Things I did today? Sorting stuff, mostly. There was a new delivery of spindle sticks, which needed to be packed away in suitable boxes; there was some re-stocking of hand spinning kits, and checking the amount of spindle whorls that are left, and some re-organising of different wool kinds, and so on. Most of this is already in preparation of the Nadelkunst, which starts on Friday next week - so I have a few more days to get everything lined up and prepared. There's plenty left to line up and prepare, though, so it's not like I will be running out of work!

Especially not since there are a few other things that need attention, and rather quickly, as they are also on a deadline. That whoosh sound? That's the deadlines approaching... so I'd better get back to writing the email I still need to write, and do all the other things on the list for today. There's a newsletter to get out as well, which is 2/3 finished, thank goodness, but needs a little bit more attention before sending it off.

So if anyone has a few spare hours they don't need - I'd take them!

I managed to totally forget blogging on Friday - there was just too much stuff going on. 

First, I was being very adult-y and sensible and had a doc's appointment to check for skin issues (cancer screening and mole check); I'd gotten some weird light spots in the upper torso area, and I was actually steeling myself for a kind of skin cancer diagnosis when going there. Fortunately, it's just an overactive dermal yeast and almost purely cosmetic, so now I'm quite relieved (and equipped with a cream and a special shampoo to curb the overenthusiasm of that specific yeast). 

After that, circumstances called for a baking spree - I'd promised a cake as a birthday present. A Snickers cake, to be precise. Which is a concoction consisting of a bit of dough glued together with liberal amounts of buttercream in three different flavours - chocolate, peanut, and caramel. 

Pro tip #1: If you actually buy caramel, and not sweetened condensed milk by accident, you don't need to boil the milk into caramel as an additional step.

Pro tip #2: If you read your notes correctly, you don't leave the cake itself in the oven for double the time necessary. (It was still fine. Phew.) It was a little flatter than I had hoped for, which made cutting it more of a challenge, but I did manage. (It's baked in form of a long rectangle, then cut in half lengthways, then the two halves are halved again with a horizontal cut so you have, in the end, four very thin and long pieces of dough. When fully assembled with the buttercream layers inbetween, you get something more or less with the proportions of a snickers bar. Which, by the way, will not fit on a standard long cake platter as it is, you guessed it, too long.)

Pro tip #3: If you try to mix double the amount of custard into the butter, you will kill the buttercream. (It's a water-in-fat emulsion, and it can only take so much of the water phase before it flips and "curdles".) If you don't realise what you are doing, you will manage to do that twice.

Which leads me to pro tip #4: Don't take skimpy notes, write things down properly. There's no guarantee you will really re-bake the cake after a short time, still remembering the bits you did the previous time in detail.

So... I had a bit of trouble getting the cake all done, but in the end, it wasn't more ugly than my regular not-so-much-trouble cakes, and (most importantly) it tasted really nice. Makes a large, very solid cake that is rather easy to transport, but should be cut in slices not more than a centimetre wide, meaning it makes about, oh, 30 and a bit servings? It will also freeze rather well, which is a good thing, as it's rarely all consumed at once!

That cake is also one of the test opportunities for my (still ongoing) quest to find the perfect chocolate buttercream, by the way...

 There was considerable getting sidetracked today - I had planned on getting some different work done, but ah, plans never survive the first contact with the enemy...

The crucial bits got finished, though, and there were (the sidetracking) a few other things that I had planned to do soon, and now have done already. I've even been lucky with the necessary errands, as the weather was rather pleasant while I was running them.

Now it's gone back to grey with a bit of snow... so to counteract that, I give you the rainbow of colours you can see in the Guter Stoff exhibition:

 It's more beautiful in person, of course!

I've finished preparing, practising, and fine-tuning the presentation for Syke tomorrow evening - so all that remains to do in preparation for tomorrow is packing my stuff (including the computer, of course, and the presentation on an extra USB stick, just in case).

Because I was curious, I looked at my time tracker and did the math on how long it actually took me to put together the presentation. It was a nice, fun, and good thing to revisit all the stuff, and to be fair it was an unusual type of presentation because usually I can re-use or adapt already existing slides... but yes, it did eat up quite a few hours.

As a general rule, academic-style presentations get a small monetary honoration. As a second part of that general rule, that is never enough to cover the actual time invested in preparing and practising the presentation - even if you're fairly quick about it. Third part of the general rule: As these presentation invitations usually mean going somewhere to meet colleagues, being able to present your work, and then connecting and discussing and sort of having something like a mini-conference, nobody really minds.

I'm rather happy with the whole thing too, now that it's all prepped and set, and hope the listeners will be, too. 

Also it made me finally put together the individual images of the corded skirt for the panorama picture:

and that, due to some reason, makes me really happy as well.

As I'll be travelling tomorrow and on Friday, there will be blog silence - see you again on Monday!

It's beautiful and sunny and warm outside - spring is definitely coming! The crocuses have started blooming: 

We've almost finished pruning the willow fence, and it's high time for this before the shoots start trying to make leaves. There will be another little pruning session later this afternoon - once I've finished the post stuff, and dealt with the rest of the emails, and finished the other paperworky things that have to be dealt with today.

Sometimes I wonder why there seems to be more desk work on the days with splendid weather...

And now for something completely different: Researchers have found out details about how corpses in Egypt were mummified. There was a number of substances used, in specific mixtures for specific parts, and we now know this due to the discovery of an embalming workshop in Saqqara, dating to the 26th dynasty.

You can read more about it in this Open Access article at nature.com, or if you prefer a short German summary, here is one.  

(I think I'd still prefer to get buried in a grave mound instead of getting mummified and put into a pyramid...)

I'm one of the many, many fans of Jane Austen's works. I can't really say what makes her books so fascinating to me (well, apart from Emma, which does exactly what the author intended it to do, that is get on my nerves via the insufferable protagonist). Is it the glimpse into a world of the past, but not so far in the past that there's too much conjecture? The slightly different etiquette and societal rules? Or the fact that, in the end, it's straight-up lovely happy-endy chick lit, and thus just a read that's good for the soul?

In the end, it doesn't really matter. I've read Pride and Prejudice, which is my favourite of her books, more times than I remember to count, and we have several versions of it as a film, and those do get viewed again and again too. 

If you like Jane Austen stuff, maybe this video about some of her surviving letters, showing a glimpse of her personal life, will delight you as well: