Somehow, IT maintenance stuff can become an incredible black hole for time and brain power. It certainly is nibbling on mine, and more than its fair share!

There is some need for a good, solid overhauling of the webshop and site, unfortunately. Things have gotten rather, um, spacious... as in the many images in use in the blog, and the website, are taking up quite a bit of space.

There's also been more and more issues with the shop not working properly recently, and there will be a new version of Joomla!, the platform that this whole shebang here runs on, in the foreseeable future. That means I'll need a few new things for the site (among them a new look, as the old template is not compatible with the new version, or at least that's how it looks).

So there's been some searching, and some installing and trying out things, and so on. It will stay quite, quite interesting, I'm afraid.

I also found out that there is a heap of broken links in this blog - small wonder, it's been running for so long that a lot of the sites and pages I have linked to in the past went out of business ages ago!

But since I'll change things around anyways, now is your chance to tell me if there's anything you'd like to have different in the future. Is there something missing on my website? Is there anything that does not work for you, or works really well?

If you're watching the news, you have probably seen images from the regions of Germany currently being flooded. It's really, really bad - I am very lucky, living in an area that has not had such heavy rains. Our house is not especially flood-prone either, it's on a little hillock, sort of.

In those other areas, though... oh my goodness. Houses have been destroyed, and there's been a good number of deaths as well, plus there's missing persons, and issues with drinking water supplies - plus, of course, issues with electricity and gas supply. Some areas are cut off by floods.

Like one newspaper wrote, it's a shock, but it does not come entirely as a surprise. We've had changes in weather over the last years, with winters getting warmer and summers getting unpredictably hot, or wet. Climate scientists have warned for years that things like this will happen, and will happen more frequently.

What I really, really find shocking (though, unfortunately, also not surprising) is that one of the candidates for becoming chancellor in September actually said that, "well, because of this one single day, you do not change politics". That was when he was asked if he really thinks brown coal mining should not be stopped sooner than planned, in the light of the obvious consequences of climate change...

What? WHAT? Well, if that single day does not make you think, what will? By the way, that guy is the same person who said that "we have to act sooner, and do more, to counter climate change". Erm. Your party is the one who has been at the rudder these last 16 years, and it's also the one that has blocked many, many ventures to become carbon-neutral and more climate-friendly faster.

We have no children, and honestly, in times like these? I'm really, really glad we made that decision. For all those that did have children, though... I very much hope that a lot of people see that we need a change in the ruling party, and we need it now, and towards one that will take our situation seriously and actually do things to slow down the climate catastrophe.

It's taken a good, long, loooong while - but I am getting rigid heddles into the shop now. Lovely, very nice rigid heddles, made from local, sustainably produced wood, in a German workshop.

[caption id="attachment_6181" align="alignnone" width="506"] Maple wood on top, cherry wood on the bottom.


They are decently small with about 15.5 on 10 cm, and have 24 slits and 23 holes, which makes them wide enough for a nice, broad band.

I can get them in cherry or maple wood... and will probably stock both kinds. I'm all excited!

One of the things that become hard to buy if you want to buy them plastic-free? Ice cream. Which is a pity, since I love ice cream. (Though this year, the everlasting, returning-daily rain has somehow curbed that craving a bit.)

We bought an ice maker gadget a few years ago, to be able to make our own ice cream, so the solution to plastic-free ice cream was already at hand. The problem? Finding really good recipes.

Especially for that staple of ice creams: Vanilla. Most recipes you find are really, really heavy on cream and egg yolks, and I plain refuse to use 6 egg yolks for a 6-person serving of vanilla ice cream. (Egg yolks, fat, and sugar are all ingredients that make the ice cream creamy, so much of them will make much creaminess.)

I thus went and tried something with just a bit of this, and that, and it actually turned out fantastic - it's not freezing up rock-solid, it's sweet but not too sweet, and it tastes a lot of vanilla. So here you go:

13 g vanilla sugar (homemade, it's a mix of 9 parts sugar and 1 part vanilla)
400 ml milk (full-fat)

Stir vanilla sugar into the milk and bring to a boil; simmer gently for a few minutes to bring out the vanilla taste. Take off the heat, mix in

70 g sugar
12 g cornstarch (stirred into a little bit of water)

and bring to a boil again. Mix in

100 g cream (cold)

- this should cool your mix down to about 70° C; if not, make it so. Then stir in

1 egg yolk

and stir gently until slightly thickened.

Let it all cool off, place into the fridge until it's really cold through, then use your ice maker to make ice cream from this.

And if you do... let me know how you like it!

 

I managed to get into the woods again yesterday, before the mosquitoes came out, and pick some more bilberries. These are just wonderful in a Finnish mustikkaapiirakka (bilberry pie), and I also love them with semolina, or Quarknockerln, or, well, practically anywhere. I was a little late for harvesting last year, but this time around, I caught them.

There's lots and lots of bilberry patches in the wood here, and at some of them they are, actually, rather large. The berries, that is. Still, picking them is a good amount of work and takes its sweet time, so I make it less mind-numbingly boring by listening to stuff on my (always very long) podcast list.

Among yesterday's crop was a story that made me giggle and sigh at the same time. It was one of the best stories I've heard in a while, and you might enjoy it too - so here it is:

A Zest for Life on Starship Sofa, by NRM Roshak.
 

Today was prep for the online workshop on medieval seams and stitches - cutting pieces of cloth for the material kits. Of course I was supervised by Madam the Cat while doing this, before she hopped up onto the sofa, there to nap, followed by some light snoozing and some dozing. Ah, the life of a cat...

I have tweaked the place where the individual bits will go in comparison to my first sampler, which was made just to show the different stitches to people, and got some additions over time.



So it's more orderly now, and a bit better structured, and covers the usual suspects regarding stitches and seams and hems.

The kit will also include labels with the stitch names, which are currently being woven - to my great delight, I was able to find a small bandweaving company who does offer bands in organic cotton in addition to the regular ones. Since I vowed years ago to not support the conventional cotton industry, with its enormous use of water and pesticides, with the accompanying harm to the environment and the workers, that made me very happy.

As soon as the labels arrive, the kits will be finished, packed up and sent off to the workshop participants. And then I'm really looking forward to teaching the seams and stitches again, it's been way too long!

This week has been very full, and very busy, and while there's still a seemingly huge stack of things to do as quickly as possible - such as getting the NESAT presentation all sorted out, and the quarterly tax stuff done, and harvesting the raspberries before they all mould away in the incredibly rainy weather that we have - I have a very nice feeling of having actually accomplished a good bit as well.

Such as finally getting around to cutting some reed, and preparing both new drawing quills and reed cores for winding on thread.



Now they have to dry - and then I can use them as the cores for sewing threads. Or as impromptu shuttles... that, too, has happened more than once already. (I have a tendency to use about anything remotely suitable for winding things on as impromptu shuttles, though...)