On the journey back home from Uppsala, I stumbled across a nice and helpful website if you're planning to travel by train: zugfinder.net. It lets you search for a specific train (like, say, the EN 346) and shows how much and how often that train was delayed in the past 30 days. That could have been very helpful indeed for my plans!

You can also see what train is where just now, in case you are looking for a specific one. 

I've had a wonderful, if quite short, time in Uppsala at the Material Literacy workshop. It was planned as a rather short stint, but ended up being even shorter due to a massive train delay. Fortunately I could follow the part I'd have missed otherwise on Zoom! 

It was wonderful to meet some old friends and colleagues again,  and meet new people. There were fruitful discussions and lots of looks in detail at wonderful textiles. Hopefully there will be more on the topic of material literacy - I think it's a very helpful term for being able to read objects, and having some properly structured, thought-out lessons or schooling on that will surely be very useful for many people.

We finished with a little excursion into the church museum, and I was very happy to see the Golden Gown again.. It's been so many years since I was there last.

On the way back, there was time for a short stroll through Stockholm (well, some of it!) and a bit of food shopping before going back in the night train. I managed to find a nice small Christmas market there, so back at home, we were able to enjoy some freshly imported ostkaka:

I had not heard of that before coming across it on the Christmas market, but I got to try it there, and it was very nice. It's served warm, with the option of adding whipped cream and jam or something fruity, which we did when we had it here. Definitely recommend it!

The way back had just a little delay overall, so I was home in the afternoon, one hour later than planned originally. Now there's no travel until the end of the work year... which is also nice. There's a stack of things waiting to go to the post tomorrow morning, and I'm looking forward to doing some maintenance work during the winter break. The cat also approves to have her cuddle spot on the desk appropriately staffed again!

3I'm off to a workshop in Sweden, so I'll spend tonight in a nice night train bed, to arrive way up north the next morning. I'm already looking forward to this a huge lot!

There will be no blog posts until Monday - but until then, you might be as amused as I was by the fact that the numbering of rulers (as in kings, not the draw-a-straight-line-thingie) is not as uniquely identifying as one might thinks. At least I used to think so... until I stumbled across Rudolph. The first. Or third. Or sixth, all depending on what you are looking at. The German wikipedia article lists it up nicely in the first sentence....

I do confess I was a little annoyed as well. What do I call him when I write about his grave garments now? I.? III? Or something entirely different? At least there's not an abundance of Rudolphs with rags, that makes things easier...

Margarita Gleba has organised a zoom Study Day for textile archaeology - you can join online! 

It starts at 15:00 and goes until 18:00, and you can register via this form here (or click the image). 

I remember, when I was a child, that we did use sunscreen when out on a bright summer''s day. Sunscreen with factor...4. 

Then. later, there was 8. Then there was 16. From some point, you'd not see the factor 4 in the drugstore shelves anymore; instead, there was factor 20, 30, and then even 50.

It's not just that people are inside more, and thus need more protection when they are going outside. There's a need for more protection because there's more UV around. A recent study shows this very, very clearly, and the whole thing is freely accessible here in English. If you prefer German, here's an article in the Spiegel that's more or less a very short summary. 

You might have heard about the interesting fact that the decline in the number of births looks similar like the decline in the number of storks... and as every legend-savvy German knows, it's the stork that brings the babies. So. No more storks, no more babies, right?

Just that correlation is not causation. Nicest and funniest bit about that that I know is this XKCD:

And if you're amused by spurious correlations, there's a whole website about this that you might enjoy!  

So... we did manage to get a wildlife camera (my aunt had one that she could borrow), but whoever lives in our compost heap cunningly chose a time of night that was very foggy to appear. So yes, someone is there. No, we don't know yet what kind of animal it is (though it might be just plain, boring... rats).

We'll keep our eyes open. And the camera trained on the place!