Three things I've recently discovered:

There's a project called Thefbo, looking at the textile crafts from prehistory at Lake Constance and Upper Swabia. They even have a blog, in German and English, so you can have a look at what they are up to (which included some retting of linden bast fibres last year).

Also having a blog: Stadtarchäologie Wien (Vienna City Archaeology) - this one's only in German, though. Clicking the link will bring you directly to an article about a woven band (with metal threads).

Third thing, having nothing to do with textiles: There's a website called toogoodtogo.com, and the people behind it would like to reduce the food waste that happens, on a very regular basis, in restaurants, bakeries, and food shops. Basically, you can sign up and then buy a packet of leftover food using the corresponding app for your phone; you pay a small amount of money (which means this reduces the loss the business makes) and get food that is too good to go to waste for rather little money. I've not tested this (yet!), but find it a brilliant idea. After all, this way, everybody wins - the environment, because there's less waste; the business, as they make less loss; and the customer, as they get a surprise food package for a good price. Toogoodtogo is available in several countries; you can check out if yours is among them on their website.

At the start of last year, I realised it would be a really interesting thing to keep track of what means of transport I'd use how much over the course of a year. So we hung up a sheet of paper on which we'd jot down train rides, public transport rides, and, in my case, the two flights I've taken. Bike kilometres were tracked via the odometers, and the car, of course, has its own odometer, with the start-of-year number duly noted anyways due to tax reasons.

So here's the full rundown of my travelled distances for 2019.

Winner, by far, is the long-distance train, with a sound 7845 km done. Longest individual train rides were the one to London for the MEDATS study day (about 1000 km one way) and my train ride to Leiden, where I had to take a detour to catch the sleeper train in Passau - this, together, amounted to about 1126 km to get there. Back was only 672 km, without the detour.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4UK2Suojta/

Public transport trains in our vicinity add another 630 km to the train bill - so altogether with these, my train distance is 8475 km. (I calculated the train kilometres through brouter.de, which is a routing/distance calculator website based on the Open StreetMap, using the train option. I did not make sure that this was the exact route that I did take with the trains apart from the one very interesting one to Leiden, so numbers may have been a bit different in reality - it should work out about correctly overall, though.)

Second in line is the car - with 6621 km travelled. This is both the distances done for job reasons (3803 km) and those for private reasons (2818 km). When travelling for job purposes, I'm usually alone in the car, but it is full of stuff; when travelling for personal reasons, we're usually at least two people in the car, and we do try to fill up the car if possible.

Third in the list is the bicycle - though this is my main daily means of transport (together with just walking for the very short distances). It's only shorter distances, though, usually between 3 and 10 km one way, so it does not sum up as quickly as the things done by train or car. (If it's a longer distance, we often do a combination of public transport and bicycle, which is at least as fast as the car in many cases, and usually cheaper.) I rode my recumbent for 422 km last year, and did 2408 km on the tandem together with the Most Patient Husband of Them All - so 2830 km. (Probably a few more, since I sometimes forget the odometer, or it doesn't register things at first because the spoke magnet has been turned out of position.)

2341 km were done by plane - that was my WorldCon trip to Dublin and back. (Probably a bit more, since that is the direct distance between start and end points, but I could not find any way to calculate the actual flight path distances. It will have to do.) Travelling there by other means would have added about 5 to 6 days to that venture, and that was not possible time-wise for me, so I did opt for the plane.

Here's the list again, in short:

8475 km - trains (long-distance and public transport trains)
6621 km - car (both work-related and private)
2830 km - bicycle
2341 km - plane

So I did 1.7 times the distance using train and bike than I did with the car, and more kilometres per bike than with the plane. There's still some room for improvement, obviously - but I'm quite happy with the train quota for work stuff that I managed this year, considering that I do usually have to haul quite a bit of things when travelling for work.

I can say that apart from being really interesting, jotting down the kilometres done via public transport actually made me try a little harder to go by train if possible. The part where I think would be the most wiggle room for some improvement are the distances done in the car for private reasons; maybe that can be a little less in 2020. There's currently no flight planned for the coming year, too, but a long and adventurous train ride, so I'm already looking forward to find out how the numbers will stand at the end of this year.

So - would you like to join me in the project? I'd be curious to hear about your numbers in 12 months!

Just in case, now that the time of manger scenes is approaching, you'd like to take a look at some impressive bovines, you might want to click your way over to the Auerrind-Projekt. It's a try to backbreed to the wild Auerochs which went the way of the Dodo in the 17th century.

Though what is lost stays lost, trying to re-breed to a wild form is a way of trying to get more diversity in species - something which is always a good thing. The Auerrind-Projekt is also part of the larger project "Rewilding Europe", which is aiming to conserve and promote animal wildlife across Europe - and their site is also worth checking out, not only for the spectacular pictures of wild animals.

I like to travel. I especially like to travel by train - there are comfy seats, you can eat and drink and read or work or knit. There's no pesky security check circus where you have to empty all your liquid containers, there's no arriving at least an hour before your transport actually leaves, and it's much more friendly to the environment.

Yes, it can be a tad nerve-wracking if a train has a delay, but so can a plane. Or a car.

I've recently had the pleasure of being invited to a conference in Leiden, and I was utterly delighted to find that I can travel there with a night train. It did take some creative routing (I'm first going south-east, to catch the night train at a sensible place and time, before heading north-west in it), but it turned out to be both cheaper than a flight and, for me, train journeys are always more pleasant and relaxing. So I will be sleeping while magically being transferred from Passau to Düsseldorf...

Years ago, I already used the night train to get to Copenhagen, and that was a wonderful way to travel. So I was devastated when the Deutsche Bahn gave up their night trains; now I've found that the ÖBB (the Austrian train service) does run their NightJet across quite a bit of Germany as well. And then I found that there are, indeed, quite a lot of night trains running in Europe. So maybe, maybe I'll be able to turn the trip to NESAT in Finland next year into a train trip with a daytime stopover to visit one or two of the northern cities...

If you're curious now, here's some resources:

The Man in Seat 61 is an info site about train travels in Britain and Europe;
Night Trains has information about the various routes, and most importantly a map of current night train connections;
for those of you reading German, there's a blog called Train Tracks that offers hints and info on train travel, and some info about night trains;
and finally you can also use the Interrail Website to find out about night trains in all of Europe.

By the way, I've read a few weeks ago that the Deutsche Bahn is actually considering to re-introduce the night trains... which would be glorious!

Recently, I've recommended the travel mug I'm using to someone else. Again. Then I started wondering since when I've been lugging mine around... and today I've finally looked it up.

[caption id="attachment_4848" align="alignnone" width="326"] The battered trusty mug. 


I bought this mug back in fall of 2012, when it was much more shiny and only available in this one single colour, at least at the place I bought it. I wasn't too excited about the brown, but really excited about the promises that came in the description: stainless steel (so very sturdy), large capacity, completely leakproof, and holding beverages hot for a really long time. Especially the completely leakproof was something I had been looking for.

It cost me 45 Euro back then, and I did think hard about whether I wanted to spend so much money on a travel mug - but then, the plastic to-go mugs I had before hadn't been leakproof, and they had given up rather quickly, and they had a theoretical insulation (being double-walled) which was not very good.

So I did buy it. And I used it a lot - when travelling, of course, but also at home when I wanted a large coffee that would keep hot for a long time. The lid gave out in 2015; I got a replacement lid with very little hassle and for about 8 Euro from the German main distributor.

I've been totally happy with this thing ever since I got it. The lid can be a little finicky to clean if you're having milky beverages, but rinsing it out as soon as possible, using a brush or a toothbrush to get into the crevices, and occasionally taking it apart and bathing it in hot water with soda added will keep it nice and eliminate all traces of sour-milk odour, should the dire thing have happened. I'll usually fill it with coffee at home when I am travelling to have it on the road, and when I need a second one (or when I'm not starting from home), it doesn't only eliminate the need for a disposable cup, it also keeps my drink hot for long times. Since I tend to stretch out my coffee-drinking, that counts as a rather large bonus. (Downside: if you fill it with boiling hot water, it will take forever for it to cool down enough to drink. Brewing tea in there means keeping the lid off for a while, until cool enough to sip, or else you will have to wait for about 6 hours before drinking...)

When we were in London, I was even happier about the mug than usual, as there were some coffee shops that only had disposable cups, even for the people sitting down in the shop. So out came the mug... which, usually, also meant a discount on the price of the tea or coffee. And I did mention it's rather large, right? Which means that in most cases, you're getting a little more hot beverage of your choice for about the same price. Even without that bonus, though, we then did the maths... and realised that getting a pricey thermos mug, if you use it regularly, will amortise itself really quickly.

My mug has cost me 45 €. Say you're getting an average discount of 0.20 € per cup of hot beverage. That's exactly 225 hot drinks - a year has about 250 work days, so if you get a cup of something every day you are going to work, this mug has paid for itself in one year. And that's without taking the bit of extra filling into account.

Soon now, my coffee-holding travel companion could celebrate its seventh workbirthday*, and while I'm not using it every single work day, it has long since gone past the 225 hot drinks. It also has seen a lot of different countries, sat inside my car with me for hours and hours, was dropped onto hard floors (hence it can wobble a little now when it's standing), and also has seen the wrong level in a dishwasher (it's okay in the upper level, but the lower one is too hot - which is the reason a lot of the colour has peeled off). I love it, even though it looks battered and not too fancy anymore... and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of coffees and teas in its future still.

Thus, the moral of the story - if you think about getting a travel mug, go ahead and get a good one. Even if it sounds ridiculously expensive at first, it will pay for itself rather quickly!

 
*Probably by having coffee!

Sometimes, with all the bad news coming in from all sides - climate change, weird politics and even weirder politicians, wars, people drowning in the Mediterranean, insects dying - I feel like anything I can do is just so small and so insignificant I might as well give up.

That's not true, though - and one reason I enjoyed the weekend excursion with the BUND so much was that we heard a lot of success stories. Yes, wild cats are still very rare, but they have a better chance now. Yes, it is still too dry in the summer, and water scarcity will become an even bigger problem in the next decades, but there are ways to keep trees alive without wasting water. Yes, there were new roads and new railroads built in the last years that made a huge scar in the landscape, but at least some measures were taken to give the wildlife a chance to cross those roads, and protected areas were enlarged to lessen the impact at least a little bit.

Sometimes it's just small things - small steps. But I try to remind myself that small steps are steps, too. We've switched from carton-packed milk to milk in glass bottles a while ago, and I'm amazed at the difference this made in the amount of our waste. There's still a lot of things you cannot get in returnable or re-useable packaging, especially a lot of dairy products, but every carton not bought - helps.

We've been bringing our own bags to buy loose produce for ages now, re-using the flimsy plastic bags that you get as often as possible. There's still one coming in occasionally, so we won't run out soon; they are small and lightweight, so I tend to stash one or three of them in backpacks just in case I need one when I'm somewhere. There's a sturdier folding bag in my handbag as well, also just in case. Some of the plastic bags, when they start to give out at the handles, get a last use to collect used cat litter or as trash bags for otherwise yucky trash (we usually don't use a bin liner bag).

As paper bags are not so much better than plastic bags, I've been trying to cut down on these too, recently. Most of the paper bags we have coming in are from buying bread at the bakery, and that is very easy to avoid: I just bring a clean cloth bag, and the baker drops the bread in there. No trouble, no fuss, no paper bag. There are still a number of paper bags coming home with me from bakeries, for instance when buying sticky, cake-y things that won't do well in a cloth bag, and they get re-used as liners for the compost bin.

Every bag counts. Every step counts. Even if it's a small one - it is still a step. If we all do the little steps we can, the world will move into the right direction. And while we might not be able to reverse every damage done to the planet, we can still do our bit to save as much as possible!

A while ago, we got surprised by an offer to participate in an excursion organised by the BUND (which is a nature protection organisation) - to go see some very special, protected forests such as the Hohe Schrecke (page all German) and the Hainichenforst, and some wild cats in Hütscheroda (English/German page, and pics).

We decided to go - and we had an amazingly wonderful weekend, with lots of really uplifting information. There was a bunch of success stories about smaller and larger things that are good for the region around the protected areas, and of course the protected areas themselves. There was also a bonus fruit juice tasting from a local fruit juicery, bonus info on how to prune cherry trees (which was very timely, and very helpful, for the sour cherry bush tree in our garden), and lots of wonderful forests and meadows and birds and bugs.

Here's some forest for you:





There were also beautiful meadows in the open land between fields and the forested areas, and I was utterly delighted to see several of these butterflies - it has been years since I last saw any of them:



Their German name is, literally, "chess board butterfly".

I also loved this small but bright little flower:

[caption id="attachment_4744" align="alignnone" width="640"] Kardinalsnelke


And here's one of the many insects that live in the forest:



I have no clue what this is, but I think it's pretty.