Off the coast of Yemen, there's an old oil supertanker that has been used as a storage facility and loading bay for crude oil. It's still hanging out there, slowly decaying. Or quickly decaying, these days, since maintenance has been called off because of the war.

Which means that the tanker, with four times the amount of oil that was spilled during the Exxon Valdez disaster, is a catastrophy scheduled to happen any old day now. 

There's a plan by the UNO to pump off the oil from the tanker, bringing it to a safer storage place, but they lack the funds to start work on the rescue mission. They lack a few millions, actually - and they're getting desperate enough to have started a crowdfunding, back in June. Up to today, though, there's not enough money been raised for this.

If you can spare some money, you can donate for this cause, either directly at the UNO website or via SumOfUs (German site here, there's no way I could find to link you to the English version.) You can also help by spreading word about this issue, and the UNO crowdfunding.

I'm back from a lovely, long summer break - it was definitely very summery and quite, quite hot. In fact, it was hotter than I'd have needed... 

We spent some time with friends, and went on holidays to Finland to see the midnight sun. If you're used to nights being dark, even at the height of summer, it feels surreal to be in a place where it just doesn't get dark at all. We made good use of the night light - and had naps in the afternoon to make up for that, too.

Finland is a really beautiful country, with a lot of forest and an incredible amount of lakes. Our plan was to do some lake exploration via canoe, so we had a rental canoe for a few days, a map of a part of the lake district... and, unfortunately, a lot of (head)wind. So much wind that we had to change our plans regarding the tour and shorten it a bit. After all, we were on holidays and not on a torture-yourself-mission...

It was nice to paddle, though we had underestimated two things: the size of the lakes and the amount of summer cottages on their shores (and on the islands in the lakes). Having paddled the German Mecklenburger Seenplatte, I was subconsciously expecting something similar only larger - and yes, the Finnish lake district is much larger, but the lakes themselves also are much, much larger. That means a lot of open water to paddle through. Now that, in decent weather and by itself, is technically not a problem - but it felt like we were not getting ahead at all, because the perspective on those large lakes, when you are paddling towards something in the far-ish distance, just does not change much. We usually paddle at about 4 km per hour if on flat water with no significant wind influence, which is not so fast that you can see things change quickly... hence it felt, sometimes, like standing at one point and paddling forever. It got better, at least for me, towards the end of our tour, since you sort of learn that it just feels like you're in one spot but you are actually moving, but the general effect was still there.

The second underestimated thing really were the cottages. I knew that in Finland, having a summer cottage is totally a thing and about every family has at least one - but I never made the next step in thinking about this: All these cottages have to be somewhere. That's just logical, right? Well, one premium spot to put a summer cottage is, obviously, in a nice, quiet, secluded(ish) place on the shore of a lake... which meant that there were some stretches on our trip where you could not land your canoe unless you wanted to do so on somebody's more-or-less front lawn.

So basically, you were in nature, with very few other humans to be seen, but with traces of human habitation and civilisation everywhere (in form of the cottages, mostly). There was very little in terms of infrastructure though - no cafés or shops like you'd find at every stone throw in Mecklenburg. We had brought our own food, and water logistics stuff (a filter and a UV water sterilisation pen, because you don't want to catch a nasty stomach bug especially while on holidays), and that was quite necessary. We also had our trusty little tent and put that up on our own tiny private islands for several nights, which was a lot of fun and felt really special for us. (In Finland, you can put your tent up about everywhere, though common decency demands not to do that on someone else's front lawn. In Germany, there's a general prohibition against so-called "wild camping"; you can ask the owners of land if you may put up your tent there, or use designated spaces which you can find in limited numbers in some areas, but you're not allowed to just pitch it anywhere else. In many areas, that means you need to find the next commercial campsite... which will be populated with other people and cost you money, but - on the upside - will provide you with sanitary installations and typically a little shop, café, and the possibility to get fresh baked goods in the morning. However, all that means that just going "ah, here's a nice spot, let's use that" is not something we're used to.)

Our method of travel - trains and ferries - also worked very well. Going all the way up north that way did take a good bit of time altogether, but most of our travelling was done at night, with overnight ferries and night trains, and that was very, very pleasant. We had planned the journeys basically so that we would travel in the night and then spend the day in the town before moving on through the night again. It means declaring the journey a part of the holidays, and that was what we did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I can highly recommend this! Finnish night trains are also quite nice and comfy, and you can even have a 2 person cabin with your own toilet and shower. So you spend a nice day wandering a city, doing a bit of sight-seeing, then go to the train station in the evening, board your train and have a relaxing hot shower while racing through the Finnish landscape before crawling into bed - and then you wake up the next morning somewhere else. Ah, it's just wonderful.

(If you're planning travel like this, and you use a train to get to your night travelling thingie, make sure you leave enough of a time gap before your night train or ferry leaves, just in case your previous transport is delayed for some reason. It will make the overall travel time a bit longer, but reduces stress immensely - and you can always go for a little stroll to stretch your legs if you are on time, and have a coffee or something to eat a few metres away from the train station.)

And now it's time to get back to good old work! There's a few projects to finish, and other things coming up, such as the embroidery demonstration in Brandenburg. First, though: Sending off all the orders that arrived during the summer break. 

(This post, weirdly, did not have its correct date when I posted it, but one in June. Don't ask me how that happened.)

I've made the mistake of doing a bit too much doom-scrolling in the past few days, including this morning. There's still war in the Ukraine, there's still really high Covid numbers in Germany, and there's still a lot of bullshitty stuff happening regarding energy and preservation of nature and sustainability here as well. It makes me feel sad, and helpless, and more sad, and that is not a very good thing. 

The little cat, however, is determined to brighten up my day by snuggling up to me on the desk, purring loudly, and I have the Vienna trip and presentation to look forward to. There's hot tea sent by a friend (well, not in its hot brewed state, obviously, but the tea bags), and finally a little light rain outside. While sunshine is nice too, the rain is much needed and appreciated, even if it means there will be fewer bees and bumblebees around today. 

I hope you have your own doom-scrolling under control, and enough nice things to brighten up your day. Maybe some links can also help? Here you go.

• A German company is developing something like a cross between a pedelec bike and a tiny car - it seats up to two people, no driving license needed, and it has solar panels on the roof to help with battery capacity. Here's an article on Heise, and here's the manufacturer's website (both in German only).
• The virtual convention "Flights of Foundry" is taking place on April 8-10. You can join in from anywhere in the world, for free.
• It's a well-known fact that some plants thrive next to each other, and one of the prime examples are the Three Sisters. I tried a sort-of-doing-this last year, planting beans next to sunflowers (though with rather limited success - neither beans nor sunflowers usually thrive here, due to the rather poor soil in the garden bed I put them in). Here's an article about current projects on this on The Conversation.
• In case I have not linked that before - the world's oldest pants were found a while ago, and have been analysed, and there's a nice article (with pictures) about them here.

And now I will return to getting something resembling work done...

It's springtime for real now, or so it feels - getting warmer, more and more flowers opening up, and I sort of feel the slight pressure to get some of the spring gardening things done, such as planting peas.

I'm also sorting through the seed stock, as there are a few packets of seeds that are probably too old to be viable anymore. Some of them I've seeded out of curiosity to see if anything will still come of it (though I'm not expecting any luck with 10 year old tomato seeds), some I've scattered in the garden (either they sprout, or get eaten by something, either way it's fine) and some are not sorted into either category yet. There were some tomato seeds that had no year with them, so I've seeded those, too. 

I've also tried something new this year, seedling-wise: 

I've used trays in the past, but they only worked semi-well; this way, I can have an eggshell for each variety and put them somewhere else if necessary (like out into the wintergarden once they have germinated, so they won't grow too tall and lanky for lack of light in too much warmth - which they need to get started). If you're thinking of trying it too, I found that the shells should be a minimum size to work nicely. We usually have L eggs, and the shell should really be split in the middle or above; if it's less than half the egg height, it's a little to shallow for me to feel comfortable. (I always think that it will dry out too quickly then.)