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!

I'm all excited about a few new things that have come into the shop - the weaving knives have been replenished, and now there's maple wood ones in addition to the woods I had before, which look absolutely beautiful:



There's also new linen two-ply yarn, in a wonderful light goldbeige colour,



and there's the silk developed for the Texel stocking project (which I've blogged about before - you can read more about it here).



You will notice I placed a scale with the cone - because I was surprised at how small they were when I took them out of the packaging. There's about 1200 m of yarn on that cone, enough for one stocking.

It's always so nice, and always a bit exciting, to put new things into the shop. Will everyone else like these things as much as I do? There's only one way to find out about that...

Let me know what you think - or if you have any questions!

 

There's nothing much happening here - I'm still rootling around, enjoying that it's quieter now, trying to catch up on my backlogs (there are several, email being one of them) and trying to fix those small but pesky issues that had cropped up here and there.

The pallia newsletter subscription was one of those. Since starting the English newsletter in addition to the regular German one, I needed some way for new subscribers to choose which one to get (or if they want to get both).

That seemed not to be possible, at least not for somebody like me with no php skills whatsoever. So, as a workaround, I made a new list to subscribe to, which was supposed to automatically send a "Welcome"-Mail with the choice in it (thus also serving as the double-opt-in thing). Unfortunately, this did not work as intended either. To top everything off, the "subscribe to newsletter"-Checkbox appeared twice, once in the registration form for the shop and once in the checkout, and it only worked if checked in the checkout process. (You do not want to know how many test users I have subscribed to the newsletter trying to find out what goes wrong. And how many fake orders I put in...)

Since support was not willing to help, I've now solved the problem in a roundabout way. There is no more "subscribe to newsletter" checkbox in the registration or checkout anymore; instead, there are opt-in links in the email you will get after ordering.

I've also decided to finally switch to a different bank account, since my old bank has changed their terms and conditions in a way that totally does not suit me. So that is coming up in the next few days as well - hopefully transferring everything to the new bank will go smoothly.

It definitely feels very nice to get all those niggly things sorted out!

Somehow, computer maintenance and desk clearing are ginormous time sinks! But at least there is visible progress in the stacks of papers and stacks of files - though I still have some software issues.

There's been some tweaking of things in the shop background, where there have been occasional malfunctions in the past. I hope I have made things better and not worse - if they do turn out to have gotten worse, I might have to do a fresh install and see if I can have everything run smoothly again. Though I very much dread this...

A similar thing is looming over me for my computer as well. For a good while now, the system (Windows, of course, like almost everyone uses) has managed to self-digest some crucial bit deep in its innards, so there's trouble with the updates and there's also trouble with the machine telling me it does not have an authentic copy of Windows. Yeah. Thank you very much, you do. Having had Microsoft Support take a good and proper look at it did, unfortunately, not help at all - the only solution they were able to offer me, in the end, was a custom install, which means I'll have to re-install all my programmes afterwards. Sigh. At some point in the near-ish future, I will probably do this.

And hope that everything will go nice and smooth again afterwards!

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?

I've recently mentioned the Open Access books available at OApen.org - and I've found now that the books available include Karina Grömer's book about prehistoric textiles, both in the German and the English version. You can find them here - enjoy!

You might have noticed Friday's blog post coming up early (on Thursday afternoon), which might tell you something about the state of things here, which is rather, um, leaning towards hectic. There's the Textile Forum coming up, I have a few days already earmarked for travelling both for my own enjoyment and for a conference, and there are some other things that have to be done before end of October - which is approaching ridiculously fast - such as taking care of tax-related paperworks.

I have also been planning how to get to NESAT next May. Yes, it's a while until then, but... well. Excitement. Also the prospect of travelling to Finland by train and ferry, instead of taking the plane, and seeing a town or two on the way up? That, to me, sounds utterly delightful.

Related to this, I found a very interesting route to follow, proposed by Google Maps, on how to get from the train station at Lübeck Travemünde port to the port itself:



Here's the original link to the routing, in case you want to take a closer look. It's about 100 m as the crow flies between the start and end point, by the way - but Maps has clearly seen that I am out for an adventurous journey, and wanted to add to this!