and colours and all, but it turns out you can't put tables on a DW profile, because for some reason it just strips out much of the formatting. So, no pretty colours and borders on that page. But there's a visitor counter with flags, so have a look if you want to make sure your flag is on my profile page.

This weekend has been so nice!

Yesterday (Saturday), I had a friend for visit for a couple of hours. I had not seen her for a good while, so it was nice to just have her here and sit and talk for a while. In fact, we agreed that she'd come over a couple of days ago, and I wasn't sure then that I had made the right choice because I was also going somewhere in the evening. But I'm so, so glad she were here, and she's one of those people I'm grateful that I get to have in my life. She has a beautiful Border Collie dog, too, and I always love to be around animals. Well, cats and dogs, at least - not sure about every other kind of animal that I have no experience with.

Anyway, we had a lovely few hours together.

Then, in the evening I went to see my favourite Norwegian band live! They're called Hellbillies, and this link goes to a clip from their current tour, though not from the exact concert I've been to. The song here is one of their most famous ones, and it's actually a cover version, though I suspect the majority of Norwegians don't know that. We're very familiar with this song, but not really with the original (Hal Ketchum: "Past The Point Of Rescue").

Anyway, the concert was absolutely fantastic! They're amazing live, and they have so much great music! I've actually wanted to see them live for several years, but somehow it never worked out when they've played in my town before. I'm still on a sort of emotional high from having seen them, finally... and I'll be honest and admit that I also have a sort of eternal crush on the lead singer, Aslag Haugen. He's getting older now, of course, but to me he was always beautiful in a rough kind of way that I very much like.

I got shy during their signing session after the show, though, so I ended up not buying any merchandise or getting his signature. I feel a bit silly for that now, but in that moment it felt right to just not try. Maybe next time. Because there will be a next time, I'm certain of that!

Anyway, I went to the concert with my cousin and his wife, and they came home with me for a couple of hours after it, too. We had pizza and talked about the music and the show for a bit, and it was really nice. But especially after the other visit earlier in the day, too, I was well and truly peopled out when I went to bed yesterday.

Then, today has been nice, too. One friend came by just to talk, but she was tired and didn't want to come inside. We stood for a good while talking just outside, though. The fact that I suddenly have friends who come by randomly, just for a chat, will never stop feeling completely surreal to me. For most of my life, all the important people in my life have been either family, or friends living too far away for this type of "quick hellos" to be a thing we could even do. I never really had good friends in my immediate surroundings, but now I do, and it's something that makes me very, very happy.

Other than that, I've also managed to sell an old mobile phone that was in a drawer here. I cleaned it up and reset it, and put it up for sale a few days ago. The guy who eventually bought it turned out to be someone I vaguely know, too, so he was suddenly willing to pay nearly the price I had asked, instead of bargaining endlessly. That made me happy, as I had initially set the asking price a bit higher than what I had expected to get. A lot of people buying used stuff like to bargain, so... :)

Snooker also came with a very beautiful surprise this weekend: Ding Junhui won his first tournament since 2019, and I might have blinked away tears for him at the end there. He defeated Chris Wakelin 10-7 in the International Championship final, and he had his family around him for the trophy presentation. There were some very adorable moments with his daughter especially. Maybe he used to mean more to me than he does now, but I still really like him, and this was such a fantastic moment!

Finally, something a bit unexpected: I've finally started reading my tarot books. I got two different ones some time ago - one of them was a Christmas gift last year, the other one I bought for myself. Along with that, I also somehow ended up reading a bit about witchcraft (though not so much about Wicca, yet) online, and I'm finding that I want to know more. I found a whole list of resources via some subreddits, so I have a lot of stuff to read. Some part of me definitely struggles with the interest in this as I grew up Christian, and always had that as a natural foundation in life. I've never been very active with religious-related things, but still, it's always been there, always been part of how I think about things. While I don't find the interest in tarot to be directly at odds with it, the topics I'm now researching by extension might be, and that makes my interest in them challenging to some extent. For now I've decided to keep reading, though, and I'll see how it feels from there. Knowledge, in itself, isn't a bad thing, I think.

First of all: HAPPY NEW YEAR!

As we all know, I'm not a big fan of New Year's Eve. It's a day that tends to make me look back on the past year, and remind me of everything that didn't change this year either. As in, it's a reminder of my social awkwardness and shyness; of me wishing I had more friends and connections and meaningful things to do with other people in real life.

This year, though? I actually have more of these things than I've ever had. Ever since I started attending an exercise group late last year, I've made new friends via that place. It's not that I haven't had friends before or anything, but most of my long-time friends do not live nearby, so we cannot see each other regularly, even if we speak on the phone or do video chats regularly. I've just never had any close friends near me; near enough to visit or do things together whenever we want. But: I have that now. People from that exercise group (especially one person from there), as well as one of my neighbours, who became a much closer friend over the past year or maybe a bit more.

So, in short, my "New Year, same old me" depressive mood isn't there this year. It doesn't mean I'm not still shy as I always were, though. But the truth is still that I'm in a better place with this than I used to be.

That said, I'm still ignoring the fireworks and the New Year celebrations to the best of my ability, so I'm spending the first 20 minutes or so of the new year writing this post. The fireworks outside have already quieted down quite a bit, so I guess I might actually go to sleep at some half-decent hour tonight - which isn't such a bad thing, considering I screwed up my sleep pattern heavily during Christmas. Like, staying up until 4-5am and sleeping until noon kind of screwing up. That's not going to work in the long run, so let's see if I can sleep any earlier than that today.

So, as for 2024, I'm hoping to post a bit more actively here. I kind of fell out of DW-ing for an age, but I sort of miss it. Of course it doesn't mean posting every day, but if I could get back into a posting pattern where I actually think of posting on DW whenever something happens, then that would be a good thing.

I'm also planning to do something from the snowflake_challenge this year, so let's see how that goes.

As for other goals that I've set, here you go:
* Read one book per month
* Study language 20 minutes/day, 5 days a week.
* Make a proper home-made dinner at least once a week
(as in, actually cook something myself, not use pre-packaged "easy" solutions, microwave food etc)
* Walk the stairs 3x/week
(There are stairs in my building, I just always use the lift. I'm realising that if I don't maintain the ability of walking stairs, it'll be hard for me to do it in other places where it might be necessary. Like the cousin's stairs were hard when I was there at Christmas, for example - even though I did manage to learn them better before we left. My plan is to just go downstairs from here, and then back up. Just to do stairs, for my body to not forget how.)

Other than that, I also wish to write more regularly, but I haven't been able to formulate that into a goal yet.

Same with my music stats - I would like to get back into making those, as I fell out of it this year.

That's all for the first post of the year. Let's make 2024 a year to remember on Dreamwidth as well.

IT'S HAPPENING!



I'm going to
PORTUGAL!

I have flight tickets and a hotel room booked now, so this trip just got real! I'm going with the best friend to Lisbon for a week later this summer.

In fact, he has been trying to convince me to come with him to Portugal for a few years already, but somehow the trip never turned out to be until now. I'm sure you can imagine that I'm very excited about it!

Lisbon is a city I would most likely not get to visit in any other way, because I don't travel by plane unless it's with exactly this friend. Therefore, there is a kind of double excitement here - I get to visit a cool place that feels "out of reach" otherwise, and it's also only the (I think...) 4th flight in my adult life (not counting multiple flights during the same trip separately), so that should be fun, too!

This is amazing, and I can't wait!