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!

It's time - for the winter break!

I had a wonderful year 2019, with really interesting conferences, several exciting and wonderful workshops and courses, a lot of travel, and many other good things. There was a bit of stress, too - of course there was! and I hope to get that under control even better in 2020. Overall, though, I won't complain about how 2019 went.

Now it's time to slowly wrap up the year (maybe in a towel or tea towel, because sustainability...) and get into holiday mood. I will be closing the shop over the holidays and take a blog break as well; both will be back in normal mode (together, hopefully, with my own self) on January 8.

So with this, I wish you



or, if you celebrate something else, Happy Holidays! and a good start into the year 2020.

2020. That is a weird number, somehow, and I'm looking forward to see what that year will bring.

Have good times with people you love, and I'll see you on the flip side!

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.

As traditional by now, I'm posting the yearly recipe for some seasonal bakery shenanigans. This year's recipe is a special one for me - and it comes with a bit of backstory.

When I was a child, we'd visit my paternal grandmother for the seasonal holidays - Easter and Christmas. She lived not too far away, but too far for just a casual visit; in a small house that was rather simple and old-fashioned. I remember the very small toilet, which had no sink; you had to go into the kitchen to wash your hands, where there was a small sink, and I also remember the water being quite, quite cold.

My grandmother always served us food, all home-cooked and home-made from scratch, and very different from what my mum made. She came from Czechoslovakia, and that did show in her cooking and baking. She'd also serve us cake for coffee, and there was always whipped cream, and hot chocolate for the children. (True to her geographical roots, by the way, the coffee was very, very strong to a German's taste.) She took a lot of pride in her cooking and baking - and the baking, oh, the baking, there were some glorious things that are firmly connected to childhood birthday and holiday memories. One of them was a special kind of layered cake she'd make on my request - it was my firm favourite, and it was called "Schnittchen". Another happy memory was of her Christmas cookies, which we'd get to take home after our visit: several large tins, filled with a variety of cookies, all lovingly hand-made. There were a few staples that you'd always find, each and every year, and then some varieties that might be there or might not. Those cookies were part of Christmas for me just like the tree, and the visit, and the other things that make the festivity what it is.

Years go on, though, and people get older, and she eventually suffered a stroke and could not live at home on her own anymore - she moved into an old people's home, and that stroke also set an end to her baking and cooking. So... I took over.

Unfortunately, the fact that she took a lot of pride in her kitchen skills came with a downside: She would not share recipes. If asked, she'd say "oh you take this and that and a few eggs and then you make the dough and then you bake it" - and refuse to give you proper amounts, or ingredients, or descriptions. So I never knew how she made the Schnittchen, or the many different cookies she'd bake. I remembered the staples, though, and some of the special ones. So I tried to re-create all the ones that were important to me, with mixed success. Some, I'm sure, have a very different dough from what she used, but for me, the fillings are the important bit, and the fact that there are cookies coated with chocolate and filled with praliné, and ones also chocolate-coated and filled with redcurrant jelly, and Vanillekipferl, and then there's walnut baisers. I also remember that she'd make apples and pears that had a sugar glaze, but I never recreated these - they were mostly sweet, my parents didn't much care for that variety, and so they got relegated to memory only status, not resurrected.

For years now, I've made these important-to-me varieties. Then, after my gran died, some of her recipe collection fell into my hands... and I actually found a cookie recipe that she had used, with her notations on the journal cutout with the recipe. It was one of my favourites among the not-there-every-time cookies, and it's called Nougatmützchen (little praliné hats). When I made these and then ate the first one, it was like a time travel back - and a very, very emotional moment ensued.

Making those is a three-step process, it involves a lot of praliné and chocolate, it is rather messy... and, if you ask me, totally worth it even if you don't have the deep historical connection to these cookies that I have. Also, because my gran's refusal taught me that sharing your recipes is important, it's also the recipe I'll share with you this year.

Nougatmützchen:

Cookie basis:

150 g flour
3 g baking powder
50 g sugar
1 pack vanilla sugar
1 pack rum aroma
pinch of salt
2 tablespoons milk
50 g butter

praliné mix:
400 g praliné (This is the German "Nougat" or "Nuß-Nougat", a soft concoction from hazelnuts and cocoa or chocolate. If you've never heard about this before, you can find more info here.)
100 g almond splinters (I usually take almond flakes and cut them smaller with a knife)
c 50-80 g of crushed cookies

plus milk chocolate to cover (c 200-250 g)

Make a pastry dough from the dough ingredients; let the dough sit in the cool for a while to rest, then roll out (about 2 mm of thickness) and cut out circles; the original recipe suggests 4 cm diameter, mine are a bit smaller. Bake in a pre-heated fan oven for 8 minutes at 175° C.

The original recipe now tells you to crush one third of the finished cookies into fine crumbs. I prefer to bake some of the bits that are left over between the circles that I cut out, because I'm lazy that way. I also use more of the similar leftover bits (you know that stage when your dough leftover bits are not really worth rolling out again? perfect for this) from the other cookie dough.

Warm the praliné and stir it until smooth, then mix in the cookie crumbs plus the almonds.



Now comes the messy bit, part one: each of the round cookies should get a mound of the praliné mass on top. It helps if the mass is not too warm.



Let them sit in a cool place until the praliné has firmed up; melt up the chocolate. This is messy bit, part two: Cover the tops with chocolate. I do this by grasping each cookie with two fingers, dipping it into the molten choc, then use a third finger or one of my second hand to turn them right side up again, then set it onto a rack to firm.



I get about 80-100 cookies out of this, depending on how thin I roll out the dough.

And that's your seasonal recipe for 2019. Let me know if you made it - and how you liked it!

The other seasonal recipes that I blogged in the past are:

• Linzer Plätzchen
• Lemon Lozenges
• Chocolate-Coffee-Nut Spheroids
• Schokogongs (Chocolate THINGS) and how to make the praliné for filling them
• Marzipan-stuffed dates
• Gingerbread, without flour (Nuremberg type)
• Basic cookie dough (or five types of cookies from one batch of dough)
• Vanillekipferl (vanilla crescents)
• Spitzbuben (jam-filled cookies)

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!

So much for planning - I had planned to post something here yesterday, but things happened. More specifically: a root canal happened.

I had woken up with some dull kind of a toothache on Monday, which was solidly in the "it's not too bad to ignore, but annoying" category. Since that had not gotten better until Tuesday morning, I did decide to do the grown-up thing and call my dentist. To my sort-of-delight, I did get an appointment right that morning, and it was quickly resolved that the tooth must have died a quiet death a while ago, as there was no nerve action in it anymore. (That, for those of you lucky enough to never have had such an experience, is done with a super-cold stick that is touched to the tooth. A living one will complain quickly, which is not pleasant. A dead one will not complain at all, which is even less pleasant on a different level and in an entirely different way.)

So the dead tooth was duly opened, the pus was drained, it was cleaned of most of the decayed nerve tissues, X-rays were taken, and I was sent home again with a provisional filling and a new appointment for the proper cleaning. All in all, I'm obviously not happy with pain and having to have dental treatment, but even though there is no good time to have something like this (apart from, obviously, "never" due to not needing it), my timing is impeccable. There's so much action going on these weeks that I could have done far, far worse in finally feeling that pain - at least this week, I'm at home, and though it is sort of mangling my schedule a bit, things are far from really bad. Which brings me to the final two fun facts.

Fun fact number one: After this procedure, which is basically taking away some of the issue that causes the pain (as it drains the infected site), there was much more pain than before. Though the tooth is well and truly dead and thus incapable of causing pain, the surrounding tissue is very much alive, and it seems to have woken up by the preliminary treatment... resulting in a very definitive signal that it was not content with the situation.

Fun fact number two: I spent Thursday to Monday at the Dannenberg Convent - a Living History camp close to a castle ruin (now partly restored). "Tannenberg" was one of my first yearly events, and I was there many times. I'd skipped it the past few years, due to a number of reasons, but this year was their 25th anniversary and, at the same time, the last time the event would take place in its old form. So I spent four days with friends in the rain, and we broke camp and packed up on Monday. That dull ache in the tooth, and some accompanying light pounding that came with exertion, was with me all through my treks up and down the meadow, as I was carrying my stuff back to the car. It really, really heightened my appreciation of being able to get up out of a comfy warm bed on Tuesday, grab the phone, place one call, hop on my bike for a short trip across town, and then get 21st century state-of-the-art dental care, followed by some rather safe and fairly quickly acting 21st century painkiller pill. Yes, there was medical knowledge and medical care in the Middle Ages, too, and it was sometimes a lot more sophisticated than people expect, but it was still a very far cry from dental X-rays, modern drills and modern painkillers. Which reminded me of one of the things that Living History does to its participants: It does remind us both that not all modern things and modern ways are good (or better than old methods), and not to take all good modern things for granted.