I'm back from a wonderful and really relaxing summer holiday - we went for a canoe paddle to Lake Constance and had a really nice time there. Paddling is a slow, slow way to get around, so it gives the mind enough time to unreel and let go.

The weather at the lake was a little unreliable (as we've heard it is wont to be), but we were quite lucky nonetheless: Most of the rainy time was in the evenings or during the night, when we did not mind it at all, and though we were not able to paddle for two days due to strong winds, we found other nice stuff to do.

And now my feeling of energy and being refreshed and with recharged batteries will hopefully last for some time! I've already tackled the long-overdue clearing of my workdesk (now there's more than a few square millimetres of the surface visible on the left, hooray!) and I will be working my way through the backlog of emails as soon as I've fortified myself with a nice cup of tea. The weather is very inspiring for work as well today: it's raining hard...

It's the middle of summer, and the middle of things - and what better time to take some time off?

So I'm going to do the summery thing and take some time off; that of course includes blogging. I will be back on the blog on August 15, and I wish you all a wonderful time until then - with summery warmth and summery delights!

I have returned from an amazing and wonderful week in Spain, and I'm still a bit Spain-lagged. That's like jetlag, only different - Spain is technically a different time zone from Germany (about one hour earlier than here), plus we are on that daylight saving time stuff - so it feels as if it's hours earlier than the clock shows. Then the Spanish have the habit of doin a Siesta during the hotest time of the day (very smart) and then, instead, stay up very late. It was not unusual to see small children, wide awake, playing outside at 11 pm.

We spent the week doing lots of touristy things, and I took lots and lots of photos - quite a few of them like these:




(If anybody knows what those flowers are called, I'd be happy to know!)


So now I have to re-adapt to German timetables (and from the time this blog post is published, you can see that I was not doing brillantly today). At least we're not freezing here, it's about as warm as in Spain here...

Summertime is the time to get away (at least now and then), and I'm no exception - I will be non-blogging for a few days; I will be back with regularly scheduled posts on Wednesday the 29th.

I hope you have a splendid time until then!

I'm back from a wonderful long weekend spent upholding a nice tradition - once a year, I meet up with a small group of likeminded folks to do some bookbinding. This year, for a change, I had no huge list of things that I really needed (or wanted) to get done during the weekend - and since I was quite tired, I did not have such an output as in some of the previous years... but nice chats with people I only see once a year, and I made a few boxes and a protector for knitting pattern sheets that I take with me - and a new "conference book".

Back in 2008, I decided that it would be really nice to have notes from conferences in one book instead of on this and that notepad or this and that single sheet of paper. So in May 2008, I made myself a bright green book, a bit larger than DinA4 (that was a happy accident - I wanted A4 and did not really measure after cutting the bound block) and slim enough to easily lug it to conferences. I have since taken it to every one I went to except one, where I left it at home, and it's filled up almost completely now (I blame the last NESAT, where I took copious notes). I suspect it will still last for Leeds, but after that, I really need a new one.

So I made one - with the same measurements, a tad thicker, and with bright colours. It's the yellow-cloth-and-seventies-wallpaper bound book that you see in the front of the picture - and behind it is a box to hold my wool combs.


And now it's back to normal work - like trying to get the webshop to run, and finishing the spinning I have to do.

 I'm off for the holidays now - meeting with the family and later with friends to start into the New Year. As I'm sure me and you will all be much too busy for blogs during these days, I'll see you in January 2010, on Jan 4, to be exact.

Until then have some wonderful, relaxing and stress-free days with your friends and families!

And if you are curious about which New Year's Eve tradition is most hallowed to me and my friends, you might want to know about the phenomenon that is Dinner for One (which even has a Wikipedia entry telling about its importance) and then watch it.

Best seen on New Year's Eve, along with countless Germans!

There is a German saying that goes "Wenn einer eine Reise tut, dann kann er was erzählen" (roughly translates to "Travels will always provide you with a story to tell"). This is certainly true about travel home from London yesterday, where we spent a few days to relax and take in the Christmas lights.
We traveled to London with the Eurostar, and it was a very pleasant travelling day, with windowgazing, knitting and reading the hours until we arrived in St. Pancras station. The way back, however, was not so smooth: Due to the train failures in the Tunnel, there was no train service yesterday, and according to the updates on the Eurostar website today, we would not have come home until tomorrow at the earliest.
We were alerted to the tunnel problems in time, luckily, and went back home using a plane - and again we had a good measure of luck, since our (evening) plane only ran two-and-a-half hours late, which means we arrived at our home in the small hours. Still, it could have been much, much worse.
It will never cease to amaze me that a metal contraption, made of several tonnes of metal and plastic, can take off into the air by sheer power. But comparing the journey to and from England, I liked the train journey better - and I hope that Eurostar will recover from this fiasco, both reputation- and finances-wise. (And of course I also hope that they will not try to keep their losses smaller by not paying for extra expenses of the travellers who got home by plane or ferry...)