Hello, steemians! It's time for my weekly life update!
Well, actually, I was supposed to post this yesterday but my family and I were preparing for the Ukrainian Easter. And the whole week, in general, has been quite busy.
I'll start with wishing you all happy Easter! I know that the rest of the world has already celebrated Easter last week. But we have our own calendar here in Ukraine. So holidays like Christmas and Easter always come late. Still, it's important to celebrate this day with your family. You might not even be religious. It's just nice to have a day to appreciate all the caring and loving people that you have in your life.
The first picture is of our Easter basket. You can see here all the traditional Easter foods. Sweet Easter bread with raisins (паска), horseradish, salt, hard-boiled eggs, butter, cottage cheese, smoked sausage and something that we call шпондер. Google translate fails to tell me, how to call it in English, but basically, it's pork fat with meat. After some more googling, I found out that it might be bacon. I've never thought of it as bacon, so you'll have to tell me, what you think. From what I've learned in Americal movies, bacon is kinda thinner. But if it comes from the same part of the pig, then there's no difference. Let's call it Ukrainian bacon then. Here! Problem solved!
Every year on Easter we prepare a basket like this and bring it to church to get blessed and sprinkled with holy water. We do it on Saturday, which is also the last day of Lent. But some people go to church first thing in the morning on Sunday and then come back and have breakfast with all the food from the Easter basket.
There's a tradition to eat the egg first. The oldest member of the family gives a piece of egg to everyone, wishing them happiness and good health. I think, it's a really nice tradition.
Here's another picture of our Easter eggs. These are what we call "дряпанка" or scratched egg. To make one, first, you have to take onion skins and boil them until the water becomes red. Then you steep this onion skin broth for half an hour. Then add a teaspoon of vinegar to your pan, put in your eggs (white preferably), bring the water to boil and cook for ten minutes. This way you get a "крашанка" or painted egg. To make a scratched egg, you need to take a big needle and use the point to scratch off the colored top layer of the shell. But be careful not to break the shell while you're at it! I poked a hole in my egg so I had to strategically place it in the basket so that no one would see it. My sister and I did these scratched eggs. Sis made a snowflake design and I tried to scratch out a traditional Easter pattern. Then, if you want your eggs to look even better, wipe them off with some vegetable oil using a paper towel or some cloth.
That is how my weekend's been. The week itself, as I've already mentioned, was quite busy.
I set up everything that I need for live streaming on my Youtube channels. There was some problem with the microphone. For some reason, it wouldn't work. My sister figured out that the problem was with the front port of the computer. I don't know why, but those ports get out of order after just a couple of years of usage. But maybe that's just my problem because who uses the same computer long enough for it to brake? I really have no idea. But with all the craze with upgrading your phone every time a new model gets released, I sometimes feel like a poor relative. On the other hand, it just may seem that way because the companies who make those phones and other devices want us to believe that we need a new item every year or two. And in reality regular people feel the same way as I do. If only I could afford it, I would buy all the new phones and laptops and whatnot. But not today. Not in this life. Haha! xD
I went on a tangent there. Sorry about that! Here's a picture of my cat!
Now back to the topic.
This week I did two live streams on my Ukrainian channel, one on my English learning channel and a video and a live stream on my English speaking channel. Wow! That's quite a lot of content there! If only it would get all the views as well! But either way, it was a fun experience.
When I was streaming on my English learning channel, one of my subscribers suggested in the chat that I should take donations while doing live streams and buy a new laptop because during the live stream I complained about wanting one. So I googled, and googled, and found a way to do that. Unfortunately, since I live in Ukraine, I can't just link my Paypal in the video description. Paypal in Ukraine is not fully functioning. It'll probably never function to full capacity. At least, I've long lost hope that it will. So we have to find other ways. Ukrainians (and also many Russians, even though their Paypal is not crippled) use a website Donation Alerts. It's compatible with Webmoney. That's what I will use to receive my donations (if I get any).
On my English speaking channel, I did videos about CampNaNoWriMo. I've decided to join the challenge this week and write for 30 hours. For those, who don't know, NaNoWriMo is a challenge for writers who want to focus on their creative writing and set a goal of 50000 words to write in the month of November. CampNaNoWriMo is a smaller challenge that takes place in July and April. Here you can set goals to reach a certain word count (last July I did 30000 words and won!), hours, pages etc. You can watch my videos on my YT channel at Halcja.
As for my Ukrainian channel, I did work-related videos. One of me working in Illustrator. Another one I've actually posted to Steemit. It's a video of me drawing an illustration for my Instagram. I had a lot of fun drawing that illustration so please go check it out!
Here are some other blog posts from this week that you might want to have a look at:
○ Girl and her potted plant (illustration)
○ Girl with a potted plant. Drawing live stream [in Ukrainian]
○ Reward (poem)
○ Wolves (poem)
That's all for today! Thanks for reading! <3