Boydell & Brewer is having a promotion and special offer - there's a discount for the Medieval Clothing and Textiles series (including pre-orders of the next volume).

And even more spectacular: They offer free shipping for online orders at the moment, globally (which is really nice for those of us not from the UK) and there's a special list for reenactors with 25% off (remember to enter the promo code when ordering online during the checkout - code's to be found at the very end of the .pdf).

Now please excuse me while I look at those books...

 As promised, some pictures. First of all, a tulip from our garden - most of them are done with their blooming now, but a few last ones - the black ones, mostly - are still holding their own.


And this is the current market stall setup, with the new banner in place. This is how the stall looked at Freienfels, and I'm very happy with it!


And finally... Madonna, hanging out on the living room carpet...

Summer season always starts with Freienfels for me, and probably always will - even if events like the IRM come before it. May 1 has been a fixture in my yearly planning for so long now.

This year, Freienfels was wonderful again. We had a terriffic time in our "WG" (that's short for "Wohngemeinschaft", people that share a flat) with relaxed but funny evenings and I got to know a few more wonderfully nice people. There was a lot of lovely and yummy food, among it plenty of Harry's Schokokringel from the Feldbeckerey - not authentically medieval with all the chocolate in them, but totally addictive - and Lotte in our WG went on a baking spree and made strawberry buns to die for.
The weather was also playing along, it was nice and sunny with only a few little showers - including one with impeccably bad timing on the last morning, just before packing the tents back into the car. So my free day yesterday contained a little work after all - spreading the tent fabric in the sun to let it dry and then pack up the two tents.

And today I have to finish unpacking and rearranging my stuff into the new, bigger basket for my goods that I bought at Freienfels. The old basket was getting too small, so it was high time for an upgrade. But first coffee and breakfast and paying of bills that came in during the last week...

Yesterday afternoon, when I set out to bake a cake, I realised I was really, really tired - things that are so normal that they should not need any brain capacity at all were sort of... eluding me. Like the proper sequence to put in eggs and flour (hint: eggs first), that the baking powder should actually be added (almost forgot that), that it's really smart to first stir the starch for custard with a little liquid, and only then mix this paste into the boiling milk (hint: straining lumpy custard is possible, but not fun) and other brainless stuff like that.

In spite of all my botches, the cake turned out really nice and now serves as my breakfast. Well, a small part of it only, obviously. (I have this... thing... for baking cakes that can feed a company of hungry cake-eaters. I have some normal-sized ones in my repertoire, but most of my cakes contain instructions like "3 jars of cherries" or "2 kg of rhubarb" or "2.5 kg bananas". Just lifting the baking sheet and carrying the cake around earns you the right to eat some, because we all know that weightlifting persons need a lot of extra calories, right?)

Apart from this, I have the article to finish (it needs some closing words, then one last go-over, tweaking the bibliography and adding in the pics), some mails to write, some money to wire away, and then it's time to pack for Freienfels so we can start early tomorrow morning.

Things that would be really helpful right now:

Another week of time for finishing that article. (Has to be finished today, due to Freienfels.)
Not having hay-fever at all.
Even more time for doing a bunch of things that are fun (and also sort of necessary) but also take time - like planting out a few of the seedlings crowding the wintergarden here, and re-potting some others, and baking a cake (with rhubarb! It's rhubarb season, hooray!)
And even more more time for some much-needed putting things into order and straightening out stuff. Plus (very important) the motivation to actually do it.
An extra-fast postal service, since I'm waiting for a heap of packets, none of which have arrived yet. Which is very sad. And they include a packet with material that I hope to use for the new market stall setup/decoration... so it should better arrive before Friday morning.

And, top of the list: profound knowledge of everything that I need to know. Preferably in form of something like eidetic memory that also enables me to exactly, and faultlessly, remember where I read something. That would be so cool.

On the plus side, the installation thingie for the flowery newness is almost complete - I only need to drill three holes and pack three leather strips as ties for it. And I'm really looking forward to Freienfels!

Dirt is nice, especially when it conserves stuff. Any archaeologist knows that.
Getting your hands dirty is nice. Any craftsperson knows that.
And any bibliophile knows that you should not touch books when you have dirty hands...

but what if you are a bibliophile archaeologist-slash-craftsperson? You will probably have at least a few books that are at least a little dirty. Now that can also be a good thing! Trust me! In a few hundred years, should your books with the dirt on them have survived, and should they be deemed interesting enough for study, stuff might happen with the dirt on them.


As it now does with the dirt on late medieval manuscripts. Someone is actually looking at dirt traces as wear patterns on prayer books, and trying to extract information about the use of said books by the reader. This, I'd say, is really cool stuff to do with dirt!

Blogger has finally changed its layout for everybody, including people like me who try to stick to the old layout they know well until it's not possible anymore.

Otherwise, stuff has changed layout too, in a manner of speaking: I have done my inventory check and combined this with emptying, checking and cleaning and re-filling the boxes for my goods. This was, of course, accompanied by the usual grumbling about how boxes in different sizes never fit into a larger box without trouble. Quite a few of the goods changed box shape and size, so I am looking forward (well, not really) to hunting for the box I remember containing x and then finding that x moved. (Yes, I did label the boxes to avoid as much of that as possible.)

All this shifting and sorting actually led to the workspace getting a tiny bit more organised in the process, which is a very, very good thing. So on my schedule for today: spooling the last rolls of yarn (new colour of fine plant-dyed silk!), putting even more things into even more order about here, and doing some serious (and deadlined) writing work.