It is abysmally hot and humid here - it feels like a sauna, really. In spite of the heat and humidity, there is some cycling to be done for errands that have to be run, and there's also some apples waiting to be cooked into apple sauce and then canned. So... plenty of hot work ahead! I am already looking forward to my trip to the conference in Belfast, where it will probably be much cooler, due to the sea being close by.

The trick to cycling in this weather is, by the way, to go just fast enough so the airstream is cooling you down, but not so fast that the heat generated by the effort is more than the airstream can cool away. Which is especially hard to impossible if going uphill. Also: Traffic lights, the bane of airstream.

(Fun fact: Even paddling, which is a really slow way of getting forward, will generate some airstream that is actually noticeably cooling. We were joking once, when taking a break on a river, that we should get back to paddling again because of the nice, cool "Fahrtwind"... and then we started paddling and realised that there actually was enough of it to make things much more comfortable.) 

Ötzi has been the centerpoint of a lot of research over the years, and has led to quite a few revisions of our image of his time. Now, recent research on his genome has also revealed that he probably was bald... and had dark skin. Well, there you go - he's always good for a little surprise!

You can read the full article about the genome analysis here. 

Well, this has happened back in May, but I only heard about it recently - and I think it's a lovely story:

A sailing boat got into trouble at sea and sent out a distress call - which was answered by the Götheborg, a replica of an 18th century ocean-going sailing ship. They came to tow the smaller vessel to a safe harbour.

You can read more about both the Götheborg and the rescue operation on their website - it definitely is worth a visit, if you ask me!

It's hot outside, it's warm inside, there already was an iced coffee after lunch today, and I will be off on summer break now. 

I'm planning to make the most of the next few weeks to relax and see friends and then sneakily catch up on stuff that has been neglected for too long. The website is freshly updated, all current orders have been sent out, the quarterly tax stuff is taken care of, cat food stock is large enough so Madame will not go hungry - it looks like I'm all set for the break. 

So I will leave you with this image of an ice cream that has stripes like a tunic with clavi... very summer-appropriate, I think.

I'll be back on the blog on August 7. Have a lovely summer! (Or winter, if you're in the other hemisphere...)

Another Monday! Somehow time flies like a banana on speed - or did that saying go otherwise? 

Anyways - things are progressing here, slower than I would like, but nothing new about that, right? I have my tasks for the week laid out and it's already clear that I will not be bored. This evening is also already planned for - the cat needs more food, so there's another batch to be prepared. Which means shopping, and then pulling out all the cat food ingredients and mixing something for Her Furry Excellence.

I'm not sure now if I wrote about this before here on the blog, but we've had to find a different way of feeding her. She's always had some food sensitivity, but it has gotten a lot worse a while ago, and there were constant issues with her digestion. Even on the food that she'd always tolerated well. Our guess was that she has become sensitive against the thickening agents which are in about all the canned cat foods, with very few exceptions. And those exceptions contain other things she cannot tolerate. Or come in tiny little tins - and sorry, the cat is already the largest producer of waste in our household. I absolutely refuse to make her waste footprint even larger by opening not one can every second or third day, but three or four tiny cans each day to feed her. (Since we cut down on our meat intake when cooking, she's probably also the household member with the highest meat consumption per week.)

So in the end, we've changed to raw food that we mix ourselves... and she seems much better on that, though there are sometimes slight discrepancies between how we think it should be appreciated and eaten (it's made with love, and exactly to suit her needs) and what she thinks (ah, well, today... I will declare this as meh, and barely edible).

Which means I'll finish the day's things to do, and then I will make the shopping list, and then it's off to get her meat...

It's a holiday here today, so you're getting this stream from a webcam watching ospreys instead of a proper blog post: 

A long, long time ago, I stumbled across EscapePod - the weekly science fiction podcast. I don't remember exactly how, or why, but listening to the episodes became a wonderful way to keep me entertained during long hours of textile work, or long hours of driving in the car. I managed to listen my way all through the whole back catalogue, and there were very, very few episodes that I didn't like.

So at one point, liking it so much, I got myself listed in the Escape Artist narrator database... thinking that I might, at some point, get sent a nice story for EscapePod, and read it, and that would be very cool.

Well. I did get narration requests - but not from the 'Pod, but from Cast of Wonders. And apparently it wasn't completely horrible, because I did get more (very occasionally, but that's totally fine with me - it does take a chunk of time to do the recordings and the primary editing). The most recent one has come out in May, and if you're curious, you can listen to it here.