In the parallel universe where the Corona virus never transferred to humans, I'm bouncing around right now, packing the last bits and pieces into my backpack, and probably preparing food and coffee for the journey to the NESAT conference. I guess there's quite a bit of chaos in the study as well, more than usual, as I've only come back from the fair in Karlsruhe on Monday, and the list of post-fair homework (apart from "carry things back inside to empty out the car") is still untouched.

Instead, I'm sitting here at the home office desk, with the Most Patient of All Husbands sitting at his home office desk on the other side of the room. The tickets for the journey have all been cancelled or the dates moved to next year (when there will be a NESAT), and we'll be staying home, doing the social distancing thing.

It still feels weird.

There are a lot of things that have changed here in Germany, due to all the restrictions. For me, personally, it feels like things have already settled down a lot into a "new normal", not all of it brilliant, but mostly it's fairly comfortable. Our favourite market stall for Saturday grocery shopping is back after taking a break for a few weeks due to the situation, shops have re-opened, and we've established virtual meetings with some of our friends, so we do get some social contact. It's not the same as meeting like in pre-Corona times, but it does help to see friendly faces via videochat.

Germany is probably not a bad place to be in at the moment, even though there's rising stupidity here as well - people protesting against the restrictions, falling in with conspiracy theory groups, and generally not taking the virus too seriously anymore (because it wasn't so bad after all...) I just hope that stupidity of any kind, including the "race to be the most liberal in taking back the restrictions" that some politicians now seem to engage in, won't destroy the fragile success we had in slowing the virus spread. The smart thing, as far as I can see it, is still to stay at home as much as possible, keep a good distance to other human beings, and try to not get sick.

So that's what I'm trying to do - plus seeing the good things that come from the changed situation. We don't have to worry about our catsitter situation, for instance (as we're not going anywhere at the moment...). We're having boardgaming sessions with international participation. There's more digital events now, allowing me to easily and quickly connect with other colleagues from around the world, straight from my own living room. There's more people buying things locally (which is always a good thing). Some bad things in our society now come to light, and there's a possibility that some of them might be remedied. Of course this can't balance out all the deaths, and all the negative impact that the virus spread is having on everything everywhere - but we might as well try to make the best out of it!

There's been a debate for years now about whether to feed birds year-round, or not. I've heard pros and cons for that, but never followed the debate really closely, as we're usually not feeding the birds (our neighbours upstairs and next door do that in winter, and I figured that would be enough).

Yesterday, though, I stumbled across a post on my Facebook feed about the dangers of feeding birds with the wrong feed in spring and summer - as that will actually kill their young. If you read German, you can read the full explanation here. For those of you not reading German, here's the short rundown:

Feeding birds during summer, especially in areas where they have little natural feed, is generally a good thing. But it has to be the right feed, else it will cause more harm than help. Suet-based feeds and fatty kernels are for winter feeding only; in summer, you should only feed small seeds from grass and wild flowers that also occur naturally in the area you live in. Another thing suitable for summer feeding is fresh or freshly killed insects. Never feed dried insects, as their salt content is too high for both adult and young birds.

One of the common statements is that the feed offered at feeding stations will only be consumed by the adult birds, who will feed "proper" things, such as insects, to their offspring. This is, unfortunately, not the case. The adults will also feed their young with the fatty seeds or suet-based feeds which are so easy to get from the feeding station. The small chicks cannot digest these foods; they block their intestines, and the chicks die over the course of several days with severe colics and constipation. (The German article linked to above also includes pictures, if you'd like to see what this looks like. Scroll down the page. Not for the faint of heart.) If they do survive, they often suffer misformations due to the malnutrition (too much fat, too little protein) from the inappropriate food. (Even winter feeding with fat food only can have negative consequences, as this study shows.)

So if you feed birds in your place - please take care to feed appropriate things only. The best way to support wild birds in your area is creating an environment where they find enough spaces to hide, build their nests, and where there are plants teeming with insect life so they can catch enough food for themselves and their brood. (Lawns are overrated anyways - go for a wild flower meadow instead. Not only will that be much more colourful, it will also save you all the work of lawn mowing...)

I've recently started to bake bread again (I blame one of our friends, who reminded me of the joys of sourdough), and if you bake traditional sourdough bread, the dough needs to hang out in a warm enough place for quite some time.

The typical hack for this is to put the dough in its covered bowl into the oven and turn on the oven light - just the lamp; this puts out enough heat to warm the inside of the oven to about 30° C if you leave the door open a bit. However, our oven is a shiny new-fangled thing with a light that goes out after about 15 seconds... so I needed another way to gently heat it up.

The solution? A candle or, in my case, an oil light. There was a bit of trouble at first, though, as the light went out after a short while - and it took me a little time to discover the reason. Which was... old oil on the swimmer.



When I sell these, I usually tell my customers that if they are not using the light for a while, it's a good idea to take the swimmer out and give it a good rinse to clean it, then dry it.

Very obviously I'm not always taking my own advice... this swimmer has been in use for a rather long time, with breaks inbetween uses where I sometimes took it out and rinsed it  and sometimes not. Over all this time, a good layer of gummified oil has accumulated both on the metal bit and on the cork.

That is, unfortunately, not just an optical issue - the gummified oil warms up when the light is burning, and then seems to get just liquid enough to get into the wick, blocking it up. Which means that the wick cannot get enough oil through anymore, and the flame goes out.

So - should you have an oil light that does not work properly anymore, check it for gummified oil; clean it if necessary (hot water and soda, and a good long soak in there, will help), or get a replacement swimmer.

Germany has the day off today - so you're getting a cat pic instead of a proper blog post:



See you on Monday!

This year will definitely be a year of more gardening than usual, due to the reasons you all know. In an attempt to a) have more variety in plants and b) more order in the seed stash, I've put all of the old seeds of some kinds into earth.

As expected, some of them just did not do anything at all - they were too old. I was especially sad about that being the case with my chili seeds, as my plants have all died, and I was so fond of the colours of the Ecuador Purple.

A week or so ago, I remembered that I have some home-grown dried and roughly ground-up chili in my spice rack, so I spiced up a flower pot... and lo and behold, these have actually sprouted:



It will take a while to find out whether they are Ecuador Purple, or the other kind (a no-name random one). I'll happily do that, however.

Some of the old seeds, it turns out now, only took a lot longer to germinate. I'm sort of flooded with tomatoes, accordingly... the day will come when I'll try to get some of them a new home. Soon-ish.

In other sprouting news, the willows are now really working hard at growing back:



There's daisies blooming:



and, of course, the neighbour's bees are still getting their free drinks here. (He's promised to pay for them with honey at the end of the year...)



(All hail the good macro lens on the camera...)

It's time for some garden pics for you - the sun is shining, it's been pretty warm the last few days, and that does show:



The first tulips are blooming now, as is the peach tree, the plum tree, and the morello cherry. You can see the latter in the background here:



The little one in the foreground is a dwarf apple tree (an old variety, called Goldparmäne) that was not overly happy on our friend's balcony, and consequently was allowed to go to a new home in our garden. It is showing small leaf tips now, and we hope very much it will like its new spot, and make apples for us.

The willow fence is also working on its new shoots - it always takes a little longer for the fully pruned willow to sprout again from the latent buds. On the picture, you can see how much difference in thickness there is between individual stems - and you can also see that the lower arches are troublesome, as they tend to die off at about halfway or three quarters up, and so we're re-bending a lot of last year's shoots to close the arches every spring (that's the slim, bright green ones).

First of all, here's a link to an interesting article about the comparisons of the Black Death to our current Corona pandemic, written by Going Medieval.  And while I'm throwing things at you to read, here is a long blogpost about Macchiavelli, written by Ada Palmer. Just so you have something to do, in case you haven't.

Here, things had more or less settled into a new routine, with both of us working in the home office - but now things have changed up a bit again, as the Most Patient Husband's company has shut down for the Easter holidays. Which means that this week and next week, he has time off work, so I'll probably cut down on my own worktime a bit as well, so we can make good use of his free time. (Which also means that I might accidentally skip a blogpost or two. I don't plan to, currently, but it might happen.)

Otherwise, nothing really newsworthy is going on here. Well, unless you count little things; little things that brightened up our weekend, and make things somehow much nicer and much better. Little things like a few new plants for our garden, ordered from that local nursery, which arrived on Friday and were duly re-potted on Saturday. Activities on that day also included a very, very fun bread-baking action:

One of our friends had offered via his Whatsapp-Status to bake bread together; nice, simple, down-to-earth rye bread with sourdough. He'd prepare a sourdough starter for the local people (which we collected contactless, of course), and then on Saturday, there was a video group call at several points in time, with explanation and instructions on what to do to bake the bread.

Many years ago, I used to make my own bread purely for fun, so it wasn't all new to me - but it was definitely something else to do it in a group, with a few hilarious technical issues, and a number of lovely rye breads at the end of the action.

This was my result:



It's a nice, proper sourdough rye bread, tasting just like it is supposed to be. I also have a starter in the fridge now, and I do suspect there will be a bit more bread-baking in my future again...