Years ago, we got a "Dampfente" - which is a small hand-held steam cleaner that has, more or less, the shape of a duck. It's not large, and it has been used occasionally through the years, mostly related somehow with textile work.

For instance, I used it to set the twist in spun yarns when I was pressed on time; steam once, let cool and dry off (which will not take as long as letting a thoroughly wetted skein dry out) and then repeat the process. Voilà, almost instantly dead yarns. 

An added benefit of that process was that I realised how much movement and wiggling happens when the twist is set. There was a lot of wiggling of the threads, even though they were all stretched on a skein winder.

From the past tense used in this past text, you can probably guess that at one point, the little duck broke down. It would still heat up, the pump would still try to do its work (audibly, but not horribly so), but no steam was coming out.

Yesterday I finally took out a screwdriver and some ambition and took the whole thing apart. I got joined in my duck dissection by The Most Patient Husband of Them All in the evening, and using four hands (which is very much to recommend, since the hot parts have to be kept away from the possibly-melting parts, and the water from things that should keep dry, and you have to test all the stuff somehow) we found the culprit: The filter was clogged.

I had expected some limescale issue to be the cause, but no, there was nothing. Instead it looked like enough fine fibres and dust particles had accumulated in the fine filter mesh to stop water from coming through. Filter cleaned, set back in, then a longish session trying to fit everything back inside into its proper place and screw the thing shut again. 

The fibres in the filter probably came from not cleaning the little can that was provided to fill the duck with water well enough before using it - so fibres and dust from the bottom of the little water can got into the tank, and from there into the filter, and there you go. Clogging, after a while. Which means in the future the water can will get cleaned before use (with normal water) and just to prevent any chalk issues, distilled water will be used.

I'm very pleased now - both that it functions again (it will come in handy at the Textile Forum, I'm sure) and that it was possible to repair it!

Holiday travels are wonderful - seeing new places, meeting new people, eating new and different foods, talking different languages (or at least trying to). Then you arrive home again, eventually, bringing with you... well, what do you bring with you from holiday trips? Memories, of course - which may or may not fade over time. I'm not a diary person, but when we are on holidays, I write a little travel diary. That is something my mum always did, and because memories may fade, or it could be handy to look up where one stayed a few years ago, or some highlight of a trip, I also made this a habit. 

Then, of course, there's photographs. When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I really enjoyed taking pictures during holidays, but somehow, that enjoyment got less and less over the years. Maybe it has something to do with me taking the camera mostly for work purposes, more and more so as time progressed. Mostly, though, the reason is that when I'm taking photos, some part of my brain gets obsessed with looking at things only in "will that make a good picture"-mode, and that distracts me from actually enjoying things, or looking at stuff just so. Fortunately, the Most Patient Husband of Them All does not have a similarly weird brain, and he takes a picture here and there and now and then, so we go home with a few images for our collection and to keep memories alive and to show them to friends and family.

Sometimes there's also something that we buy to take home with us. I have blind-baking ceramic "beans" that we bought on one of our England journeys years ago, and when I take them out to use them, I remember that trip. 

There's only so much you need for a household, though, and only so much stuff you want to buy and lug home from travelling. So my most favourite type of holiday souvenir is... a recipe.

I'm fond of good food, and I very much enjoy eating "foreign" things when abroad, and trying stuff that is a regional speciality. And sometimes, something is delicious enough for me to look up the recipe (or several of them, since, you know, Internet recipe search) and integrate it into our portfolio of things to cook here. Which means that I both get new ideas on what to cook or bake, and I have something reminding me of glorious times in other places, and it's something that does not need storage space (apart from the bit of space in my cook book).

Cinnamon rolls remind me of trips to the North - Scandinavia or Finland. Scones are, of course, England and Ireland. Just like pies, which I make way too rarely. There's Sächsische Quarkkeulchen, from our hiking through the Sachsenforst, there's Crostata reminding me of the Embroidery School in Muro Leccese this spring, and most recently there's Pressgurka, from our stop in Sweden on the way back home this summer.

Definitely my favourite kind of holiday souvenir, these recipes!

Off the coast of Yemen, there's an old oil supertanker that has been used as a storage facility and loading bay for crude oil. It's still hanging out there, slowly decaying. Or quickly decaying, these days, since maintenance has been called off because of the war.

Which means that the tanker, with four times the amount of oil that was spilled during the Exxon Valdez disaster, is a catastrophy scheduled to happen any old day now. 

There's a plan by the UNO to pump off the oil from the tanker, bringing it to a safer storage place, but they lack the funds to start work on the rescue mission. They lack a few millions, actually - and they're getting desperate enough to have started a crowdfunding, back in June. Up to today, though, there's not enough money been raised for this.

If you can spare some money, you can donate for this cause, either directly at the UNO website or via SumOfUs (German site here, there's no way I could find to link you to the English version.) You can also help by spreading word about this issue, and the UNO crowdfunding.

I'm back from a lovely, long summer break - it was definitely very summery and quite, quite hot. In fact, it was hotter than I'd have needed... 

We spent some time with friends, and went on holidays to Finland to see the midnight sun. If you're used to nights being dark, even at the height of summer, it feels surreal to be in a place where it just doesn't get dark at all. We made good use of the night light - and had naps in the afternoon to make up for that, too.

Finland is a really beautiful country, with a lot of forest and an incredible amount of lakes. Our plan was to do some lake exploration via canoe, so we had a rental canoe for a few days, a map of a part of the lake district... and, unfortunately, a lot of (head)wind. So much wind that we had to change our plans regarding the tour and shorten it a bit. After all, we were on holidays and not on a torture-yourself-mission...

It was nice to paddle, though we had underestimated two things: the size of the lakes and the amount of summer cottages on their shores (and on the islands in the lakes). Having paddled the German Mecklenburger Seenplatte, I was subconsciously expecting something similar only larger - and yes, the Finnish lake district is much larger, but the lakes themselves also are much, much larger. That means a lot of open water to paddle through. Now that, in decent weather and by itself, is technically not a problem - but it felt like we were not getting ahead at all, because the perspective on those large lakes, when you are paddling towards something in the far-ish distance, just does not change much. We usually paddle at about 4 km per hour if on flat water with no significant wind influence, which is not so fast that you can see things change quickly... hence it felt, sometimes, like standing at one point and paddling forever. It got better, at least for me, towards the end of our tour, since you sort of learn that it just feels like you're in one spot but you are actually moving, but the general effect was still there.

The second underestimated thing really were the cottages. I knew that in Finland, having a summer cottage is totally a thing and about every family has at least one - but I never made the next step in thinking about this: All these cottages have to be somewhere. That's just logical, right? Well, one premium spot to put a summer cottage is, obviously, in a nice, quiet, secluded(ish) place on the shore of a lake... which meant that there were some stretches on our trip where you could not land your canoe unless you wanted to do so on somebody's more-or-less front lawn.

So basically, you were in nature, with very few other humans to be seen, but with traces of human habitation and civilisation everywhere (in form of the cottages, mostly). There was very little in terms of infrastructure though - no cafés or shops like you'd find at every stone throw in Mecklenburg. We had brought our own food, and water logistics stuff (a filter and a UV water sterilisation pen, because you don't want to catch a nasty stomach bug especially while on holidays), and that was quite necessary. We also had our trusty little tent and put that up on our own tiny private islands for several nights, which was a lot of fun and felt really special for us. (In Finland, you can put your tent up about everywhere, though common decency demands not to do that on someone else's front lawn. In Germany, there's a general prohibition against so-called "wild camping"; you can ask the owners of land if you may put up your tent there, or use designated spaces which you can find in limited numbers in some areas, but you're not allowed to just pitch it anywhere else. In many areas, that means you need to find the next commercial campsite... which will be populated with other people and cost you money, but - on the upside - will provide you with sanitary installations and typically a little shop, café, and the possibility to get fresh baked goods in the morning. However, all that means that just going "ah, here's a nice spot, let's use that" is not something we're used to.)

Our method of travel - trains and ferries - also worked very well. Going all the way up north that way did take a good bit of time altogether, but most of our travelling was done at night, with overnight ferries and night trains, and that was very, very pleasant. We had planned the journeys basically so that we would travel in the night and then spend the day in the town before moving on through the night again. It means declaring the journey a part of the holidays, and that was what we did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I can highly recommend this! Finnish night trains are also quite nice and comfy, and you can even have a 2 person cabin with your own toilet and shower. So you spend a nice day wandering a city, doing a bit of sight-seeing, then go to the train station in the evening, board your train and have a relaxing hot shower while racing through the Finnish landscape before crawling into bed - and then you wake up the next morning somewhere else. Ah, it's just wonderful.

(If you're planning travel like this, and you use a train to get to your night travelling thingie, make sure you leave enough of a time gap before your night train or ferry leaves, just in case your previous transport is delayed for some reason. It will make the overall travel time a bit longer, but reduces stress immensely - and you can always go for a little stroll to stretch your legs if you are on time, and have a coffee or something to eat a few metres away from the train station.)

And now it's time to get back to good old work! There's a few projects to finish, and other things coming up, such as the embroidery demonstration in Brandenburg. First, though: Sending off all the orders that arrived during the summer break. 

(This post, weirdly, did not have its correct date when I posted it, but one in June. Don't ask me how that happened.)

I woke up this morning to the sweet, sweet sound of raindrops falling. 

It's been very dry here for a good while - summers are hot these days without the relatively frequent thunderstorms that used to come every few days when it was hot and sunny. This morning there was just a little gentle rain, which did not last for long and did not yield much moisture (it was about one litre per square metre), but now we finally have some more, with a good dose of thunder thrown in, and that is very, very good. I hope the thyme in our lawn will get blooming afterwards, and it's also going to make the plants that are still not crispy very happy.

Another happy thing? The Grünes Heupferd in our wintergarden has grown up and is now an adult. At least she has wings now, in the proper size, not just the little stumps.

So. Rain, a grown-up green lady, summer break coming up, and the first tomatoes are also starting to turn red. Plus it looks like my lemon grass did actually survive the Great Grub Attack - something laid eggs in that specific flower pot, and the grubs that hatched from them were too many for the roots of the plant. I found the grubs by chance when looking into the pot and pondering re-potting. Which I then did, of course, and two of the stalks still had some hint of green. One of them is growing again now, jury's still out for the second one, but at least the one is saved and can eventually grow into a proper large plant again.

(The grubs were transferred to the compost heap, where they can eat to their hearts' delight. Without killing my plants!)

It's Monday, and in spite of having had a normal amount of sleep, I'm tired. Go figure. This is slightly annoying, as - of course and as always - there's plenty of work to do. The cat snoozing in the room does not help either, spreading her snooziness molecules.

Probably the heat here is also to blame, at least partly: It's been very hot the past days, and today is no exception. There was something trying to look like a little hint of rain this morning, but it was not even enough to really register, either in our rain meter or on the ground. Which means the important plants still get their daily watering through the can today. 

We have two rainwater collectors, one of them a very large one, so there's water for the thirsty ones. Which are, mostly, tomato plants placed in pots, and a few more placed in the soil in beds. The latter, however, are not as easy or quickly to water. I also have the tendency to think that since they have roots, and practically unlimited freedom, they should be able to stretch their roots until they get to moist soil and take their water from there. In contrast, the plants in the pots don't have that possibility, so they have to get their portion of liquid daily.

So since it's been hot and dry with enough watering activities for most of the plants this year (at least up until now), there are quite a few promising-looking green tomatoes being made already. Now I hope that they will ripen soon-ish and be delicious. It would be really nice to have enough for making some sauce, or diced tomatoes, and can that for use in the winter, but I'm not sure if that will work out...

Just like last year, there's a great green bush cricket living in our wintergarden. 

It's a little larger now than it was on this photo taken some days ago - and on the photo, you can see the cast-off skin from its previous larval stage. Not fully grown yet, the green thing.

This species mostly eats other insects, but the specimen here is definitely not opposed to snacking on some green stuff as well - the leaf it is sitting on belongs to an avocado plant, and several of these leaves have a hole, or a piece eaten out of the edge. (And yes, I'm sure that this green lady is to blame for the holes, I've seen her take a few astonishingly big bites out of one leaf edge yesterday morning.)

Last year's guest had an even more exquisite taste - it bit off the tender young stem of a passionfruit seedling, and killed some other seedlings as well. Munching some avocado leaf is, in comparison, very much holding back on the havoc possible. Much appreciated!