A few days ago, Bavardess had a very interesting blog entry about "beaver" as synonym for the vagina (something I had never heard before, though I can claim non-native-speakeriness as excuse) and how this word use probably developed from a medieval play on words. She links to a little video showing a girl having a girl day out with a beaver, all as advertisement for a new brand of tampons.

Which finally makes me write this little bit concerning tampons (or other disposable sanitary products) and green living. Tampons have been a sort of revolution and have become a normal part of modern female life in our part of the world. They are sold in all kinds of different sizes, from different manufacturers, each one claiming to be the one and only brand. But they all have one thing in common with each other (and with the disposable pads as well): They mean a huge waste of energy and material. All  the water and energy needed for production, the raw materials - plastic, cellulose, paper - for making and packaging them - the tampon or disposable tab is used and then discarded, and into the landfill they go. Not so good for our planet, actually.

So maybe it is time for the next revolution, yes? Some re-usable, environment-friendly product that can be worn like a tampon, safe, healthy, and durable? If that sounds like a good idea to you, you might want to buy yourself a menstruation cup. They are called something like Mooncup or Divacup, and they are a silicone cup that is inserted much like a tampon, catching the blood securely.  You can read much, much more about them on this livejournal devoted to the menstrual cups, and on lots of other places on the Internet - as always, the search engine of choice is your friend.

If you are a tampon-user, go try one. They are really wonderful and absolutely worth the money - in fact, not buying any disposable products anymore will save you more than a cup cost very soon. Or maybe it's even a gift idea for the holiday that's almost upon us?

I actually missed my blogiversary, which was on December 8 - that was Tuesday last week. And that even though I had marked it in my calendar, to be sure I won't forget it.

But then the internet-less time came, and the trials and tribulations of the move, and the stacks of boxes distracted me, and I completely forgot the blogiversary. Even though I think that it really is something worth celebrating - a year is quite a bit of time, after all!

When I started this blog last December, I was not sure at all how blogging would work out for me. I knew, however, that I did want the blog to offer something new regularly. Some blogs I had already read for a good while did inspire me to do the blogging-daily thing, and the most important of those is Kristin Nelson's blog Pub Rants. No, it has nothing to do with watering holes, selling beer and snacks, it's short for "publication", and I really liked (and still like) her style of writing and the fact that - with very few exceptions - I could have a few minutes every day, reading the news from Kristin, half-way across the globe.

And now, after the first year of blogging, I am really happy I tried it. I have a bunch of regular readers (and commenters), and getting feedback on the things I do and the texts I write does feel wonderful. Posting weekdaily is by far not as difficult as I had feared. Of course there's the occasional day where I can't think of anything much, but there are a few strategies that help with that: I try to cover one topic only per post and store other ideas in the drafts section, I try to have one or two "emergency posts" completely pre-written in the drafts section, and I am just generally on the watch for bloggable things - interesting links and webpages, for example. And then of course I don't blog on the weekends, and I will take time off* for holidays, events and travelling, things where blogging would be difficult or troublesome. All that together makes daily blogging a fun thing to do for me, a nice way to start off my day, and I hope that it will stay like this for at least a year or two more!

* All that time off results in about 203 posts during the one year, which is about 0.5562 posts per day, or one post every 1.79 days. Which sounds much less impressive than "I blog daily". You see me humbled.

As the prolonged blog silence probably let you guess, the move did not go completely as planned. The actual "get stuff to the new place" part went very, very well (whoever has friends like those we have is really, truly blessed), but there are a few minor to medium complications.

Some things still need to be fixed in the new place before we can put up furniture and put away stuff, and unfortunately (as we now know), the time before Christmas is the time when every craftsperson's schedule is full enough to burst, so we'll be living out of boxes for a few days more. In addition, our phone and internet connection will move over a little later, so regular blogging is scheduled again from December 10.

On the plus side, the new flat is a dream come true, the kitchen is already up and running, so we won't go hungry, and our neighbors are very very nice - and half of them seem to be native English speakers!

I'm taking the rest of the week off from blogging to concentrate purely on boxing the remainder of the chaos here. If all goes well and according to plan, we'll move over to our new flat on Monday. Because the telephone will, in all probability, not move over with us right away but take at least till Tuesday, blogging will hopefully resume next midweek. If not, well, something has not worked out - or I felt such an urge to blog that I found another place to do it.

Meanwhile, here's a really bad knitter's joke.

What does a pirate knitter like best? ... Black Purls.

I am slowly but surely surrounding myself with boxes filled with stuff - books, textile implements, more books, resources and materials, more books, tools, cloth, and even more books*. It is a weird-looking mix of order and chaos: a jumble of things on heaps to be sorted out, books still in shelves (almost none left in the study, though), things that are pre-packed in boxes anyways, and the big newly-filled boxes stacked on top of each other, slowly filling up freshly cleared space where shelves were.**

Yes, that sounds like an upcoming move - we will move into a bigger flat, since my stuff seems to have exploded (or maybe "popcorned") during the last months. This is largely connected to my acquiring some exhibition stuff (which includes two dress mannequins) and to the growth of the market stall and its assortment of goods, but also to such slightly mad ventures as the spinning experiment (which resulted in my having about 105 spindles now instead of five, and two more rather large boxes to stash). All this has led to the apartment being too small, and offering too little storage space.

So we will move, but stay in this very nice and quiet part of Erlangen. I will have a nice, large study/work room with no roof slope taking away space for shelf storage or moving around in the room, and enough space to actually do tailoring work in there without feeling cramped. And it is a ground floor flat - hooray for not having to lug so much stuff down from second storey when going to a medieval event!


* Yes, I'm a book junkie. And that is especially true for books on archaeological stuff, textiles foremost, of course. Book buying binges when in museum or exhibition bookstores is a very common quirk of archaeologists, and I'm no exception to that rule. Which means that not only do I have lots of books, I have lots of really seriously heavy books, because most catalogues are printed on thick, glossy, heavy high-quality paper...
** Compared to stacking books on the floor until stack height is still just stable, shelves are a much more compact way of storing (we found this out when emptying a shelf to re-build it with an additional bit a while ago), but even shelf storage cannot beat boxes filled with books and stacked up high. Much less convenient for actual reading, though!

With the hype for all things medieval, there have also been quite a few boardgames with medievally themed topics or artwork. And with the huge games fair in Essen just past, there is a new one in the range - the game "after" Ken Follett's sequel to Pillars of the Earth (which usually means loosely connected to the book topic). That book is, in German, called "Tore der Welt" (doors of the world), quite a different title from "World without End", and the game title matches the book title.

Well, I don't read medieval-themed historical novels anymore (the last I read actually was Pillars, when I had just started studying medieval archaeology), but I'm game to play medieval-themed games. Maybe that is because it is harder to put huge, garish mistakes into game descriptions, and maybe it's just because I like good board games. Especially those that are typical German-style board games (and isn't it amazing they name a whole genre for us Germans, and such a nice one as well?). I didn't manage to play the Pillars game when it came out (I think last year), but this year's Follett I did play, and all four of us playing had a good time. It is a nice game, with good artwork and good, functioning game mechanism, including some fun details: You have to pay taxes, feed your family and show that you are a good christian after each of the four "chapters". The chapters contain different events and give each player six chances on action. Those are selected using your twelve action cards - but you have to discard one of the remaining cards when playing the one you selected. This, for us, sometimes led to more thinking about "what shall I discard" than "what am I going to do now" - quite unusual, and quite dastardly in a very nice and amusing way. For once, you can't blame luck if you don't have the action you would need anymore! Every player also has an "event card" to play each turn, giving him or her some much-needed income and sometimes a second income, but every other player gets something as well. What everyone gets is depending on how the card is placed on the board - another simple, but nice and well-fitting mechanism.

Altogether, I did like the game quite a lot. It is already available, but only in the German version for now, so tough luck for all of you who would like to play it but don't read German. (One competent translator, though, should be enough - you only need to read the rules and the event cards, there is no need to read for choices.) But since the Pillars game (which has also gotten good critiques from those around me who played it) has been translated and is offered in the US, there should be good chances that it will cross the great salty puddle, too.

We spent the weekend doing something totally unrelated to medieval garments for a change, by going to a small townlet in the Franconian Forest (the German Wikipedia article is much better, if you can read German), quite close to where I grew up, and spent Sunday in this region doing a lot of eating and some bicycling on a trip to Hell and back.

If you now wonder what we were up to: We participated in the 7th "Frankenwald Radmarathon", a yearly event where you can cycle up to 250 km, going up lots of inclines out of valleys and back down into valleys. The event is amazingly well organised, and it seems as if 2300 cyclists are no problem at all for all the organisers and helpers - everybody is friendly, relaxed and helpful. The tour includes several larger roads (Bundesstraßen), and there are helpers from the fire brigades who even stop the cars so that the cyclists can roll through smoothly, without stopping. That really feels like being very, very important. The landscape is absolutely amazing, with forests, fields, little creeks, and many quiet roads where you hear nothing but the wind singing in your ears and the tires singing on the road. There are also lots and lots of food, starting with coffee and cake on Saturday, continuing with all-you-can-eat pasta (with sauce Bolognese) on the evening to fill up reserves, there's a breakfast buffet on Sunday morning (you can start tucking in at 5 o'clock there), and after the start at 7 o'clock, there's a stop every 30 km or so where you can re-fill your bottles, have a rest and eat and drink. They call it "Germany's only all-inclusive bicycle marathon", and it really is all-inclusive. We even joked that it's just eating, with the buffet tables spread a bit apart so you can have room for more food again. One of the "food stops" is in a place called "Hölle" - the German word for hell. (Where, incidentally, one of the sponsors is located: "Höllensprudel".)

In addition to all the food and drink and the beautiful landscape, with wild forests and houses all covered in schist shindles, the organisers and helpers manage to turn the whole event into one gigantic party. There's show dancing, music, music and cheering people in Stockheim when the peloton rushes over a large roadbridge for the start in the morning, and there are commentators at start, goal and on the steepest climb 10 km before the goal. And there are spectators dotted all along the road: People sitting on the sidewalk in lawn-chairs and watching, people watching from their gardens or balcony or out of their windows. On top of the last steep hill, there's a "fan mile" with a bunch of people cheering, shouting, photographing, making lots of noise to help motivate the cyclists, and one of the obligatory professional photographers making a picture of all those creeping uphill (about 1,5 km with up to 17% incline).

All together, it is a wonderful event - beautiful views, interesting routes, wonderful food and a great party. And we'll be sure to go to Hell again next year in August!