Our Internet is still acting up and not really moving very fast (with great lags when up- or downloading stuff) which means that all the I'net work that I have to do is tedious at best, nerve-wrackingly impossible at worst.

Which again shows how reliant I have become on the 'net, and how important it is to daily business. Sigh. I hope I can at least get a few mails done now before I move over into the next room to enjoy some work that is totally 'net-independent - hooray for historical textile techniques!

The old year 2010 (can you believe it's almost over already?) is yet bringing something new, and a very, very exciting thing to boot: Last Friday saw the ground-breaking ceremony for a laboratory and workplace especially for Experimental Archaeology in Mayen.

Mayen is a city in the volcanic Eifel region in Germany, with a long history as an economic centre. Nowadays, the region is visited for the very special landscape that still shows volcanic activity. And now it will gain a new attraction, at least for experimental archaeologists: The Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology aims to provide the infrastructure and logistics for experiments that are difficult to run otherwise, with different workspaces and proper laboratories to make first analyses. I think that sounds like heaven, and I am very happy that a project like this has now officially taken off and is being built!

If you understand German (or are interested anyway), you can see a TV report about the ground-breaking on the TV Mittelrhein homepage; the report about the lab starts at 8:35. It's only about two minutes long, and you can see how cold (and thus hard) the ground already was for the ceremonial use of spade and shovel. The building is scheduled for official opening next summer, and I hope the hard winter that has been forecast will not delay the process!

It seems as if Winter took his job seriously this year - while we had good weather with no snow and not too much rain until the last week of November, it's now snow and more snow - and the cold temperatures that go with it.

Aside from low temperatures, winter always means shorter days and less available light, but I have a good way to counter this. For projects where I need a lot of good light, I have an adjustable lamp with a daylight spectrum bulb. A few years ago, daylight spectrum lamps were really pricey and hard to get, but it has become much easier now, and I can really, really recommend them. Not only do they provide wonderful light for working, with very little to no perceived colour changes in your workpiece, they are also a good countermeasure against light winter depressions that occur when the body doesn't get enough natural daylight. So if you are still looking for a lamp for the dark months, or need to replace the bulb in your workplace lighting fixture anyway, I can very much recommend daylight spectrum bulbs!

This morning, snow was covering the trees and bushes and lawns here, and there's still a very light powdering of more snow coming down. So it seems as if winter has well and truly arrived now. (How good that we got married last Saturday and didn't plan it for this week - taking photos in the park would have been... uh... extra-cold then.)

In addition to snow falling, our Internet connection is acting up, and it's sort of a gamble whether a page will load properly on the first try (not very common) or whether it needs between three and ten re-load attempts. That is not the best basis for getting computer work done, and it severely gets on my nerves, especially since I have to take care of some maily and internetty stuff with a high priority. I guess if it won't work at all, I'll just have to work on other stuff first and hope the connection settles down again to its old reliability soon.

With winter now officially here, the Season of Secrets is starting up again - preparation not only for the Yuletide days, but also for next summer season and its markets. And then there is, of course, the prospect of maybe a workshop or two during the cold months - there is some planning going on right now. And it would not be winter without cosy evenings with friends and copious amounts of tea. So... the most important questions right now are "will we have as much snow as last year?" and "how much of the To-Do-During-Winter list will stay undone this year?" - and I'm looking forward to finding that out.

Thank you all for your congratulations and good wishes!

We had a wonderful time on Saturday with both our families and lots of friends - and of course (as is typical for a wedding in Franconia) lots and lots of good food. And now we are slowly getting used to normal life again (and maybe even to the consumption of cake now and then - never in my life have I had such a cake overload before). It's astonishingly unfamiliar to be wife and husband now, something new added to our life together now after quite a few years of "wilder Ehe" as it is called in German. And we're also recovering from the total frenzy of the days and weeks before and the day itself (which to me felt like about five days rolled into one, it was so intensive).

And now I can actually say "my husband" when talking about the Most Patient Man of Them All. That's bound to occasionally make a conversation easier - or at least less lengthy...

A week or so ago, I chanced to look on the blog archive thingie on the sidebar, and it occurred to me that

a) the year 2010 is almost over - it's the middle of November already! Where has all the time gone? and

b) I must have been on tour and doing stuff much more often this year than last, since I have quite a few less posts for 2010, and I guess I won't be making about 40 more posts until December 31.

In fact, I'm very sure about that, since I am going to take a few days off the blog. Again. I'll be off the blog (and probably off the internet too) until next week Thursday, when normal life should have reasserted itself after our wedding.

I stumbled over a batch of nice links recently, and I'm finally sharing them with you:

The Anjou Bible is fully digitalised and online - you can see it here. The Book Viewer is in Dutch, but the icons' functions are very, very obvious, so you should have no problem looking at the pictures.

I also stumbled across a site called Decameron Web with an article about sexual positions in the Middle Ages. There's also a lot of other resources and information about the Decameron there, including an Italian and English version of the text.


And finally, there's an interesting non-medieval project going on: An artist called Christopher Salmon is on the quest for money to make a short film from Neil Gaiman's short story "The Price". The text will be read by Neil Gaiman himself, and there's stunning artwork in graphic-novel-style going with it.



If you like the teaser and want to support it, you can pledge money (starting from 10 Dollars) to the project. The money will only be deducted from your account if enough supporters can be found - the film is budgeted at 150.000 USD, and there's yet a ways to go until that amount is reached.