My normal life style does not include lots of reading or listening to the news, but even if you don't try to catch news every day, the big issues sooner or later still come up somewhere. Like the Haiti earthquake.
To help with relief in Haiti, the Yarn Harlot has put up the knit signal (like the bat signal, but with more yarn) and asks for donations to MSF (Médecins sans Frontières, which means Doctors Without Borders).

MSF has been doing great work all over the world for many years, and I personally think that they are one of the best humanitarian organisations to give money to - because besides other reasons, very very little of the donations does go into the overhead, and most goes to where it is needed. So if you have a little money left over, consider giving them a bit - and if you need a better pro-donation pep talk, read Stephanie the Yarn Harlot's blog.

The year 2009 is over, and I hope you all had a wonderful and smooth transit into 2010!

Last year was a year of beginnings and starts into new adventures for me. I made my first steps in the publishing process of the thesis, I joined forces with Sabine for some textile madness projects (including the Textile Forum in Eindhoven), and 2009 also was my first full year in the freelancing venture. I had an exhibition, I went to several conferences and medieval events I had never been to before, I did some research on new things. I planned and ordered things for the market stall, I planned some workshops, and I acquired skill in some new old techniques - like netting, brocading and a bit of goldwork embroidery. Hey, I even learned how to knit!

So looking back, 2009 seems to have been a good year. I say "seems", since a year of Beginnings is just that - fresh starts with no way to guess how each little thing begun will work out over time. And so I am curious to see what opportunities 2010 will bring to go on with each of these things... because ultimately, 2010 will decide just how good 2009 has been.

I hope we all have a wonderful, interesting and successful year. And to all the rest of things in a year one could wish for, I think nobody wishes it better than Neil Gaiman in his New Year Benediction:

 I'm off for the holidays now - meeting with the family and later with friends to start into the New Year. As I'm sure me and you will all be much too busy for blogs during these days, I'll see you in January 2010, on Jan 4, to be exact.

Until then have some wonderful, relaxing and stress-free days with your friends and families!

And if you are curious about which New Year's Eve tradition is most hallowed to me and my friends, you might want to know about the phenomenon that is Dinner for One (which even has a Wikipedia entry telling about its importance) and then watch it.

Best seen on New Year's Eve, along with countless Germans!

There is a German saying that goes "Wenn einer eine Reise tut, dann kann er was erzählen" (roughly translates to "Travels will always provide you with a story to tell"). This is certainly true about travel home from London yesterday, where we spent a few days to relax and take in the Christmas lights.
We traveled to London with the Eurostar, and it was a very pleasant travelling day, with windowgazing, knitting and reading the hours until we arrived in St. Pancras station. The way back, however, was not so smooth: Due to the train failures in the Tunnel, there was no train service yesterday, and according to the updates on the Eurostar website today, we would not have come home until tomorrow at the earliest.
We were alerted to the tunnel problems in time, luckily, and went back home using a plane - and again we had a good measure of luck, since our (evening) plane only ran two-and-a-half hours late, which means we arrived at our home in the small hours. Still, it could have been much, much worse.
It will never cease to amaze me that a metal contraption, made of several tonnes of metal and plastic, can take off into the air by sheer power. But comparing the journey to and from England, I liked the train journey better - and I hope that Eurostar will recover from this fiasco, both reputation- and finances-wise. (And of course I also hope that they will not try to keep their losses smaller by not paying for extra expenses of the travellers who got home by plane or ferry...)

A few days ago, Bavardess had a very interesting blog entry about "beaver" as synonym for the vagina (something I had never heard before, though I can claim non-native-speakeriness as excuse) and how this word use probably developed from a medieval play on words. She links to a little video showing a girl having a girl day out with a beaver, all as advertisement for a new brand of tampons.

Which finally makes me write this little bit concerning tampons (or other disposable sanitary products) and green living. Tampons have been a sort of revolution and have become a normal part of modern female life in our part of the world. They are sold in all kinds of different sizes, from different manufacturers, each one claiming to be the one and only brand. But they all have one thing in common with each other (and with the disposable pads as well): They mean a huge waste of energy and material. All  the water and energy needed for production, the raw materials - plastic, cellulose, paper - for making and packaging them - the tampon or disposable tab is used and then discarded, and into the landfill they go. Not so good for our planet, actually.

So maybe it is time for the next revolution, yes? Some re-usable, environment-friendly product that can be worn like a tampon, safe, healthy, and durable? If that sounds like a good idea to you, you might want to buy yourself a menstruation cup. They are called something like Mooncup or Divacup, and they are a silicone cup that is inserted much like a tampon, catching the blood securely.  You can read much, much more about them on this livejournal devoted to the menstrual cups, and on lots of other places on the Internet - as always, the search engine of choice is your friend.

If you are a tampon-user, go try one. They are really wonderful and absolutely worth the money - in fact, not buying any disposable products anymore will save you more than a cup cost very soon. Or maybe it's even a gift idea for the holiday that's almost upon us?

I actually missed my blogiversary, which was on December 8 - that was Tuesday last week. And that even though I had marked it in my calendar, to be sure I won't forget it.

But then the internet-less time came, and the trials and tribulations of the move, and the stacks of boxes distracted me, and I completely forgot the blogiversary. Even though I think that it really is something worth celebrating - a year is quite a bit of time, after all!

When I started this blog last December, I was not sure at all how blogging would work out for me. I knew, however, that I did want the blog to offer something new regularly. Some blogs I had already read for a good while did inspire me to do the blogging-daily thing, and the most important of those is Kristin Nelson's blog Pub Rants. No, it has nothing to do with watering holes, selling beer and snacks, it's short for "publication", and I really liked (and still like) her style of writing and the fact that - with very few exceptions - I could have a few minutes every day, reading the news from Kristin, half-way across the globe.

And now, after the first year of blogging, I am really happy I tried it. I have a bunch of regular readers (and commenters), and getting feedback on the things I do and the texts I write does feel wonderful. Posting weekdaily is by far not as difficult as I had feared. Of course there's the occasional day where I can't think of anything much, but there are a few strategies that help with that: I try to cover one topic only per post and store other ideas in the drafts section, I try to have one or two "emergency posts" completely pre-written in the drafts section, and I am just generally on the watch for bloggable things - interesting links and webpages, for example. And then of course I don't blog on the weekends, and I will take time off* for holidays, events and travelling, things where blogging would be difficult or troublesome. All that together makes daily blogging a fun thing to do for me, a nice way to start off my day, and I hope that it will stay like this for at least a year or two more!

* All that time off results in about 203 posts during the one year, which is about 0.5562 posts per day, or one post every 1.79 days. Which sounds much less impressive than "I blog daily". You see me humbled.

As the prolonged blog silence probably let you guess, the move did not go completely as planned. The actual "get stuff to the new place" part went very, very well (whoever has friends like those we have is really, truly blessed), but there are a few minor to medium complications.

Some things still need to be fixed in the new place before we can put up furniture and put away stuff, and unfortunately (as we now know), the time before Christmas is the time when every craftsperson's schedule is full enough to burst, so we'll be living out of boxes for a few days more. In addition, our phone and internet connection will move over a little later, so regular blogging is scheduled again from December 10.

On the plus side, the new flat is a dream come true, the kitchen is already up and running, so we won't go hungry, and our neighbors are very very nice - and half of them seem to be native English speakers!