My little thumb injury shenanigans have taught me two things... firstly: Keeping wounds moist for the first stage of healing is the current state-of-the-art method, and I can tell from my experience that it was very agreeable and worked very well. The thumb is almost back to normal as of this morning. There's a little bit more healing to do, but there's no pain, no redness and no swelling anymore.

Secondly: There's a very good reason for film coating around pills... at least around some of them. The antibiotics I got prescribed, alas, they lack such a coating. Don't ask me why, maybe it's because the makers believe in the old German adage about "bitter medicine" and so on. Anyway, I popped the first one in my mouth and then reached for the water, and that was definitely not the best idea of the day. Lacking a coating, the pill generously spread its outer surface to the outer surface of my mouth, and that stuff is bitter with a capital B. It also had a tendency to stay where it had gotten to, which means the bitter taste was quite persistent and took a while, and a handful of cherry tomatoes, to get rid of. There may also have been some funny noises.

So the next pills got coated. Not in liver paté (though I'm still tempted to do that with the last one I'll take this evening, because, you know, cat), but, with varying success, in jam, honey, and chocolate spread. (I was actually a little tempted to coat them in real chocolate, but for just the few pills for 3 or 4 days, it did not seem worth the effort of melting choc and coating them.)

Choc spread is basically the equivalent, for me, to the cliché of liver paté for cats, so it seemed the logical (and most amusing) choice. However, it's way too tempting to eat it off the pill (defeating the purpose, but also very much cat-like as in they'll quite often suck the coating off and then spit out the pill) and in addition it's rather sticky in the mouth. Jam and honey work better; I think I like (liquid) honey best. Safest method to avoid any of the bitterness to escape was rolling it in a bit of honey on a teaspoon, then taking a mouthful of water, tipping the head back, dropping the pill in and then quickly swallowing everything. (Pro tip: If you touch the naked pill for the rolling-in-honey action, do not lick your fingers afterwards...)

Now... does that count as a life skill? If not, at least it makes for an amusing story.

My plan was to finish some sewing project today - but it has been thwarted... well, I could technically do it, but I'm choosing to let my thumb marinate as recommended instead.

If you're now wondering what I mean... my left thumb currently looks like this: 

It looks much worse than it actually is. That is a moist cover to keep a small, slightly infected wound open and able to ooze out anything that will ooze out. I tried to get a (rather large) pill into a poor sick cat yesterday evening, and that was only partly successful as in part of the chewed-up capsule landed inside the cat (good), and part of the cat's teeth landed temporarily in my thumb (not so good). (The cat is not to blame, by the way, as he was not trying to bite me - he had only two wishes: To close his mouth again, preferably with the pill outside of it, and to get away from this horrible situation. My thumb just happened to be in the way of achieving wish number one.)

Because cat bites are notorious for getting infected, and I need my hands in good working order, I did the very sane and grown-up thing and went to the doc this morning. So now I'm getting antibiotics for a few days and the (tiny little) wound gets a spa treatment. It's not hurting much or really heating up, but there are signs of infection, and since the fascia in the fingers are plentisome and those are not agreeing at all with infections, better to act quickly and hit the bugs with antibiotics than get real issues later on.

Bonus, though: I got reminded of the fact that one of my basic vaccinations needs a refresher, and got the shot while at the doc's today.

So. Lessons to learn from this? If you need to pill a cat, consider wearing (thin leather) gloves right from the start. (Thick gloves will not work, you can't put pressure on the small spots at the jaw joint then.) 

Most importantly: Don't get bitten. If you do, it's a good idea to go to the doc straightaway, as soon as there are the first signs of any infection. Don't wait around, cat saliva is evil stuff.

(Bonus tip: Go check your vaccinations and see if they are all up to date. Second bonus tip: If you're getting antibiotics for any reason, get yourself something to build up a healthy gut biome again while you're in the pharmacy anyways. These meds kill bugs first and never ask, and that includes the ones that are supposed to live happily in your gut.)

The irony of the whole thing, by the way? The pill for the cat was antibiotics...

I'm delighted to travel to the North again, for a presentation in Lübeck. The Forschungsstelle für die Geschichte der Hanse und des Ostseeraums are hosting a series of talks each year, and I have the pleasure and honour of starting off this year's series with a talk about the production of textiles and clothing in the era of the Hanse. That will be on October 11 - which means I've started working on the presentation. Writing and preparing these always takes a good chunk of time, and I like to have a few days to let ideas mature and settle in my brain inbetween; I find that this helps immensely.

You can find the full programme here; the talks are all in German. They are free to attend in-person in Lübeck, but you need to register for them due to restrictions on the number of people.

I'm very much looking forward to this already. There will be inside stories about making textiles - and probably a lot of moaning about what we don't know anymore. (The German term for inside stories is much funnier, by the way, especially in this context: it's "aus dem Nähkästchen plaudern". The literal translation for that is "to talk from inside the (sewing) workbasket".) I'm also planning to bring a distaff along, because, well, you can always use a distaff! 

Unicorns are something that's been fascinating humans for a long time - and  I remember that when I was a child, I went to "Fasching" (dress-up for carneval) as a unicorn one time. (No, I don't think there are any pictures, but I know it involved a horn made from silver crafting paper, and probably a pin-on tail.)

Unicorns come up sort of frequently in medieval artworks, too - and if you'd like to read a bit more about them, you can do so at the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, where there's a nice article (with pictures) about the unicorn, both available in English and in German.

I like music, I like funny stuff done with language, and puns, and good rhyming. So it's a small wonder that I enjoy a lot what the comedian Bodo Wartke does. You can call it "Klavierkabarett" - as in he's doing funny things with a piano as his trusty sidekick. (He's also doing a few non-funny or only half-funny things handling heavier topics, but, if you ask me, he's doing it exceedingly well. A bit like a German version of Tim Minchin, only with less swearing and less explicit.)

Love, of course, is one of the topics that are important in life, so it's also a small wonder that this comes up in his songs again and again. And because a deep fascination with language usually does not limit itself to just one's mother tongue, but to the whole concept, you can find something very special on Bodo Wartke's website: a Love Song Generator. There's seven different languages for the chorus (which means you'll probably find one that you will understand) and more than 80 languages and dialects for the stanzas (including Latin, Middle High German, and Middle English) and you can mix and match to your heart's content. Or to the content of your beloved, if you're making one for somebody else...

There's an online symposium about "Thy Father's Instruction: Reading the Nuremberg Miscellany as Jewish Cultural History by Dr. Naomi Feuchtwanger-Sarig", hosted by the Goldstein Centre, on September 14. It's to celebrate a book launch and starts at 18:00 Israel time, so you might want to check your timezone if you'd like to attend; it's free but you will have to register. Read more about this on the Centre's website, where you can also register. 

Not online, and not free, but well worth it if you're in German Living History and interested in the topics covered: the Nobilitas-Akademie. Nobilitas is a group to preserve old crafts - which means they also organise crafter's markets, or events at museums that involve historical crafts. They also try to spread knowledge, and help people exchange knowledge and network, and one of the possibilities to do that is their Akademie. 

It takes place in a castle-turned-youth-hostel, and this year's academy is on November 11 to 13. There's talks about medieval cooking, fighting, Cisterciensians, technical knowledge of the Middle Ages, and more. Apart from the presentations, there's time to talk and network with the other participants, and the last time I've attended, there was also some medieval gaming. Check out their programme on the Nobilitas website, where you'll also find their registration form.

There's been a bit more testing, and I think I now have found the best solution for my photo database problem... some more testing will follow, but so far, it does look promising. 

After a bit of mucking around, I now have found out how to import the keywords (proper delimiters are important), and - most important - how and where to import the picture dates so I can sort things by time again. There may have to be some little bit of changing file encodings (there are problems, potentially, with the German Umlaute otherwise), but it does look like I will be able to port everything. Still have to find out where best to shove the comments from the old database, but as I've only ever used those for temporary marking of pics to export, if I lose those, it's no big deal at all.

Just in case you're curious, or are looking for an image database/digital assets management programme yourself, the three in the running were Photo Supreme (the current top dog in my list), iMatch, and Photo Mechanic Plus. They all require a bit of a learning curve.

All three of them also present you, as default, with the "dark" colour scheme. I really don't understand this hype for the dark scheme; it's the same on my phone, about every app wants to go and do the dark thing, and it's hard to convince them (and sometimes impossible) that I want my stuff to be light, light, light. I find it really exhausting to look at a dark screen with light text on it as opposed to a light screen with dark text. I know that some people find the dark background easier on the eyes, but for me, it just doesn't work that well. So it's another point in favour for Supreme that I was able to find a "light colour scheme" pre-selector rather easily, and could switch to a nice grey background that way. (The other two also allow you to change background colours, but it's not as quickly and easily done.)

So. All three are pretty "mighty tools" (which, in geek speak, means "you can do a huge lot of cool things with that programme, but you have to know what you are doing, and learning curves may be steep"). All three will manage large amounts of photos, and all three are mainly geared towards photographers uploading, tagging, culling and sorting their collections and not to weird archaeologists sorting their medieval illustrations with it. With my specific requirements profile (importing data from FotoTime, having weird dates on images, and Umlaute in the keywords and descriptions) all three will need a bit of prodding.

Photo Mechanic does not allow for the import of dates directly, which means that I have a real problem here. iMatch does allow import, and it looked a while like it would win the race, but I keep having issues with actually writing the metadata to the files (that is not done straight away as default, and I've had it write metadata only to find, a few minutes later, that the image still has remaining metadata to be written). So. A bit more testing, probably doing a new larger test import with the parameters and tweaks that I found already, then a bit of working with the candidate... and I'll keep you updated.