Sarah Goslee, together with a friend, is proposing a new study group about archaeological textiles in the Complex Weaver's group. That does sound interesting - I've read a few of the newsletters from the Medieval Textiles group, but being no proper weaver myself, I never joined or participated. The new group will have a much broader focus, and I will definitely keep an eye on its development.

It's all still in the planning stages, but you can read more about it on her blog.

Avocado, to me, is a weird fruit. It doesn't taste fruity, it has a taste that I find very, very bland (up to "this tastes like nothing", but I like the texture it has. I got into first contact with them quite, quite late, and I think my first taste where I really liked them was as avocado sushi roll. (Texture, you see? That weird crumbly-melty mouthfeel in with the rice and the wasabi and soy sauce tastes, something like a cool melting blandness on the tongue.)

Recently, though, I have been experimenting in the kitchen, and in my quest for new (new to me, at least) recipes I have stumbled across avocado pudding. Yes, avocado pudding.

Basically, you take an avocado and puree it, adding something for sweetness (like a banana that you puree right along with it, or a few dates, or honey, or cold baked sweet potato, or fine sugar) and something for taste in addition to the banana or whatever - such as vanilla, cocoa, or berries. (Or not, depending on your preferences.) Plus maybe some liquid - water, milk, almond milk, whatever, to give it a slightly softer texture and have some more of it. It seems to be a thing out there, in the raw/vegan/"paleo" scene. I thought it weird at first (possibly not least because I am sceptic about things praised as "soooo good" and "even better than the original version" by vegans) and sort of stalked the basic idea for a while, not knowing whether I should or not. Then I tried it.

I don't much care for the taste of sweet potato in there, but with banana and strawberries? Really nice. Especially if you add in some chunks of fresh fruit, too. The most patient husband of them all tried the sweet potato version and found it rather... well... very much not to his taste, but then I haven't warmed to his favourite avocado version either (he likes it with some mustard, oil, vinegar, salt and pepper as sauce).

So if you are feeling adventurous and have an avocado and a banana to spare - you might want to try it. I'm not regretting that I did! (In case you want more of a recipe than I have given, any search engine will inundate you with recipes, and probably also with praise of the oh-best-thing-ever.)

I am back home from a very sunny and very relaxed long weekend at Herzberg Reunion. That was a not-public little medieval event where I had so much fun last year that I wanted to come back this year, even though it's not much of a sales event for me.

Still, I brought the little market stall - and some work to take care of. Including a stack of newly-made spindle whorls in need of firing. I did a modified pit firing procedure, just like the last time I fired spindle whorls, and I had really good success with next to no losses (no loss at all if you don't count the one small chip that broke off of one whorl's surface). Spindle whorls in various sizes, forms and weights are now, finally, back in stock!

I also brought some knitting for detail photographs for the options in the pirate hat pattern and some sewing work, all of which got done as far as I had planned. Plus wonderful time with friends that I see way too seldom, and lots and lots of delicious food. And did I mention the sunny weather?

I got a non-sun scare when packing up, though - I was just about to fold my tent when a single raindrop hit me in the face. Which led to a very hasty finish in packing (also known as "There are only the soft lightweight things left so I will just toss them into the back of the car RIGHT NOW never mind their order or good packing") - one of the colleagues called it "an alternative packing approach" or something like that. Well, that single raindrop was the only raindrop that fell in about two hours. But at least all my stuff was in the car very quickly - and all dry!

Now the car needs to be unloaded and all the dirty things want to see the insides of the washing machine, and the heaps of other stuff have to be stowed away... the usual, after an event.

Again assorted links for your convenience and delectation!

A Commonplace Book has compiled pictures of late medieval felt hats from illuminations.

Powered by Osteons hosts the Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival. With cool links (where did Roman babies poop?)

There's a German online course about the Hanse, Lübeck, and Archaeology - ten videos, made with archaeologists, all free.

Finally, ancient flatbread recipes reconstructed from burial site evidence.

That's it for now - and actually also for the next few days, since I will be at Herzberg from tomorrow until Sunday. Regular blogging will resume on Monday.

The cat, sleeping contentedly beside my desk again (lucky cat) just looked at me a minute ago, slightly confused. The reason for that? This video:




(Sorry for the facebook-link - I'd have preferred to link the video directly, but could not figure out how to do that.)

I laughed so hard I had to cry. Which, in turn, made the cat stare at me. (Weird humans.)

In other news: the library at Erlangen has digitised manuscripts available online, I have a medieval event coming up, I've finally managed to re-stock my beeswax pieces, and am planning to fire a batch of spindle whorls the coming weekend.

Also it finally rained during the last two days - finally! The garden was really parched, so it was high time. (The lawn outside has been in crunchy summer edition mode for a few weeks now, and as usual, it will recover - but the strawberries and tomatoes and flowers don't take the heat and drought so well.)

Want to see the oldest bottle of wine? You find it here.

If you are rather looking for about 1.5 kg of chocolate turned into an anatomically correct replica of a human skull, look no further.

Speaking of skulls, Dread Pirate Roberts' Favourite Winter Hat is currently being test-knit by a group of lovely folks over at Ravelry. I hope to have it available as a pattern soon - and will take it to LonCon, too.

Other not so nice news regarding SFF: Marion Zimmer Bradley had a dark side, protecting her child-abusing husband as well as molesting herself. Jim C. Hines has a blog post about this, with further links.

If you are like me, you are using the internet a lot. Including doing numerous searches - for example on dict.leo.org for your German-English translation needs. I also prefer DuckDuckGo to Google as my standard search engine these days, but I frequently fall back on Google Scholar, and there's a few other things I regularly search...

Now, the normal way of doing a dictionary search is... go to the dictionary, type in your word, submit and wait for the results. Similar for all the other things except the Duck - something that was, well, not really evil but just that slight bit of annoying.

This annoyance is no more. I have discovered a nifty little Firefox app called ZappySearch, which allows you to search a page by typing a shortcut (such as gs for google scholar, for example) and your search term into the address bar, hit return, and lean back while you get your answers. Ah. Bliss.

Its developer is Matt Evans, and you can find the little app either under the Firefox app menu (look for ZappySearch) or directly on his webpage. (If you want it straight away, I recommend the website - it is the newer version, and might take a little more time to turn up in the app menu thingie).Thanks, Matt, for making my life easier!