It's time again - for tick season! I just took care of one crawling on my foot after being in the garden for a short spell, and the cat has had a few already.

So here's your yearly reminder: If you are living in, or planning to travel to, a tick-infested region, go check if your vaccination against tick-borne meningoencephalitis is still up to date, and get it refreshed if it isn't.

Typical recommendations to avoid tick bites are to wear long trousers when outside in taller grasses or the forest, and check your body afterwards for any unwanted, unpaying temporary eight-legged appendages. Remove them with tweezers, or a special removal tool. We've tried a number of different tools over the years, and the best we've found is a tick removal lasso. Ours are from a Swedish company and called 3iX; they work much better than normal tweezers or even the special tick-removal tweezers. Sometimes you also find cards with slits sold as tick removal tools; I never got those to work on human skin, much less on cats with all the fur in the way. The lasso tool (Zeckenschlinge, for the German speakers here) does an equally good job on humans and animals, and works for all sizes of ticks, even the really tiny ones.

If you want to make sure the tick goes dead, you will need to squash it, cut it apart, pour boiling water over it, or burn it. It will happily survive being washed down the drain. (I wrote more about that here.)

I hope you'll have a good season with no tick bites!

There's been some looking at files, and more looking at files, and comparing, and downloading old versions. There was me, thinking I had an idea about where to search for whatever would fix the issue.

The issue was the following: I could install a new theme for the blog without trouble, and I actually managed to find one rather quickly that a) displays comments and b) does not look horrendous (and actually took most of the existing style things without me making it first). However, the menus for navigation, both at the top and at the side, were missing, and I could not find out how to get them in.

The solution was delivered, like so often, by the Most Patient Husband of Them All - who listened to my complaints and then asked some questions which led to me testing something just to make sure it would look one way, as I expected - and promptly finding that it did not, thusly pinpointing where I'd need to look and what for.

Turns out that you have to list the theme as one of the allowed themes in a php file in the Joomla! component... and that's actually all you have to do. It's literally add one single line in the right file, and all is set to go.

Well, there was a little bit more fiddling with the looks in one or two bits, but for the main issue - that was the thing. So I could have gotten away without looking at all the files. In theory, because finding that the solution was not in them was necessary for the searching in the correct spot.

Anyways - you should now be able to see the comments again, and hopefully see the blog nicely and properly displayed. If it's not, please do let me know about the issues, so I can try to fix them!

Here's an update on all the things happening here:

First of all, the blog/comment issue. I may have found the culprit - it seems it has something to do with the blog template. How that could have changed from working without trouble to refusing to show comments, well, I have no inkling of the hint of a clue of an idea... but it means I can start to look into it with something like a bit more of a direction. The quick fix for this might be to install a different template for the time being, but that would look completely different to the rest of the site, and the one I tried this morning for a few minutes was... um... let's just say I found it not aesthetically pleasing or easy to use at all.

Secondly, the online spinning workshop - my plan is to include a spinning kit consisting of a dressed distaff and a spindle with whorl in the price for the workshop, and send these out beforehand. That way, everyone will have the same tools and materials, and we can all start on the same spot. This might not be the best option for courses abroad, but it's certainly something for Germany... and the international shipping option might be the DIY distaff kit, plus fibre, and then my spinners will have to dress the distaff themselves. I'll look into that some more - first course will be in German, and I'll fix a date and put it into the shop in the next few days.

Before that, though, I have to finalise and send off the two pieces I've been writing for two museums - both are materials for internal use, to help with setting up an exhibition or with museum projects. Usually the museum assistance things I write are directly connected to a reconstruction that I'm making for them, so it actually feels a bit weird to hand in "just" a written thing, and no actual goods in connection with them. If all goes well, I'll be finished with one of them before the weekend comes - at least that's my plan. Let's see how well it fares when it has to face reality.

Finally, for you to see you off into the weekend, some garden pictures - because there's also nice things going on there. There's still tulips blooming, among them this fuzzy-edged one:



To my delight, the first of my new tomato plants has started flowering. If the fruits will be ripe as quickly, and taste nicely as well, I might have a new favourite breed...



To my similarly great delight, the little lemon tree has not only grown a good bit this early spring, and bloomed nicely, it is also hard at work making lemons. This is the first one, and the largest to date.



All the care instructions in the 'net, by the way, say that lemon trees like it rather dry and must not be watered too much. I found that at least this one specimen hates getting too dry; it will roll up its leaves, never to unroll them again. So now it lives in a pot with a water reservoir, I make sure the reservoir is never completely empty - and that seems agreeable to the little tree. Which will, hopefully, provide us with lemons now I've found out what it wants.

I'm having a little bit of a technical issue (thanks for the heads-up, Beatrix) - the comments are currently not showing on the blog.

I have no clue why this happened, and I'm looking into it. The quick-fix attempts have not worked, unfortunately. (These were, just in case you're interested: Checking if the cache plugin is to blame, checking if there is a wordpress plugin that prevents the comments from showing by disabling them all, checking if it's due to the theme by changing to another one.)

This means there might be some deeper issue... which I'll go and hunt for. Unfortunately  If you have been or are commenting (and thank you if you did, it's always great to get feedback): I still get what you are writing, both in the back-end of the site, and as an email, so it's not lost. It is just not showing up currently.

The really weird thing about this is that I can't remember changing or updating anything in the last few days, or in between the comments still showing and them disappearing quietly (and I don't know when, exactly, they did this). So there I will have go, delving deeper into the innards of my site. Wish me luck!

In German, there's the saying "Alles neu macht der Mai" - May makes everything new. Coincidentally, there's a few new things afoot here...

Thing One: Recycling Spindle Whorls! Medieval spindle whorls came in oh so many shapes, forms, sizes and materials... and one of the types was disc-shaped whorls made from broken pottery. This has been on my list for a while now, but finally I've gotten around to getting the tools and the broken pottery to try making them.



These are cut using modern tools, and the material is modern broken pottery. In the best-case scenario, I'll be able to get some potsherds from replica pots in the future... but for now, I think these will do nicely. They weigh somewhere between 11 and 19 g, depending on which pot they came from, and which part of the pot... and I confess that I'm utterly delighted by those.

They have been tested first thing, of course:



I find them a bit too light for starting off an empty spindle, but then I am fond of using heavy whorls for that. They do run beautifully on a half-filled spindle, though!

I'll be making a few more the next days, and then they will find their way into the shop as well.

Thing Two: I've finally decided to take the plunge and try online teaching. I've done in-person courses only up to now, and I do think it's so, so helpful to be able to touch and feel things and not just see them, but with the pandemic going on and on, I'm starting to think that half the deal is better than nothing. So now I'm planning an online spinning course... I am still trying to figure out a few details, but it will be about 2 hours, showing how to spin with hand-spindle and distaff. My biggest question at the moment is how to make sure that every participant has suitable tools and materials - in my in-person courses, I just bring a bunch of distaffs and a pile of spindle whorls so everyone can pick one to use during the course, and then either buy afterwards or toss them back to me. That is not so easy when teaching over distance, of course. Unfortunately, many modern spindles will have rotational properties that don't work well with the distaff spinning style. So... do I send out kits as part of the course? Or do I just offer them as an option, with the possible danger of someone participating with entirely unsuitable tools?

If you're interested in a spinning course, feel free to drop me an email, or comment here - and once I've figured out the rest of the open questions, you will also be able to find info in the shop in the workshops/courses section.

It's May the Fourth, so may the fourth be with you!

Yes, it's a bad one, and it's not getting better from year to year. But since I'm a sucker for bad puns, and good ones, and especially ones that are so bad they are coming around again to emerge on the good side... I still enjoy it.

In that vibe, here's the good old Grocery Store Wars video, because it's Star Wars-related, and it's punny, and I really enjoy it. Also, sadly, even though this video is quite old by now... it's still current.


We're still having trouble with pesticide use (killing off our insects); there's a lot of unsustainable farming practise, including fish farming. Mind you, I don't think that just buying organic food is the golden solution - I'd guess it is more sustainable to buy a locally grown cucumber that has been commercially produced by a farmer using fertiliser and other agricultural chemicals responsibly, than to buy an organic avocado from Peru. Lots of organically grown things also come in plastic packaging, including fruit and vegetables - also not the best thing for our environment.

So personally, I try to buy food that is locally grown and unpackaged, bringing my own containers to the shop or market. Bonus if it's organic, but local and unpackaged actually has higher priority on my list; we basically only buy things from outside the region if it's something that cannot be grown here, such as bananas and oranges.

Next best is re-useable packaging - deposit glass jars, for instance. Next best: paper or paper-based, plastic-free packaging material. Following this are one-way glass jars, which we re-use in our own household for storage of stuff we buy unpackaged, or for canning our own things. Home-made convenience food does have its own charm.

We're thus down to buying or consuming very little plastic packaging these days. A lot of things only come in plastic packaging, and there is an easy solution for most of these, for us: We just don't buy them. On closer inspection, most of these, for us, can be replaced by something equally delicious that has no plastic wrapper, or we can make it ourselves. (Mascarpone is one of these. Tortilla chips have been successfully produced here. It has the side effect of actually appreciating treats a lot more.)

Meat and fish are the really difficult bits here, especially with the additional hygiene rules implemented by a lot of shops due to the Corona thing. To our great delight, we've recently discovered a small farm shop that makes it possible to bring our own containers, so the meat problem is more or less solved. It means we'll eat what kind of meat they had - but since most of my meal planning goes "Let's see what we get at the market, and then we'll make it work somehow", that has not brought much of a change.   Fish, though... there's one local fish farmer on the Saturday market, and he has lovely fish, but it's all plastic packaged.  So we've reduced the amount of fish consumed, and are keeping our eyes open to find some alternative where we can get unpackaged fresh fish.

It's a journey. It makes some things harder, and it means not eating a lot of things because they are out of season, or only available in plastic - but on the other hand, the same thing makes life easier in a way, as well. If it's clear that something will not be bought due to reason X, Y, or Z, that makes shopping decisions quite a bit faster... and seasonal things a lot more awaited, and appreciated.

So. Use the fork, Luke. Use it wisely. And if you suddenly find yourself in a quite different movie: Choose wisely.

Botanica Yarnfest this weekend was a lot of fun, and I found out, once again, that I get quite, quite nervous before doing an online livestream demo thingie. It's worse than doing  a real-life demo somehow, even though there are no people present. Probably because there are no people present... there's just no feedback whatsoever, nobody sitting down and waiting for you to start, no room vibes to be read and acted upon. I find I actually prefer having a bunch of people look at me and being able to look back instead of having just that tiny little screen showing myself, so I can make sure I'm not running out of the picture.

Anyway, I did my demo, there were a few questions, I had some fun, and I did get some very nice feedback afterwards. I also managed to download the whole thing to my phone (which did the filming). It was not possible to re-post it to my own Instagram account, though; apparently that is only supported for videos up to 15 minutes, and mine is a bit over 30.

But there's youtube... so here you go, in case you'd like to see it: My demo of medieval spinning, with all the funny "big nose" camera effects that you get when you go close to the camera, and the weird portrait screen ratio helpfully provided by my phone.