A few weeks ago, we made an order for something that feels like an everyday adventure to me: We subscribed for an organic produce box. A smallish company in our region offers home delivery every week, with an assortment of fruits and vegetables, organically produced - and you can even opt for regional vegetables only, which leaves you with truly seasonal food.

I love this box. First of all, there's less grocery shopping to be done: We still buy the few things we use in larger quantities, potatoes and occasionally onions, at our normal grocery store. But the big deal about shopping for fruit and vegetables, for me, was always choosing. Having to decide between produce that was grown locally or imported in - or between buying imported food or nothing at all, in some cases. Then choosing what to get. The things well-known, with the preparation down pat? Or something else for a different taste (that might not please)? Since I am one lazy bugger, I ended up on the familiar grounds most of the time.

That is now a problem of the past.

While you can opt out for some of veggies or fruits you don't like, the subscription box will arrive, and there's probably something new in it from time to time - just what I had wished for. They even add a sheet of paper with information and a recipe suggestion for the more exotic things. Before the box, I was looking for recipes in the internet to get inspiration on what to buy. Nowadays, I'm just googling the main vegetable ingredient I want to use and browse through the hits until I find something that sounds appealing. Which has added a touch of adventure to cooking - exactly what I had hoped for. And there is much difference between "not buying something" and "canceling an order for something" - though I usually check a week before what we will get. (Because I'm also very, very curious.)

Is it cheap? No. Our grocery bill has gone up significantly with the box - but so has the amount of fruit and vegetables consumed. And the quality of the foods way surpasses what we can usually get, each and every single piece. There's even a refund should something have gone bad inside, unnoticed by the handlers.

Is it convenient? Well, yes and no. Yes, because the time spent in grocery stores, produce aisles or farmers' markets is cut down to or close to zero. On the other hand, you have to be there when they deliver or have an arrangement, perhaps with a neighbor to receive the box for you (and hand back the empty one).

Is it worth it? In my opinion: Totally. Which is why I write about it here (instead of about medieval garments like I'm supposed to).

Today feels just like yesterday work-wise, except that all the things with a deadline that haven't been finished yesterday are one day more urgent today. And since I'm hunting for double files right now (or to be precise, I let a program hunt for them), I can't even do proper work on the computer since all the RAM has been taken already.

And I'm only hunting for the double files to get more space on the external disc so I can do a full back-up before installing updates for two of my programmes. Which I don't really need to do urgently, but wanted to do to have it off my list since I thought it would not take long (and another full backup is never wrong). Speak of efficiency.

No, never mind. Speak of back-ups. I know it hasn't much to do with medieval clothes on the first glance, but when writing my thesis (about archaeological garment finds, which should explain the blog post title), two hard disks died in my computer. Yes, you have read correctly. Two. And the second one was bnly about three months old when it gave up. Since I had one disk dying years before, with less-than-pleasant results, I had grown religious with making backups, so it was not the disaster it might have been - even though the second drive managed to die slowly in such a curious way that it corrupted the most recent backups, costing me about a month of time. Incidentally, I handed in my thesis one month later than I had planned.

With a complete data loss, I would not have finished my thesis by now. In fact, I'm not sure I would have found the heart to do it all over again. Should you be one of those people who are doing it all without a backup copy of your files and a deep belief that you will be the lucky one, please reconsider. Backup media doesn't cost much money nowadays, and it will save you a lot of anxiety and tears (and of course, unnecessary work!) should bad things happen to your hard disk. I'm using a small freeware programme called SyncBack, and I'm content with that, but there are oodles of programmes out there and there's surely the right one for you too, even if you don't like SyncBack.

So please, do yourself and your friends and relations the favor. Do your backups regularly - it doesn't take much time, but boy, can it make a difference!

I love libraries. Especially those where you can keep the books for a long time.

Having studied in Bamberg, I grew used to the wonderful library there, with very friendly librarians, good light, lots of tables (and in the archaeologists' library building, with a wonderful view included) and very kind and fast service. There's the "book of wishes", for example: If you miss a book in the catalogue and think that the library should have it, you write it into the book, and most of the times, it gets ordered. (And then you get that wonderful book with a slip of paper between the pages, saying "Your Name" and "Erstausleihe" (first loan).) Thank you, TB 5 in Bamberg!

The library in Erlangen, on the other hand, has not too many books for my research. And those they have are all scattered across town, standing in smaller library rooms with often reduced opening times. A lot of those books can't be checked out. There's only one Erlangen feature I miss in Bamberg: You get an automatic email notification once your book is nearing the end of checkout time. Nevertheless, this wonderful feature won't help anything if the book can't be checked out.

And that is the main reason I'm still going to Bamberg now and again: The wonderful library. (I don't mind at all that it also gives me the chance to have coffee and a chat with friends and colleagues there, too, during much-needed library breaks.) And today is library day, so I'm on my way to the car, lugging along a stack of books that need to be returned (or, in some cases, checked out again). And I'll come back home with even more books.

I really enjoyed the last two days and today. It is pretty wintery at the moment, with low temperatures, and we had wonderful weather yesterday - just the right weather for a bike ride to the Christmas Market in Fürth.

Winter is nice when the air is cold and crisp, and I like the singing of the bicycle spike tires on the cold streets. Nights with spice cakes and chocolate and tea, maybe with some candles burning. Book buying binges (that I'm especially prone to in winter time). Strolling through a christmas market. Riding a sleigh down the small hill close to our home. Evenings in front of the fireplace. Roleplaying sessions in the warm room when it's cold outside. Snuggling up with a good book somewhere (the book buying binges come in here). Baking (and eating) cookies. Finding presents for friends and family that are utterly pleasant surprises. Visits at the spa where you can swim in the outdoor pool - the pool water all hot while the air is so cold that you think your nose will freeze off. Hot chocolate. Chick flicks and christmas-time movies (especially "3 Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel", the Czech version of Cinderella filmed in the 70s)... Winter Goodness.

I have made a resolution to do some academic housekeeping (a.k.a. filing of papers) every day to reduce the huge stack of copied papers that are still left from the time of thesis-writing. Since filing here means taking the paper and typing all the necessary data like author, editor, title, year, journal or book title, ... into my database before actually punching holes into the sheets and binding them together and physically filing them, this is not one of my favourite jobs - it can get pretty tedious after a while. At the moment, I am filing mostly papers written in Czech, which means "after a while" translates as "after the third or fourth article". Even with a keyboard heavily altered to include almost all special characters that are needed for writing Czech, Polish, French, and the Scandinavian languages, getting all the words typed out correctly is taking a lot of concentration.

Yet keeping such a database is a huge help when looking for that "something I once read somewhere", not to speak of citing things in papers and articles. I would not want to be without that database - I am using Endnote, but if you are looking for a literature database, you might want to look at Zotero, a free plugin for Firefox doing the same job as Endnote. I bought the commercial programme a few years ago because it included an add-in for MS Word, and there was no alternative product on the market. I was convinced before buying that adding references to texts with a flick of the finger really is something, and I never regretted buying the software. Even better if you can get the same functionality for free nowadays!

So now I'm tackling the paper stack three or four papers at a time, and I'm looking forward to the day in the future when all the sheets have been filed into one of my file folders. And I hope it will come soon!