First of all, if you are interested in hearing about textiles and economy, don't forget that the conference in Copenhagen starts tomorrow at 9 in the morning (GMT +1). All the links to participate via remote connection are up, and I think folks in Copenhagen are looking forward to having a remote audience too! This is certainly something that makes me feel all futuristic.

In other news, the flowery newness is not yet finished; there's still some (but considerably less) work to do - mostly the last embellishments plus the edges of the thing.

And finally, I have been looking for an alternative to amazon again (why? they are too mighty, and they know it), since they gobbled up the bookdepository online shop in 2011, prompting quite a few concerned reactions. I have now heard that at least for Germany, buch.de seems to be a good alternative - free shipping for books (in the country, at least), a decent selection of English books, and their prices are only slightly higher than those of bookdepository or amazon. I can live with slightly higher prices if the rest is fine - plus they even offer several different payment methods with no added costs, like paying after getting an invoice.

The university of Copenhagen hosts a conference about Textiles and Economy in the Middle Ages (in northern and central Europe) that will take place on the 19th and 20th of April. While this will be too short a notice for most of us to secure a spot in the conference and rush to Copenhagen, it's still possible to attend through remote participation via the conference homepage:

Production and trade of textiles in medieval Europe - The central and northern Europe as example.

The link for the online participation seems not to be live yet, but I suspect (and hope!) this will change in the next few days. The conference is open to a global internet audience and you will be able to participate from your own computer where ever you are, using the on-line meeting system Adobe Connect.


I am certainly planning to catch a few of those lectures!

It took most of yesterday to catch up with emails and get my brain back onto something resembling a track, and it feels like I should already start packing and preparing again - for the IRM on the weekend. This mostly means planning what I want to show and what I want to emphasise in my assortment of goods and services, making a list of things to take so nothing important will stay here by accident, and taking care of the urgent things to do around here.

(Now... is clearing the desk considered urgent if I still have enough space to type? Probably not. Though it feels like I should set aside a whole day one of these days to do some clearing, and sorting, and probably filing or discarding of lots of the paper around me.)

Plus I'm struggling with my youtube account which seems to have forgotten that I exist. Or that it exists. Or both. The channel is still there, but I cannot log on to it, and I don't even get a new password sent when I try. Should I be able to get it to run, I can decide how to edit the video of my talk in Vienna and how best to upload it. (It needs editing because, as a good soul just told me, I have made a horrendous mistake in a calculation that I put into the presentation. Uh. Oops. So no uploading it un-edited, and I will still have to decide how to fix the problem, which is present on two slides...)

I'm back - and it's nice to be home again, even if both my ventures were absolutely fantastic. The weather was fabulous, the people were incredibly nice, there was delicious food both in South Tyrol and in Vienna, and the conference in Vienna went very well.

It was, to my great delight, a different crowd from "the usual" - since I often go to archaeological or experimental archaeological conferences, or to textile archaeology conferences, you sort of start knowing a lot of the people who turn up there. Which is very nice and enables one to re-connect and catch up with each other, but on the other hand limits new input you can get. This was quite different this time, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. As well as the lovely reception we got given in Vienna town hall and the Grand View tour on the rooftop of the Natural History museum (with the most splendid weather imaginable) - and of course meeting some of my friends again.

And then I came back from the conference in Vienna to a garden that is slowly filling up with blooming spring flowers and fantastic weather. Now I only have to get through the gazillion emails in my in-box and get back on track for the things that need to be done urgently... which includes the fine-tuning of plans for the IRM the coming weekend. Which I might just do sitting in the garden this afternoon, since it is pretty warm and sunny! These are the joys of being a freelancer...

I'm off to meet friends, celebrate the anniversary of the ArcheoParc in Val Senales, my mum's birthday, the successful reconstruction of three Hallstatt bands in Vienna and speak at the 3000 years of colour conference. All during the next ten days or so.

Which means, of course, that I will spend most of the time somewhere else - with just a short pit stop here inbetween travels. And this means no blogging for this time.

I will be back on March 26, after having had fun and adventures and good times, and I hope you will have those too!

In spite of my giving sometimes a very different picture, I am not always a very orderly or organised person. Yes, I like to be prepared for stuff, but sometimes things escape me. And sometimes I just let a "that should work... somehow... possibly" solution go on way, way too long.

I have just finished sorting all the stuff I took home from the conferences of the past years. Usually, you get handed a little something - a bag or even a canvas bag or a folder - stuffed with a little info about the place you are, the conference programme, museum leaflets, an attendants address' list, and other papery stuff. Now, I have solved the note-taking-and-finding conundrum some years ago when I started to write down all notes from a conference in a single book I made just for that purpose. The papery stuff handed out? I had put them into a magazine file thingie to keep them all together somehow. I have now put all of it (including older notes and stray notes taken on loose leaf paper) into one large ring binder, sorted by conference, and gotten rid of all the old ad leaflets and brochures. And that made me realise... I went to a lot of conferences during those last years. I suspect I may have missed one or two, but during the last years, I almost always went to two conferences each year.

Now I only need to find all the printed-out or scribbled-down notes for the different presentations I gave at the various conferences and put those into a ring binder... and I will be all sorted and have a new, nice, relatively future-proof system. Whew.

This landed in my email inbox yesterday:

Dear all,

We are glad to inform you that it will be possible to follow the international workshop An integration of use-wear and residues analysis for the identification of the function of archaeological stone tools, “La Sapienza” University of Rome, 5th – 7th March 2012  live on the website www.archaeologicaltraces.org.

Everybody is welcome to participate, actively or not, in the discussion sessions using the chat.

So in case you read this in time, you can have a look. In case you are too late (or not interested in stone tool use wear analysis), you can still join me in thinking this a really awesome and really cool thing. Live streaming and interactive discussion on conferences! Welcome to the future! Yay!