It happens every year - and this year, yesterday has seen another blogiversary. I started this thing in 2008 - so: Happy eleventh birthday, little blog!

Now... how does one celebrate a blog's eleventh birthday? Apart from having coffee and some cake, or something in that general direction?

 

It's the time of year when things start to finally slow down a bit - which is a very nice thing after the rather hectic time that October and November somehow always turn out to be.

So I'll be setting this week aside for maintenance work. Which includes looking through my stock, making decisions about new orders and re-orders, re-packaging and re-shelving things, trying to find new and better ways for troublesome spots or not-so-perfect temporary solutions, getting some paperwork dealt with, things like this. There is already some progress from when I started on Friday, and I've spent most of today taking stock and re-organising things. It feels nice in some way to be able to finally take the time to do this, though I do have to tell myself now and then that yes, this is work and yes, this is necessary as well as doing other, more obvious stuff.

Next on the list: finishing to sort through the "to-be-sorted" stack of papers that has accumulated on my desk. I've also started on this already, with some success (though there is still a good stack left to be taken care of in the next days). The cat, of course, is helping - she is always happy to inspect empty boxes, or to lie on a chair and supervise my work. (Ah, where would I be without my furry overseer.)

Do you have a time of year for taking stock and sorting? Does it also happen to be towards the end of the year, or do you find yourself doing this in spring, or at some other point in time? Or are you so organised that you don't need to do this, but have things taken care of bit by bit as they come up?

You've probably been getting just as many mails and special offers about Black Friday as I do. Lots and lots of offers... for discounts.

Sometimes, these discounts are so high that I wonder how this can be possible. Either it means that the vendor is having a huge margin with the normal pricing, so there's still some profit left after the discount, or it means there's no profit anymore and it's more or less an advertisement stint, with the intention of getting the customers to buy other things as well (possibly believing that the prices have to be just as good in every case, which they cannot be, or else the shop won't survive).

Black Friday has become more and more of a thing in Germany in the past years, and I'm not really in love with the thing. At all. I can totally understand giving discounts on goods that have been sitting in your stock for ages, taking up space - you'd want to clear those out as a merchant. (As a customer, I totally enjoy those, by the way. If something delights me that happens to be from last season... well, I couldn't care less that it's not the current season's colour, or whatnot!)

I also get giving discounts for large amounts of the same thing (and yes, if you are planning to order a heckton of something from my shop, you can always send me a message first and ask about the price, and I'll see what I can do).

When it comes to random temporary deep discounts, though... I don't get it. When I calculate my prices, I try to go for a profit margin that makes sense for running my business, but is still fair to my customers. Sometimes, because the raw materials are expensive, or because there's a lot of costs involved in the making of the product, the things I offer do end up with a relatively high price tag - I can't help that, and it usually means that I can only have small amounts of these things made, and that there's a certain risk of me sitting on them for a long time. (Which means storage space, and capital tied up - also something that has to be considered when setting a price.) That said, my pricing policy does not leave a lot of room for price reductions. So that's one reason why I won't do something like "half off everything for Black Friday!".

As a consumer, I'm also somehow miffed when I buy something, then find out a little bit later that said thing is now offered for X percent off. Yes, I know that's just bad luck, and since the price I paid has obviously not killed me, I could just ignore it. However, it still leaves some kind of bad feeling for me - and it will mean that the next time I need to buy the thing again, and it's not urgent, I might wait until it's discounted again, or I might look for it somewhere else, now knowing that it could be available for a lower price. Maybe I'm the only one weird in that way... but I wouldn't want to cause this feeling in my own customers.

I'm also not really in love with the idea of trying to get people into a buying frenzy on a specific day, or weekend. Most of us in the western world - myself included - buy more things than we really need anyways. We're not living in a world of limitless supply, though, and getting new things all the time is not going to be sustainable forever. So having a day hyped up to make people buy, buy, buy... it doesn't seem like a really good thing to me.

What do you think? Is Black Friday a thing where you are? If so, do you enjoy it? Are you happy with the deep discounts for no apparent reason? Or would you prefer to have lower, stable prices all the time?

In case you're looking for something to let your artistic self out to play, the Rijksmuseum is inviting everyone to participate in the Rijksstudio Design Award. This competition is open until February 27, and you can submit your piece, inspired by the collection of the museum.

There will be a Public vote winner and a Design Award winner, as well as a young Talent (aged 21 and under). You can read more about the award, and find the info for your submission, on their webpage.

It's time for some random links for you again (in hopes of getting my huge number of browser tabs diminished into something remotely sensible looking) - so here you go:

A new method for baking bread in minutes - researchers in Vienna are baking bread by sending electricity directly through the dough, which is looking especially good for things like gluten-free breads. You can read more about it here (in German).

If you put things on the Internet, chances are that someone else will see them and maybe feel inspired by them. Or... "inspired". There's also a chance that the idea might be taken and something entirely different made from it. Like in this case:
Bernadette Banner has made a dress reconstruction for herself, and the image of this has been used as the basis for a knockoff, sold very cheaply. So she bought a knockoff of her own dress, and made a long video about this:


If you prefer to read things to watching videos, you might want to go and browse the OpenAccess books at the OApen Library - for example the archaeology section.

There's also a bit of information online about Viking Age brocaded tablet-woven bands, as the teaser to a paper being presented at NESAT 2020.

Finally, here's something about giving media interviews as a scientist. I've been interviewed a couple of times now, and it's always exciting, and a little bit scary as well - but being well-prepared, as the article also states, definitely helps a lot.

You've probably been half expecting this after Monday's post - it's time for me to take some time off the blog, because of... things. Exciting things. Conference-y things.

I'll be travelling to the Knitting Symposium at the TRC in Leiden, where I am utterly delighted to be part of the panel discussion. Once I am back here, I will go straight on to the European Textile Forum, and after that, experience tells me, I will be totally knackered and will need a few days to recuperate, and then there's my Gran's Birthday coming up (she is turning ninety-eight!) and I will be home for that.

So... expect blog silence here until Monday, November 18.

When I was at WorldCon, chatting with one customer, she answered a question on how much she knows about a specific topic with "not a sausage" - meaning "exactly nothing". That was an expression I had never heard before, and there ensued a short but fun conversation about where it came from (she got it off someone else, but it seems to be rather rare) and that Germans use sausage in a different way in their (very common) idiom: Das ist mir Wurst (it's sausage to me, meaning "I don't care").

Which reminded me of a much longer conversation that we had during one dinner at the last Textile Forum, resulting in the insight that Germans have a lot of expressions that concern food. And when I say "a lot", I mean a huge lot.

So I thought it might be fun to go and collect some of them here, and maybe even get some input from people in other places, with other languages, if you have similar expressions - or not.

Here you go. Some German food idioms. The German phrase, the literal translation into English, and an explanation.

Das ist mir Wurst.	It's sausage to me.	I don't care.
Das ist nicht mein Bier.	That's not my beer.	It's not my problem.
eine beleidigte Leberwurst sein	to be an insulted liver sausage (liver paté, or sausage with liver in it)	to be easily offended, or more offended than warranted by the circumstances
seinen Senf dazugeben	to add one's mustard	state one's opinion about something (unasked and usually also not too welcome)
mit dem ist nicht gut Kirschen essen	this person is not good to eat cherries with	it's hard to get along with this person
seine Brötchen verdienen	earn one's bread rolls	make money for living/work
das macht das Kraut nicht fett	this doesn't make the cabbage greasy	it's not accounting for much in the overall picture
die dümmsten Bauern haben die dicksten Kartoffeln	the most stupid farmer has the largest potatoes	usually said when someone gets a lot of money without effort
nicht die Bohne	not a bean	not at all
Tomaten auf den Augen haben	to have tomatoes on the eyes	to be blind/not see something that should be obvious
Petersilie in den Ohren haben	to have parsley in the ears	the audio equivalent to the tomatoes - to not hear something
ein armes Würstchen sein	to be a poor sausage	poor devil/poor thing
der schaut, als hätten ihm die Hühner das Brot weggefressen	that one has a look as if the chickens ate his bread	to look helpless or perplexed
sich ein Ei legen	lay oneself an egg	to dig a hole for yourself
für'n Apfel und ein Ei	for an apple and an egg	for very little money
dumm wie Bohnenstroh	dumb as bean straw	dumb as a post
es wird nichts so heiß gegessen, wie es gekocht wird	nothing is eaten as hot as it's being cooked	it won't be as bad as it seems at first
der satten Maus schmeckt das süße Mehl bitter	the satiated mouse finds the sweet flour tastes bitter	things lose their appeal when you have had enough of them
wie Kraut und Rüben	like cabbage and turnips	completely dis-ordered
das ist nicht das Gelbe vom Ei	that's not the yolk of the egg	that's not the best situation/solution
die Rosinen aus dem Kuchen picken	to pick the raisins out of the cake	only take the best bits and leave the rest

Funny how many there are, right? And I have probably forgotten quite a few. Let me know if I did (and which ones) - and let me know if there's similar food-related idioms in your (non-German) language!