Remember how, not many days ago, I happily told you that the Beast was finished? Well, it has returned once again to haunt me (though I am to blame for that myself) - we were offered to have a last look at the second stage proofs, and we decided to do so.

Which means I'm currently reading it again. One last time - though this round, it's just to look out for any little remaining typos and inconsistencies, and reading is not as demanding or as slow as for a full edit.

I hope to be finished by tomorrow evening with all the read-through, leaving the weekend gloriously Beast-free...

There's this German saying "Lila - der letzte Versuch" (purple, the last effort). While I'm on the last effort to make the Beast as nice as possible, the wooden trough here has purple flowers as a last effort to make it useful, since its bottom broke during production... making it a not very good trough, but a very nice flowerpot.

Well, don't look literally - the cat did bring something home, but we made no photograph before picking it up, carrying it to the candle and burning it into nice crisp black oblivion. Yes, it was a tick - the first she brought home this season (at least the first one that we found).

So here's the obligatory Springtime-is-start-of-tick-season post:
Are you living in or planning to travel to a place in Europe that has ticks carrying the TBE virus? If so, have you checked your vaccination status? It's recommended to refresh the vaccination every 5 years, every 3 years if you are older than 60. TBE is a nasty thing, and the easiest way to avoid it apart from spending all your time inside is the vaccination.

Ticks can also give you Lyme Borreliosis, which is bacterial and also quite nasty, but there's no vaccine against it.

For those of you who need to refresh tick-bite avoidance and treatment stuff, because you are lucky enough not to get in contact with ticks often:
Wear long clothes when walking through nature, especially if you are walking through high grass, undergrowth, and along forest edges. Check yourself for ticks after being outside, enlisting the help of other people or a mirror for the hard-to-see spots. If you find any ticks, remove them as soon as possible, using a suitable tool; do not cover them in oil or glue. You can get tick-removal tools in every pharmacy (and also in pet shops). There's different kinds of them; we have a sling-type tool called "3iX" that we are very happy with, as it also works well on the cat (our main field of use) and will grip even tiny ticks.  It has been said that just pulling out the tick without twisting is better; personally, I feel it goes out more easily with the old "turn it around a few times, pulling gently" method. Dabbing some disinfectant over the spot where the tick was cannot hurt once it's out.

Once you have the tick out, check if it has come out completely or if the head is still in the wound (that can happen sometimes). Then destroy it. Do not just flush it down the loo - it will laugh at you, ticks can happily survive for weeks under water. Either douse it with boiling water (must have more than 70°C to work), squash it completely (that can be messy) or use metal tweezers to hold it into a flame and burn it. Dead ticks are good ticks.

Fun fact: Sometimes you get a tick that has a tick on its back. A Two-fer. These two, my friends, are doing the Nasty. The Beast with Two Backs. They are humping along. Making more tick eggs.  Or however else you want to describe it. If you kill these two, you have just rid the world of about 1000 more potential ticks...

(Disclaimer, in case it's necessary: I am, in general, an animal-friendly person. I'm one of those who carry the spider out, and make sure the bumblebee gets out of the house too. There are, however, three exceptions: ticks, moths and carpet beetles. Well, four if you count that I will slap a mosquito if it bites me. If you are a small chitin-clad creature that wants my blood or my wool, I will not give you quarter!)

This was a very productive weekend - much more so than planned: we went to a demonstration against TTIP, strolled through a furniture store and tried to help a friend find a table for his living room, and - most importantly - we spent the sunny Sunday afternoon outside, renewing the waterproofing on our tent.

Said tent has been our home on medieval markets for more than ten years now, so it's understandable if the waterproofing is not as fresh as on day one anymore. Last year we noticed that there were a few parts where it was more moist than usual, and especially the door flap turned rather soggy in wet weather. Which meant... time to do something.

So we got ourselves two large brushes and a suitable waterproofing product and went to work, first painting the roof and then painting all the side panels with it. There was a lot of painting - but now it is standing outside in the sun, all dry and ready to be packed away for Freienfels (coming soon!).

The tent, lowered for good roof access. A definitive plus of a two-part central pole!

We are confident that it will be good for a nice long while now. And as an additional bonus... our getting it waterproofed in time for the start of the season might mean a dry festival, following Murphy's Law!

This, my friends, is the last time that the Beast will have kept me from blogging in a timely fashion due to totally eating my brain and whacking me about the head with a deadline... because it's done.

Done, finished, dealt with, packed up nicely and sent away. Of course, there were a gazillion little things we would have liked to change in that last read-through (mostly little glitches in style that slipped past us in the last Big Edit), and of course there were still some typos left (some of them quite amusing, such as a stray paddler trying to sell spices), but we refrained from fiddling with style (and the editor will deal with whatever needs dealing with, much to our joy and relief) and now it's done, done, done.

Which means that in the future, if I totally and utterly forget to blog in the morning, I will not have that wonderful scapegoat anymore. And you know what? I don't mind at all.

Before I toddle off into the weekend, though, here is a fitting link for the springtime that is in full spring at the moment: a brand-new system for beehives to harvest honey easily and without disturbing the bees. Fascinating!

And there's also some news on the Digital VAT issue - the Commission is rethinking the rules. There's hope!

Deadlines, I am convinced, are Eaters of Brains. They especially seem to like those parts of the brain that are supposed to keep track of things already done or still to do - such as doing a blog entry.

Tomorrow, though, is the last day this particular deadline will nibble on my cranial capacity. And since someone recently made me promise to post more pictures on this blog, you are now at least getting a gratuitous cat picture to make up for the very belated blog post:

This day today (much like yesterday) has been totally and utterly devoured by the Beast. That is, of course, the book due to come out soon, which has been privately named the Beast for ever and ever... or at least since before I came in on the project.

The fact that it's coming out soon means that it's been typeset, and edited, and we are currently reading the proofs, trying to catch any remaining errors. Which means that Gillian read it all, and I read it all, and we are now making sure that our edits don't contradict or overlap and are getting it all nicely in shape. That, in turn, means another chat session tomorrow, when we will hopefully get through most of the remainder...

At least I got to sit in the wintergarden and look at nice garden flowers while doing the reading. Like this one:


And that one:


And now back to get a little bit more work done today!

If you are doing research, you'll know about paywalled journals. For those of us lucky enough to live near a university, many of the paywall problems can be solved with a library card and some quality time spent on the computer among all those books... but not every library has the stuff you need, and no library ever has All The Things, and anyways the beauty of online articles is the quick access right from your home workstation, and that is much rarer to get than a library card.

So it's extra nice that from time to time, some of the big paywalls open up and give out stuff for free. Like Maney, this week: You have free access to 43 of their journals about archaeology, conservation and heritage until April 26!

Why are you still here? Oh, right. Here's the link. I know where I will be spending my breaks today - there's still the typeset Beast to finish proofreading!