Packing is going on, quietly, here. Also final planning and organisation stuff for the Forum, and some more website wrangling snuck in (the new setup is resisting some of my efforts very, very valiantly, to my great dismay), and there was a post office run and mailing, and now it's afternoon and I still feel like I have a heap of work to deal with. Sigh.

At least there was Kirschenmichel for lunch, and it was delicious. (That's a kind of casserole with old bread, cherries, and a bit of cinnamon.) There was tea, too. And there might be some chocolate in my near future... at least my choc sense is tingling.

Out of curiosity - are quick self-tests for the Corona virus easily available where you are? And how much are they? In Germany, they are available in pharmacies and drugstores, and generally very cheap (as in one Euro or less), as there's also the possibility to get tested for free with a quick-test in test centres... but I guess that is not the case everywhere?

 

Things that happened today: Pre-packing for the European Textile Forum (as in "making heaps of things that need to come along, and have to be packed into boxes or directly into the car in the next few days"); cuddling the cat (that's a daily must), work on the NESAT conference presentation; emails regarding the in-prep or running projects, and a tiny little bit of new website work stuff was snuck in as well.

I've also been packing things and printing out stuff - instruction sheets to go with spindles, and distaffs, and distaff kits. And I have realised that it's time to get a new printer... because the old one is acting up even more than usually.

Usually, it must be said, it's only doing small annoying things. Though it has recently refused to re-calibrate decently, and that is definitely a bad thing, especially for printouts sent to customers (which should look nice and clean)... Unfortunately there is no way to properly or manually re-calibrate the thing; there may have been, we dimly remember some possibility to calibrate a printer, but that was years and about 3 Windows issues ago. Yes, the printer is at least 15 years old.

The really sad thing is that it's still working nicely apart from the calibration issue, so if that could be fixed... but it looks like it can't.

So. Add "get informed about current printer options" to the list of things to deal with. Though that will definitely not happen until after the summer break and then some. There's never a good time for things like this to happen, but right at the moment, it's really not something I can squeeze in on top of the other things that need to happen and have an actual deadline... Ideally, the outcome of the "get informed" then will be a new printer that's decently eco-friendly, does not cost an arm and a leg, and will last a long while. And if any of you have a hint in that general direction, please let me know!

I'm very much looking forward to Sunday - which is when I will do the first online version of my workshop about medieval seams and stitches. It is an intro workshop resulting in a nice little sampler cloth, showing the most usual stitches and some seam and hem variations. It can serve, later, as a help to decide which seam to use, or which kind of hem or neatening will work best.

In the previous courses, I always brought along a few write-on-cloth pens and some extra linen fabric or bands for labels with the stitch names. But since that is not an option for an online class, there's been an upgrade:



Properly woven, nice neat labels for the stitch types.

These were done in a German manufacture on band looms, and they are in organic cotton. If you are looking for labels for something - maybe "handmade by ..." or with your name woven in, or with whatever other text, I can absolutely recommend Bandetikettenweberei Max Windrath, with their absolutely fabulous customer service. (Some of my labels got lost in the post, and the replacement arrived here lightning-fast.)

There's been some more behind-the-scenes website wrangling, though that was not quite successful. (If you've run across broken image links in the blog - I'm working on it, they will be fixed soon. This is a side effect of me getting rid of the many, many extra images that Wordpress generates when media is uploaded... which cluttered up my webspace.)

I hope the other issue, which regards the new site and especially its template (sigh...) will get better with some support... and now I'm really looking forward to the weekend.

Which promises to be quite sunny, and nice, and warm.

There also was some spinning! Here's the results:


One very nice skein of dark, rather shiny yarn, which was a joy to spin up. As opposed to the "fun" spinning I'm currently doing with some mystery fibre (well, I know it's wool, but I forgot exactly which kind) which has a lot of crimp, and somehow does not please me at all to work with. I'll stick with it some more, though, so that we can have some yarn for the Textile Forum to play with.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I a) do own a car (or, to be really correct, I own my own company, and said company owns a car, and that b) I am very fond of cycling, and will try to use the bike or public transport instead of driving whenever possible.

Car vs. Bike is, to my constant consternation, a very emotionally heated debate here in Germany. I really don't understand this - and I guess quite a lot of it is due to some anti-green propaganda. But let me explain this a bit better.

It's quite typical that, if somebody says "people could take the bike to do that" or "bikes are more sustainable than cars", someone else cries out "but you cannot forbid people to use the car, not everyone can be car-free" or "but bikes are not suitable to transport heavy goods or multiple people". Basically, what happens is the implication that everyone who is pro-bicycle, or mentions benefits from bikes wants everyone to instantly ditch their car and go by bike everywhere and for everything, no matter what.

This is definitely not true, but it happens all the time, and it's not making the situation better.

I grew up in a small town at the end of nowhere, and everybody there used the car for about everything. Children rode bikes, but as soon as you turned 17, you'd register for driving school, and you'd typically get your license on your 18th birthday (the earliest point possible back then), and then you had mobility, and freedom, and many of my peers also had their first own car then, or got use of the family car. My home town is not very bike-friendly regarding the streets, and it's a bit hilly, but both things are also not very bad, so it would be perfectly possible to cycle more than is usual there. On the other hand, there used to be next to no public transport (which has not changed much) - so for any visits to neighbouring villages or towns, you'd need a car.

Today, I live in a bike-friendly city, and we're doing all of our everyday stuff by bike. There's also decent public transport, which allows to take bikes along in the metro trains so you can use your own transport for the last mile. However, there's still the car - and I need that for going to fairs and markets, because there's just no way that I could transport all the things necessary to set up a booth in public transport. Exceptions apply, such as when I went to Dublin for WorldCon - though I had most of the booth logistics supplied by the con there. If you have to bring your own tables and seats like for most fairs, that's just straight out not possible.

So. I am fully aware of the benefits of a car - but I'm also aware of their drawbacks. Personally, I think that bikes are the best thing for mobility in many cases, and many circumstances. They are resource-friendly (and even an e-bike uses much less material and energy than a car), they keep you healthy, they are quiet and don't take up much space, it's easy to find a parking space for them just where you want to go, and for short to medium distances in daily life, especially in towns, they are faster than a car. Even for the 10-something kilometers to our regular bouldering place, it takes us just as long to go by car as it does by bike! Yes, they have limited transport capacity (though it's amazing what you can pack on if you have a bit of practise), and they do not protect you from the weather (unless you have a velomobile), but these are things where there's still the option to take a car. (Or lend a cargo bike.)

Nobody of the sane people promoting the bike as a very good option for personal transport wants everyone to stop using cars right now. All that we want is for more people to consider cycling (or walking) instead of hopping into the car more often, because every little bit helps. So it makes me very sad when the response to "more cycling" is an automatic "bikes cannot solve everything!!!!11!!". No, they cannot, but neither can cars.

And then there's e-bike bashing, too. Yes, they take more resources to make than a non-electrified bike. There's also the people looking down their noses at e-bikers, because apparently, in their minds, if you need the motor, you are a lesser person. WTF? If an e-bike means there will be more cycling instead of car driving, I'm all, all for it. I don't care for the reason that someone adds a motor to a bike, whether it's laziness or unfitness or some other physical condition or the fact that it's just more fun to go supported or the need to get somewhere reliably quickly without breaking a sweat or the desire to ride on the latest fad wave or the fact that the friends in the cycling group all have an e-bike and there's no way to keep up without one - any reason is valid. And any kilometer done by bike, whether e or not, whether it's to replace a car trip or it's a fun ride just for cycling's sake, is a good thing.

I'm done with my rant for now... but I'm curious: Have you encountered that "you want to forbid everything! go away"-phenomenon, too? Regarding cycles, or something that a green party said or promoted, where you are? And what's your opinion on the bike-vs-car thing? Let me know in the comments...

In the context of all the website-looking and preparing updates, I've also installed a link checker on the blog. And, lo and behold, it has found broken links... quite a lot of them, actually.

About three hundred of them.

It makes me realise, once more, how short-lived quite a lot of things on the 'net are. Some of the links were easily fixed (old, abandoned blogspot profiles, for instance - I just unlinked them); some others pointed to sites that don't exist anymore but have an wayback archive link, which could be used. Finally, some are just going nowhere and there's no record of anything anymore.

This blog has been running since 2008, so it's a small wonder not all links are working anymore. Also, being around like this time here on the net, somehow I feel like that makes me a weirdly ancient something. It's a nice feeling, on the other hand, to be a weirdly ancient something still going on, and still there, and still blogging!

When I started out with my first steps on the 'net, with a little private homepage on Geocities, it was coding html by hand in a text editor. After starting pallia as a company, I did my website by hand as well. At that point, frames came up as the newest hot shit on the block.

Then there was the day when I looked for proper shop software, and found Joomla!, and consequently used that as well. That was also the point in time when I stopped doing everything myself, and instead relied on templates by others. I can sort of do CSS, but have never really practised it; I understand a tiny little bit of how php scripts work, but that's it, and I'm not up to writing anything from scratch anymore, and haven't been for a very long time.

Then the time came for the relaunch of blog, website, and shop all in one... then, a few years ago now, the big migration from one version of Joomla! to the next one, and soon that is going to happen again.

Things certainly stay interesting that way. And though it's a lot of work, and eats up quite some time, I'm still fairly happy with being my own IT department. After all, it means I have a good overview of what is up on my webspace, and lets me fix some things easily and quickly. Plus, admittedly, I think a lot of it is fun work too!

 

There's another EXARC textile chat on Saturday, July 24 - topic this time is "Unusual Materials". So if you're interested in uncommon or weird materials for all kinds of textile techniques, join in and bring your stories and pictures!

As usual, the chat will take place on Discord in the afternoon (starting 15:00 CET). You can find more information and the link to the Discord channel here on the EXARC page.