It's hard to believe that it's blogiversary day again, and that this blog is now another year older. I'd never have imagined that it would stay an almost (work-)daily part of my life for so long when I started it back in... let me check... 2008.

So - happy 12th birthday, Blog! There might be some bit of celebratory cake this afternoon here, because any excuse is good for having cake. This certainly counts as one. And you, as a reader of this, are obviously also provided a reason to have cake, too. Having to celebrate this blogiversary, and so on.

So... thank you for reading, and for commenting here! It is always delightful to get comments, to know that the things here are being read and that some of them are proving useful.

By the way - do you have any favourite birthday cake recommendations?

 

We have three doors in our home that have a glass inset, and they are each decorated with a coat of arms. When we moved in, we were told that these had some meaning for the family who built the house and lived here in the first place, but we never looked into it more.

This weekend, after being told that one is the coat of arms of Cologne City, we had a little rootle to try and find out more about the others. It was interesting, even though we remained unsuccessful - it's not so easy to look for specific arms when you don't know how to describe them, and even then it can get complicated.

I've always been half-amused and half-fascinated about the special language of description used when talking about coats of arms. Colours are not red and blue, but gules and azure; there's rules about using metal (white or yellow) and colours on each other; there's bits that are to be included in the description, as they are relevant for telling one variation from another, and bits that are down to artistic license. So I know enough about heraldry to know I don't know much at all - and not sufficient to use portals and search engines to track what we have on these doors.

If you'd like to have a look at some coats, you can do so in the wappenwiki.org, which lists coats of arms from Europe and beyond, starting from those dating back to 1100. It does not have the blazons, unfortunately.

An introduction in the different colours, arrangements, and motifs can be found here. More about the art of describing, also called blazoning, is offered on the website of the Heraldry Society.

There's a bunch more pages, and registers, and databases on the 'net. Enjoy the rabbit hole!

The weekend is coming (how nice!), after winter has already come here; we've had first snow this week, and most of it, to my surprise and delight, has actually not molten away yet, but stayed.

Otherwise, this week has been one of those where you do lots of small things and afterwards have the impression of having achieved nothing at all, which makes for an annoying feeling... and a non-shrunken to-do-list, of course!

So I'm feeling half exasperated that the weekend is almost here already and half delighted that it is. And while I'm trying to decide what feeling will win, here's a link for you: Go check out historicaltextiles.org as there is, like every year, a wonderful textile advent calendar with a photo of a historical textile every day!

 

I've posted before about the slightly weird chili plants that I have this year. They are still alive, and faring fairly well, even though it has gotten quite cold now. We don't heat the winter garden, so it's below 10° C in there now, and can drop down to about 3-4 ° C. That is approximately the lowest temperature that tomato plants will endure, and chilis don't like it much colder either, so there is not much growing or blooming going on there right now. With one exception - my physalis plant is flowering; it starts in autumn or early winter, and goes on flowering basically all through winter here.



With the chilis, there is slow but steady ripening of the fruits. Which means interesting colour changes in the interesting chilis:



They will eventually turn all red, but at the moment, I am totally enjoying this multi-coloured effect.

There's still some activity other than slow ripening, by the way - one stalwart fly is living in the winter garden and visits the flowers when it's sunny and thus a bit warmer. And something else is apparently also active, as evidenced by this:



Chili plant leaves, it seems, are tasty for someone!

Our little cat is growing older, and she's getting a bit more lazy every year. For her age (which is probably around 20, though it's not really known, as she was abandoned and brought to the shelter) she's still quite fit - but signs of feline aging are noticeable now. For instance, she's drooling more, the tips of her fangs are often slightly visible, and her claws are more audible when she walks, as they are not retracted fully all the time.

Also, her fur seems to be slightly lighter and more greyish. Most noticeable of all, though: her whiskers, which used to be all black once upon a time, have turned snow-white, with the exception of one or two last dark ones.



The "aaaawww"-factor when she's sleeping, though? Absolutely and utterly undiminished.

I have a number of Instagram feeds that I follow, among them several to help me in my language learning. The by far squee-worthiest of them is learnfinnishwithmoomin (which is exactly what you'd expect from that name: Muumi doing things in Finnish).

Two days ago, it was announced that Muumi will write some Christmas cards and send them off to people not in Finland, which is an utterly wonderful idea. I will shamelessly steal it, even though I don't have a cute Muumi plush figure to present the cards, or write them (I'm pretty sure that even though Madame the Cat has graciously allowed me to place some cards with her during her nap, she'll not be any help whatsoever in writing them).



Anyways. If you'd like to get a Christmas (or Season's Greetings, if you prefer it non-religiously branded) card from me: I will send out up to ten cards to anywhere in the world. Let me know by email or in the comments if you're interested!

(If there's more than ten requests, I will do a raffle on Friday and then contact the people who'll get a card for their address.)

It's time for a link onslaught again - there's way too many tabs open here with things that are hopefully interesting for you, too!

If you understand German, here's a hilarious video about the (not-so-hilarious) ongoing debate in the EU parliament about the budget. It will be... interesting to see how this will end. I do hope that the 25 states who have not vetoed will not give in; that would not only be a bad thing but also the wrong signal for all bullies.

If you live in Germany and share my feeling that there's not enough happening to slow down the climate change, you can sign a petition for the Bayerischer Landtag asking for a greener distribution of funds. Here's the text of the petition, and here's where you can sign.

In case French in Medieval England (and learning it) sounds intriguing to you, take a look at this site, which is about the "Tretiz". There's also a Twitter account to go with it.

More old manuscripts, all digitised, can be found in the Virtual Library of Lauresham. The monastery in Lorsch once, in the Middle Ages, had a large number of books and was quite famous. It's not possible to bring the books back to Lorsch in reality, due to a number of reasons, but digitisation of manuscripts allows a virtual reconstruction of the medieval library - which is free to access.

And now on to some other, more textile-y stuff: There's a Research Center for Medieval Nubia, and it has an online textiles database. There's also an interesting article about textile analysis on the page, in case you're not familiar with this and would like to read an introduction.

More textile stuff: Eventbrite has tickets for several events by the Gawthorpe Textile Collection, taking place as online presentations. You can get insights into the collection for a very affordable 5 GBP per ticket, and the money goes right back to the collections, helping to keep them alive.

Are you a medievalist, and on your own? You might want to check out The Lone Medievalist, which is committed to support those of us not within a local academic network of medievalists, and help form a network.

And finally, if you're using graphs in any form or way, or colour-code things - here's an article about how to choose colours that will let your work be readable to colour-blind people as well. There's not only an explanation about what colourblindness is, and how it happens, but there's also graphics showing what the effects are (as in this is how the colour scale looks with condition X or Y).

That's it for now - hope there's something for you in the list!