Bias is a thing. It always is, and always will be - we're all prone to it. It is human nature to put things into boxes, and to have assumptions and preconceptions. They might be cultural influence, or they might be due to personal experiences, but we all have them.

Gender bias is one of these things, and something that is being discussed a lot. Yes, men and women are different. Some of these differences may be nurture, but there's quite a bit of nature too... and I think that's important to know, and take into consideration.

Men, overall, have a different muscle structure - and accordingly are typically a good bit stronger than women. When I grew up, I was given the impression that women can do everything just as well as men. The intention behind this was, I'm quite sure, to not let me (and the other girls in my age cohort) form the impression that we're in any way inferior to the boys. It had the side effect, though, that I believed for many years that I should be just as proficient at everything as men are or can be... including carrying things or heavy lifting. Ah well. I have carried a lot of heavy boxes over the years, and I can't say that I regret it. However, I've also put a lot of pressure on myself to carry just as much, or perform just as well at hard physical tasks, as the male colleagues, and that is indeed something that I could have done without, in retrospective.

Bouldering actually was the thing that finally made me realise: there are anatomical differences, and I will never be as physically strong as my husband if we're in similar good health. That's just nature.

There may also be (I'd say there probably are) differences in how men and women think. There is, however, no proper reason that there should be so many more men in high positions in companies, and so few women. There's also no proper reason why women candidates for something like the post of Kanzler in Germany should be asked about their children and family, and who will take care of them, and men are not. That is just ridiculous.

Good news, though: These days, that inequal treatment is at least seen, and pointed out, by quite a few people. More good news: Germany is getting a law for a gender quota in larger companies, so that at least one woman will be present in the future if there's more than three people in the top management tier. That definitely is a start.

And to round this all off: Here's an article about gender bias, and how reducing the bias during the selection process has led to a significant change of the gender distribution in orchestras. Including a link to a website where you can test your own implicit biases... which is quite interesting!

 

Today was insanely busy - and I still did not manage to get everything done that I had planned to do. (Is that new? No. Do I manage, again and again, to plan too much to fit into one day? Yes.)

There was making of some distaffs, and then dressing said distaffs, and packing said dressed distaffs for the online workshop (the German one is full already, I will fix a second date soon). Then getting the parcels ready for a post office run tomorrow morning.

I also managed to sneak in a little time outside in the garden, which counted for my obligatory daily "time outside", and it did feel so good. (We agreed, early on in the pandemic, that getting outside at least once a day for at least half an hour was a non-discussible thing that we'd do. In some cases and on some days, it wasn't easy to get outside in the rain after a long day, but we both had the feeling that those were the days it was most necessary, and did us a world of good.) Flowers are starting to bloom everywhere in our garden, the raspberries are getting ready to bloom, and I planted a lot of the now-quite-grown seedlings outside. Hopefully they will all grow into nice plants that make lots of fruit and vegetables. One of the tomato plants already has a first fruit!



So - another really busy day tomorrow, and then there's the Pentecost weekend, which means  time off, and I'm very much looking forward to that. There's a bank holiday on Monday in Germany, but since the Most Patient Husband had some more vacation days to spend, he's getting two extra days - and it would be unfair to let him spend these on his own, right?

Which means I'll be back on the blog on Thursday next week. And since tomorrow is going to be really busy as well, I'll take the day off, too...

So - see you in a week!

It's time again - for tick season! I just took care of one crawling on my foot after being in the garden for a short spell, and the cat has had a few already.

So here's your yearly reminder: If you are living in, or planning to travel to, a tick-infested region, go check if your vaccination against tick-borne meningoencephalitis is still up to date, and get it refreshed if it isn't.

Typical recommendations to avoid tick bites are to wear long trousers when outside in taller grasses or the forest, and check your body afterwards for any unwanted, unpaying temporary eight-legged appendages. Remove them with tweezers, or a special removal tool. We've tried a number of different tools over the years, and the best we've found is a tick removal lasso. Ours are from a Swedish company and called 3iX; they work much better than normal tweezers or even the special tick-removal tweezers. Sometimes you also find cards with slits sold as tick removal tools; I never got those to work on human skin, much less on cats with all the fur in the way. The lasso tool (Zeckenschlinge, for the German speakers here) does an equally good job on humans and animals, and works for all sizes of ticks, even the really tiny ones.

If you want to make sure the tick goes dead, you will need to squash it, cut it apart, pour boiling water over it, or burn it. It will happily survive being washed down the drain. (I wrote more about that here.)

I hope you'll have a good season with no tick bites!

Here's an update on all the things happening here:

First of all, the blog/comment issue. I may have found the culprit - it seems it has something to do with the blog template. How that could have changed from working without trouble to refusing to show comments, well, I have no inkling of the hint of a clue of an idea... but it means I can start to look into it with something like a bit more of a direction. The quick fix for this might be to install a different template for the time being, but that would look completely different to the rest of the site, and the one I tried this morning for a few minutes was... um... let's just say I found it not aesthetically pleasing or easy to use at all.

Secondly, the online spinning workshop - my plan is to include a spinning kit consisting of a dressed distaff and a spindle with whorl in the price for the workshop, and send these out beforehand. That way, everyone will have the same tools and materials, and we can all start on the same spot. This might not be the best option for courses abroad, but it's certainly something for Germany... and the international shipping option might be the DIY distaff kit, plus fibre, and then my spinners will have to dress the distaff themselves. I'll look into that some more - first course will be in German, and I'll fix a date and put it into the shop in the next few days.

Before that, though, I have to finalise and send off the two pieces I've been writing for two museums - both are materials for internal use, to help with setting up an exhibition or with museum projects. Usually the museum assistance things I write are directly connected to a reconstruction that I'm making for them, so it actually feels a bit weird to hand in "just" a written thing, and no actual goods in connection with them. If all goes well, I'll be finished with one of them before the weekend comes - at least that's my plan. Let's see how well it fares when it has to face reality.

Finally, for you to see you off into the weekend, some garden pictures - because there's also nice things going on there. There's still tulips blooming, among them this fuzzy-edged one:



To my delight, the first of my new tomato plants has started flowering. If the fruits will be ripe as quickly, and taste nicely as well, I might have a new favourite breed...



To my similarly great delight, the little lemon tree has not only grown a good bit this early spring, and bloomed nicely, it is also hard at work making lemons. This is the first one, and the largest to date.



All the care instructions in the 'net, by the way, say that lemon trees like it rather dry and must not be watered too much. I found that at least this one specimen hates getting too dry; it will roll up its leaves, never to unroll them again. So now it lives in a pot with a water reservoir, I make sure the reservoir is never completely empty - and that seems agreeable to the little tree. Which will, hopefully, provide us with lemons now I've found out what it wants.

It's May the Fourth, so may the fourth be with you!

Yes, it's a bad one, and it's not getting better from year to year. But since I'm a sucker for bad puns, and good ones, and especially ones that are so bad they are coming around again to emerge on the good side... I still enjoy it.

In that vibe, here's the good old Grocery Store Wars video, because it's Star Wars-related, and it's punny, and I really enjoy it. Also, sadly, even though this video is quite old by now... it's still current.


We're still having trouble with pesticide use (killing off our insects); there's a lot of unsustainable farming practise, including fish farming. Mind you, I don't think that just buying organic food is the golden solution - I'd guess it is more sustainable to buy a locally grown cucumber that has been commercially produced by a farmer using fertiliser and other agricultural chemicals responsibly, than to buy an organic avocado from Peru. Lots of organically grown things also come in plastic packaging, including fruit and vegetables - also not the best thing for our environment.

So personally, I try to buy food that is locally grown and unpackaged, bringing my own containers to the shop or market. Bonus if it's organic, but local and unpackaged actually has higher priority on my list; we basically only buy things from outside the region if it's something that cannot be grown here, such as bananas and oranges.

Next best is re-useable packaging - deposit glass jars, for instance. Next best: paper or paper-based, plastic-free packaging material. Following this are one-way glass jars, which we re-use in our own household for storage of stuff we buy unpackaged, or for canning our own things. Home-made convenience food does have its own charm.

We're thus down to buying or consuming very little plastic packaging these days. A lot of things only come in plastic packaging, and there is an easy solution for most of these, for us: We just don't buy them. On closer inspection, most of these, for us, can be replaced by something equally delicious that has no plastic wrapper, or we can make it ourselves. (Mascarpone is one of these. Tortilla chips have been successfully produced here. It has the side effect of actually appreciating treats a lot more.)

Meat and fish are the really difficult bits here, especially with the additional hygiene rules implemented by a lot of shops due to the Corona thing. To our great delight, we've recently discovered a small farm shop that makes it possible to bring our own containers, so the meat problem is more or less solved. It means we'll eat what kind of meat they had - but since most of my meal planning goes "Let's see what we get at the market, and then we'll make it work somehow", that has not brought much of a change.   Fish, though... there's one local fish farmer on the Saturday market, and he has lovely fish, but it's all plastic packaged.  So we've reduced the amount of fish consumed, and are keeping our eyes open to find some alternative where we can get unpackaged fresh fish.

It's a journey. It makes some things harder, and it means not eating a lot of things because they are out of season, or only available in plastic - but on the other hand, the same thing makes life easier in a way, as well. If it's clear that something will not be bought due to reason X, Y, or Z, that makes shopping decisions quite a bit faster... and seasonal things a lot more awaited, and appreciated.

So. Use the fork, Luke. Use it wisely. And if you suddenly find yourself in a quite different movie: Choose wisely.

I've done some more evening mini painting - it's a nice change to doom-scrolling, and staring at smaller or larger screens. Also every evening of mini painting brings us closer to the day when we can actually start playing the game... (Yes, I know that it's theoretically possible to play the game before the minis are painted. Or with just some of them done and some not. But, ah, they just look soooo much better when painted. And to be fair, it's not as if we have nothing else to do in the evenings. There's mini painting, for instance!)

There's some figures that are just for one of the sub-stories, but most of them will come into play over and over again. Like the villagers - four of these guys, all looking the same. We've decided to also paint them the same, and not do different colour clothes for each.



They were the first batch of pieces from that game. They are finished now, and already have their first glossy coat of varnish.



The photo is a little blurry - these are quite hard to take decent photos of! The green things they are mounted on are bottle caps, serving as a handle.

The next guys I'm working on are the shadows - basically the main baddies that turn up again and again, and make everything worse.



These are about half done, they need some cleaning up of spills of the pink/purple, and some shades and highlights, and some details.

And then there's the main baddie for that story section, and some thugs with knives, and an inn-keeper, and another guy, and the four virtues... and of course Solomon Kane himself. Who has some very odd things on his sculpt, and it's not so easy to figure out what belongs to which garment, and how they might look best!

Another week has flown by, and I'm half happy that it's Friday (yay weekend!) and half unhappy (but... but... I wanted to get more done this week!). It's nice and sunny outside at the moment, so the happy half is much louder right now as well.

Speaking of nice and sunny, there's something hanging in the sun here, and it is seeing some use:



These are "wild bee hotels" - ceramic blocks with smooth round holes in them, deep enough for wild bees to make their nests in there. They hang in front of our winter garden, where they get plenty of sun (warmth is important for the brood), and we're happy to see that they are all getting some attention from the wild bees. Their season has only started a bit ago, so we're hoping to see much more action around here during the summer.

Our placing the hotels is not completely altruistic, by the way. These small solitary bees are excellent pollinators, and we have a few fruit trees in the garden that I definitely want to see well-visited when they are in bloom. Which is around... now, for most of them. So go little bees!