I am back!

I am back! So what should I catch you up on?

It's still ridiculously hot outside. The extreme heat was also the reason for a change of plans that we made for the summer holidays - we had planned to go cycling for two weeks, but I am, unfortunately, not functioning well when exercising at temperatures of 30° C outside. So our first change of plans was to go for a paddle on the Main instead. This plan dried up together with the water levels in said river, which were too low for paddling on the interesting parts.

So Plan C (good thing that the alphabet has a few extra letters) was made, and executed, and that was a short but very beautiful hike on the Goldsteig. The German love of over-engineering and over-securing things does not stop before hiking trails, so we did enjoy one of the "premium trails" this country has to offer... which means that in theory you can see the next trail mark (usually some painted or printed sign) already when standing at the previous one. The theory doesn't always come through in practice, but most of the time, so it's actually very nice for strolling along without looking at a map, gps, or other orientation aid for most of the time. (It would be possible to walk without any kind of map, actually, but it was nice to check at some points where we were in relation to the next place of interest.)

For me, it was also a bit down nostalgia road as we passed places that my Grandma had lived in, or talked much about. We were only walking for four days, but could enjoy some nice quiet nights in the tent and had absolutely perfect weather for hiking. We came back and the weather got hotter again, so we could not have hit it better. Bonus effect: That hike was on our list for a long time already, but was too long for a weekend and too short for a normal summer holiday. 

Other stuff happened as well during the summer break - or, well, did not happen. This would have been a sensible solution for the new EU packaging and waste regulations; unfortunately, there was no agreement in the relevant groups, so everything stayed as it was in the previously published version. The TL;DR for this: no matter how large your shipping volume, you have to pay a lot of money for licensing fees, making EU shipping for most small players unaccessible. I will post a longer rant, with things you can do about the thing, tomorrow.

What else did not happen? The full re-launch of my website (and nobody is surprised here, I think). At least it's getting there, or maybe creeping there; most of the software availability issues have been resolved now, the blog has shiny new updated software compatible with the next version of Joomla, and the new newsletter software and template is almost good to go (in spite of my messing up the migration repeatedly. Sigh.)

Also going on, though in the background: Prep for an exhibition that is to have one man from an image coming to life. These days it's technically possible to take the image of a face and have it transformed into a life-sized 3D head, but not everything that is technically possible is also... well, the smartest or most affordable option. In our case, it's a question of the budget, and I'd rather get proper fabrics than an overly nice head. So the plan is to take the figure we have and fit it with a buff that will be printed with the face of the painting figure. Was that in any way understandable?

So anyway I got to the funny part of fitting a disembodied head (as it's easier to handle) with one of my buffs and, for aligning the painting face as best as possible, marking some key spots (with, of course, my beloved charcoal). It looks rather funny:

It also fits only semi-well over my own facial features, because my ears are higher up than the head's ears, and my nose is smaller and therefore my ears are further to the front than the marked ones. Or something like that - I could not see it for myself, because unlike special fancy full-face masks for morphsuits, this material is not really see-through.

Now we will have to see how this all plays out, and how it will look once we've got it, and got it on the figure. Fun times!