Here are some curious videos to entertain you! First of all: Headwear, inspired by kitchen stuff:

Slightly more modern, and owing to the current situation - while in Germany, police patrols the streets and tells people to move on (you're allowed to do sports outside, or take a walk, but not to sit on benches or on the lawn), there's a much more intimidating kind of patrol happening in Britain:


Like so many other museums, the Städel Museum is offering its collections in digital form, so you can visit and have a look at art via the 'Net. Their motto for this? #STAYDELATHOME. I have laughed my ass off about that. (Proof, again, that I am easily amused...) Do go check out their collections, they have a number of wonderful medieval artworks as well as a lot of more modern ones.

It's time for some garden pics for you - the sun is shining, it's been pretty warm the last few days, and that does show:



The first tulips are blooming now, as is the peach tree, the plum tree, and the morello cherry. You can see the latter in the background here:



The little one in the foreground is a dwarf apple tree (an old variety, called Goldparmäne) that was not overly happy on our friend's balcony, and consequently was allowed to go to a new home in our garden. It is showing small leaf tips now, and we hope very much it will like its new spot, and make apples for us.

The willow fence is also working on its new shoots - it always takes a little longer for the fully pruned willow to sprout again from the latent buds. On the picture, you can see how much difference in thickness there is between individual stems - and you can also see that the lower arches are troublesome, as they tend to die off at about halfway or three quarters up, and so we're re-bending a lot of last year's shoots to close the arches every spring (that's the slim, bright green ones).

First of all, here's a link to an interesting article about the comparisons of the Black Death to our current Corona pandemic, written by Going Medieval.  And while I'm throwing things at you to read, here is a long blogpost about Macchiavelli, written by Ada Palmer. Just so you have something to do, in case you haven't.

Here, things had more or less settled into a new routine, with both of us working in the home office - but now things have changed up a bit again, as the Most Patient Husband's company has shut down for the Easter holidays. Which means that this week and next week, he has time off work, so I'll probably cut down on my own worktime a bit as well, so we can make good use of his free time. (Which also means that I might accidentally skip a blogpost or two. I don't plan to, currently, but it might happen.)

Otherwise, nothing really newsworthy is going on here. Well, unless you count little things; little things that brightened up our weekend, and make things somehow much nicer and much better. Little things like a few new plants for our garden, ordered from that local nursery, which arrived on Friday and were duly re-potted on Saturday. Activities on that day also included a very, very fun bread-baking action:

One of our friends had offered via his Whatsapp-Status to bake bread together; nice, simple, down-to-earth rye bread with sourdough. He'd prepare a sourdough starter for the local people (which we collected contactless, of course), and then on Saturday, there was a video group call at several points in time, with explanation and instructions on what to do to bake the bread.

Many years ago, I used to make my own bread purely for fun, so it wasn't all new to me - but it was definitely something else to do it in a group, with a few hilarious technical issues, and a number of lovely rye breads at the end of the action.

This was my result:



It's a nice, proper sourdough rye bread, tasting just like it is supposed to be. I also have a starter in the fridge now, and I do suspect there will be a bit more bread-baking in my future again...

...require special measures. Or special bits of creativity.

We used to have semi-regular boardgame evenings with friends, and these are, of course, out of the question now. However... I also invested, quite recently, in a new and special tripod for my camera, for research trips such as the one to Augsburg (because I realised when going through the pictures that the yield-to-crap ratio could profit a huge lot from a better angle when taking the pictures, and that means a special macro tripod with a boom).

So. What do you do when you want to play boardgames and have a) willing friends, b) a fair number of mobile end devices, c) a cupboard full of boardgames including a substantial number of co-op games, d) adequate internet access, and e) a nice large table?

Right.

This.



We had to swap the beautifully painted minis for the standard-issue solid coloured ones, for better visibility on the screen, but it all did work pretty well.

And yes, we managed to rescue enough people out of the burning building before it collapsed - it was close, though!

One thing I learned this year: Nasturtiums are not necessarily an annual plant - one that I had in a pot in the wintergarden is now already blooming happily, and I've been enjoying the flowers a lot.



You could see some more of the flowers in the picture if they weren't so damn tasty! I've been eating quite a few already, and I am now hoping for many, many more.

In case you've never had the experience of eating a nasturtium flower, it's hard to describe. You have both the flowery sweetness of the flower (thank you, Captain Obvious) and the sharp, mustard-like tang of the leaves, but without the leafy texture. That is just the flower and the crunchy crispness of the flower stem, with the tangy juice coming out. If you have the chance, try it.

I've not been as successful with some other gardening things - my Ecuador Purple chili seeds all have lost their will to sprout, so I need to find somewhere to get new seeds. I've also been unlucky with the last Angel Beans, sadly. Does this mean I have an excuse to do some seed-shopping? Hmm....

I've blogged about my wonky phone before - and now I've finally taken the plunge (thanks to some gentle prodding from the Most Patient Husband of Them All, who would probably have lost his own patience with a phone misbehaving like mine a good while ago) and got a new one. This time, it's a phone that is much more future-proof, as you can replace every single item that it's made of. (Yes, a Fairphone.)

There only remains that one little step... of migrating over to the new phone. Which, of course, is not as straightforward as one would wish it to be. Because while there is an app that allows you to do a backup, it has somehow managed to staunchly refuse to work for me up until now (even though it did work to move my stuff to my old phone from the previous one). Sigh. It's just so frustrating when things like that don't work.

Add to this the fact that of course everything looks different on the new phone, and nothing works like I'm used to, and the keyboard is weird (I found a new, nice, simple and free one, though, to replace the googlekeyboard that was pre-installed), and the ringtones are all wrong, and the contact data is missing for now, and the new phone doesn't have the "intelligent alarm" that Samsung includes with their phones, and it's all a little aaargh-inducing. So here goes my work day, in setting up the new one, and going "Aaaarrrgh!!!" again and again, and trawling the lists and settings and app stores and trying to find good solutions for all the pesky problems. (As it's my work phone, spending the work day is... not ideal, obviously, since that would be spending half an hour and have a perfectly working phone with everything in place, but also no illegal non-work activity eating up productive time.)

Soon, though, I'll have gotten used to the new things, found better alternatives to the things I don't like, and replacement apps for the functions the new phone is missing. Sometimes, as I well know, this means things are getting even better, as I actually took the time of looking for something that suits me better than the pre-installed whatnot.

And then I plan not to change phone for at least the next decade!

The cat is lying on the desk, purring quietly and looking outside, where it's cold, but sunny. I've been working on restocking some things (making new spinning packs, for instance); my mail backlog is the usual size, there's a paper to proofread and amend.

It's normal work, and life feels very normal at times, accordingly. And then some weird thing happens - like having to check whether postal service still runs to a specific place. Or the postie delivering something and asking me whether I want to sign or not (I didn't, for us both; he took a photo instead, documenting the delivery. Smart method.)

Sometimes it feels like this is all just a dream. All too unreal to be real - though, of course, it is. Still, the sun is shining, there's bees outside, the peach tree is starting to bloom... and there's a list of shops in town that are now offering delivery of goods, as the shops have to stay closed during the lockdown.

Now... to ensure that these businesses survive, it is of course good to shop with them, right? Basically, that is sort of a civic duty at this point in time. Probably you have a local shop in need in your town as well, struggling for business survival now. So this is the perfect excuse, actually, to buy hand-made chocolates from a fancy chocolate shop. Or some glorious yarn from a knitting store. Or from a small hand dyer. Get some new plants for the garden from a local nursery. Or splurge on something other nice... because you can, because it will make you happy in these times, and it will help the small business. (If you need something, consider not ordering online via one of the big players, especially the big A, which is still treating their workers very badly. Instead, try looking for a local shop in dire need of support and business right now. Who knows - you might discover a new favourite shop?)

I'm writing all this just in case you needed an excuse to get yourself something pretty, of course. And now I'll go call that local nursery. We need fertiliser... and a plant or two.