Monika’s Pensieve

{MONTHLY SUMMARIES}

My Month in Brief

May was a month during which everything kept happening insanely fast and planning anything seemed completely impossible - something would always turn things upside down :-/

Major Events

The month started very inauspiciously when my dad fainted in the local shop. They called the ambulance and my dad refused to go with them (he refused to believe he had fainted - not remembering how he had ended up on the floor didn’t bother him at all :]). To make a long story about having a very stubborn dad short, he ended up in hospital for a week and had lots of medical tests and examinations. They finally found what they think was the culprit and he’s alright now or so we hope.

Shortly after all this my aunt Zosia from Manchester made a visit to Poland. My aunt Zosia is an amazing person really. She’s 87 and is half-deaf, but has more energy than my whole family combined. This may sound really cool and great (and it is sort of inspiring), but her combination of traits can be rather difficult… You see on top of it all she’s very forgetful. And since she can’t hear a lot of what’s being said and forgets a lot of the stuff she does hear, her imagination has room for a lot of creativity ;) Couple that with the amount of energy she has (she could talk all day) and you might start getting the picture ;)
She spent the last night of her visit to Poland in our house. Naturally, she didn’t tell us when she’d be coming so we could pick her up from the centre or something like that - she never does :] I think she either likes the independence of getting to places on her own or she thinks it’s too much trouble for people to pick her up from places. It rather freaks us out when she does this (physically she can handle it no problem, but we always worry something will happen because of her forgetfulness or inattention). For once we were worried with good reason. She left her bag with all her documents and money on the train! So me and my mum spent a night at the police station (she needed a police report to be able to get any documents from the British embassy, so she could return to Manchester) and then I spent the entire next day with her at the British embassy.
The police station experience was very surreal due to my aunt Zosia’s rich imagination. By the time we got to the police station, the story of how she lost her bag sounded very different than what the rest of the family remembered. She had noticed that her bag was missing after supper. But she claimed she had noticed it straight after leaving the train and that she had dramatically thrown herself on my dad’s neck shouting about her bag the moment she entered the house (with my dad’s shingles problem and him generally being a bit more fragile than usual due to the hospital incident I don’t think that was even physically possible :]). She gave far more information than was necessary (if it had been me it would have taken me about 10 minutes to give the policeman the necessary information for the police report, it took her an hour) and of course a lot of it was made up. The policeman was amazing cause he just patiently listened with no change of facial expression. Me and my mum were trying to hide our silly smirks for most of that hour. But once my aunt Zosia started reading the police report and correcting it stylistically (she used to be a Polish teacher in England), it was a bit much even for the policeman. He actually banged his head on the desk out of exasperation lol He remained polite to her all the same. The hilarious thing was that she was so deeply concentrating on correcting his writing that she didn’t seem to notice anything.

Another important change in my life is discovering bioresonance therapy. My health was getting worse and worse and I figured a lot of it was due to my allergies and being overweight. Conventional medicine couldn’t even give me a diagnosis for what I was allergic to (I have tried in the past), alternative medicine apparently can *grin* For the moment I’m not allowed to eat dairy products, wheat, eggs or sugar until they “deallergize” me. They found a number of other ailments they’re treating me for as well and I’m feeling much, much better :) One of the other things they found was a virus that slows the metabolism. So apparently my weight is not just bad diet.
I’ll let you know how I feel after I finish the treatment. For the moment I’m really impressed - I have more energy, my skin and hair has improved and I no longer start the day with a cough that sounds as if I’ve got tuberculosis. I’d say these are significant improvements ;)

Fixations of the Month

There wasn’t really time for any, I miss my fixations *sniff*

Films

Film Count
8 films watched this month, of which 7 films were new to me and only one was a film I’d seen before. Planete Doc Review really made its mark on my film watching pattern in May - half of them were documentaries.

New Additions to My Favourite Film List
Sadly none *sniff* That’s not to say I didn’t watch some good films in May. I think it’s just that the best ones happened to be documentaries and there’s veeery few documentaries that I want to watch “again and again”. So anyway, the best films I watched in May were:

• Afghan Star (UK, 2009)
• Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (USA/UK, 2008)

Most Intriguing Films of the Month
I didn’t watch any very unusual films in May really. The most intriguing would probably be the two I mentioned above already.

Worst Films of the Month
The “honour” goes to…

• Yuvvraaj (India, 2008)
• Becoming Jane (UK, 2007)

Full List of Films watched in May (in the order they were watched in)

1. Yuvvraaj (India, 2008)
2. Dhoom:2 (India, 2006)
3. Afghan Star (UK, 2009)
4. Latawce (Poland, 2007)
5. De verloren kolonie (Netherlands, 2008)
6. El crimen del padre Amaro (Mexico/Spain/Argentina/France, 2002)
7. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (USA/UK, 2008)
8. Becoming Jane (UK, 2007)

Books

I got through two books yet again. One was related to A Child Called ‘It’ (my masochistic read from last month) - A Brother’s Journey: Surviving a Childhood of Abuse by Richard B. Pelzer, which is more or less the same story that David Pelzer told in A Child Called ‘It’, but told by a different family member. I found it quite fascinating to compare.
The other one was Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T. Kiyosaki, which is obviously about getting rich. It includes lots of very useful tips, my favourite is - don’t spend money ;)

Diet

My diet has been going very well since I started the bioresonance therapy. As I want to get rid of my allergies very, very badly, I have practically no trouble motivation-wise to keep the necessary diet for 6 weeks. Even though my meat intake has risen, with no sugar and no dairy in my diet I am definitely losing weight!
I think that by the end of May I was weighing in at around 74kg, so that’s 2kg less than in April (I’m 73kg at the time of writing). So my BMI was 28.2 at the end of May and is down to 27.8 at present.
I’m feeling much better than I have for a long time and the weight loss is really starting to show. I’m getting comments about it from almost everyone who sees me, which is nice :) Though my favourite part is seeing it in the mirror ;) Also, my trousers are getting very loose (I can take most of them off without unbuttoning them - it’s only the belt that holds the ones without rubber bands up!).