Palgrave Macmillan is offering free access to all its journals for the whole month of April. Their journal range includes "postmedieval" as the journal of interest for medievalists. Access is free for the current year as well as the last four years of the archives ("where the archives allow", they say on their info page).

The free access scheme requires setting up a trial account. The whole scheme seems to be geared towards librarians, but not limited to them. So sign up and enjoy postmedieval! (Or economics journals, if you feel so inclined.)

I'm back home, there is no snow on the ground (though it's still cold), I had a wonderful time looking at old bits of textile and later getting together for Easter with my family, and now I arrive back to the usual stack of accumulated mails, more or less urgent things to take care of, and the normal batches of work.

With the tiny little added difficulty of a rather nasty sneaky cold. It crept in like a bad one a few days ago, then sort of settled on a level way below the one I would have expected from the early symptoms, but now it seems as if it remembered its resolutions and does a very efficient job of clogging my nose after all. Which is a total pity, because there is leftover cake, and it just makes no sense to eat lovely, yummy cake if you cannot taste a thing. (Especially not if there is cake handed to you from a friend because you expressed an interest in tasting it when said friend described his recipe.) So it's sage tea with honey for me instead, at least for now, and I very much hope to be back to cake-consumption status this afternoon.

Oh, and maybe some sunshine. That would be nice...

I will be away from home this week, looking at a nice old bit o' textile as well as visiting a friend, and then there's Easter to be celebrated - always a lovely excuse to meet with family and have a few lazy days.

So regular blogging will resume on Tuesday next week.

Languages can be a lot of fun, and so can translation. Especially when you translate into a direction not very common - such as from modern German into Middle High German. Or from modern English into Middle English.

Enter Chaucer, stage center. Well, probably not the original one, but the one that blogs. I stumbled across that blog ages ago, but I will freely confess I never followed it - my modern English reading skills are fine, but old English in longer texts... it exhausts me.

However, Chaucer also doth tweet. Which is nice, because what he posts is both short (so quite easy to read) and also totally hilarious. If you have twitter, go follow him. And yesterday when I checked the feed, I found this gem:

Bye, bye, English Jakke of Dover. Which is the text of Bye, bye, Miss American Pie translated into Middle English. This. This is what knowledge of Middle English is for. Right?

A few nice, new and exciting things have come to my attention, internet-wise, during the last days - so it's time for a link list.

A find of a smelting oven, not too far from here, has been radiocarbon-dated. It's from the 13th century, making it one of the quite late ovens of that type. Read more about it (and see pics) in the Schauhuette blog.

If you are more into graphics design, you might be interested in having a look at the Elephants of Typography.

There's something new out regarding the finds of Lengberg - parts of the find are presented in the book "The Tudor Child". Beatrix Nutz has also made a website about this in German and in English, including some additional information about the pieces that will not be in the book.

There will be a conference about children's garments in Krefeld in May; the German language info page is here.

And finally, something not so nice: A 15 year old girl on the Maledives was raped by her stepfather - and was then sentenced to public flogging because she had sex while not married. I won't go into that further, because it's obviously so, so wrong on so, so many levels. The only positive thing about it is that word got out, and now there is a public outcry about it, and a petition running to get the Maledives government to abolish that law and institute better protection for rape victims (and actual prosecution for the criminals!). It's run by Avaaz, and signing is easy the first time and even easier once you have registered in their network.

This time, it's not because I cluttered it with stuff (though yes, that has also happened) but because I am now working with a second screen in addition to the (not overly large) one that my laptop has. And what can I say? It's lovely. Really, really lovely - I can have several texts open at once, glance over, get my information and write something in another open window.

It feels like total, complete, utter luxury. I remember that time when 17" was a huge monitor, and when flatscreens were a sensational new thing that took up so much less space. I remember seeing a spread of more than one monitor, with the extended desktop, and being told that while that was cool it was only necessary for graphic designers or folks working a lot with AutoCAD.

I have sort of worked with two screens before, only that one of them was on my computer and the other on a second one, that having internet access, and I'd use the one for writing and the other for online dictionary searches and looking up stuff. Which meant that all kinds of weird using-the-wrong-mouse-or-keyboard moments did happen. But somehow, until recently, I did not really think about getting a second screen all for myself. Total luxury of virtual real estate.

I'll probably get used to that luxury very soon and be bewildered whenever I do not have my second screen. It's still a little weird, I'm adjusting angles, and the colours of the two screeens don't match exactly but oh, I do not mind. Finally I do not need to switch windows again, and again, and again for a simple piece of work. Hooray!

The Internet is a lovely thing, and a great time-sink, and a great help plus sometimes a hindrance - but you know all that.

The Internet has also provided me, during the last two or so weeks, with means to soften my chronically tense shoulders. I have the tendency to hunch my shoulders and tense up shoulder and neck muscles when things are taxing, and unfortunately forget to relax when it gets better again until it's way, way too late. So I have decided to do something about that and keep doing it, and searched Youtube for stuff to relax.

That, in turn, brought me to yoga videos - and they really helped to relax my shoulders. Should you feel inclined to try some shoulder relaxing stuff too, you can check out doyogawithme.com - there's quite a few different stretches for office yoga, a longer and a shorter shoulder sequence, and even full yoga classes. And it's all free as well, so there's a good opportunity to try out whether this works for you or not. Enjoy!