Years and years ago, I stumbled across EscapePod, the weekly science fiction podcast. I have listened my way through it over many, many hours of car driving, spinning, and other work. And at one point, I submitted my application to be one of their narrators.

To this day, I haven't read anything for the 'Pod, but I did get to be the voice for some things in the sister podcast, Cast of Wonders. And the newest of "my" episodes is out now: 

You can listen to the episode at https://www.castofwonders.org/2024/09/cast-of-wonders-604-the-restaurant-of-object-permanence/ and I hope you like it!

Not only is it (finally) Friday, the weekend is also promising to be deliciously free of things that have to be done - so I'm very much looking forward to it. There's one run to the post office to be done and then... two days full of blissfull nothingness. 

Today I had the pleasure of watching the online PhD defense of a friend, who passed with flying colours - to everybody's great delight (and no surprise). And next week, planning and fine-tuning stuff for the Textile Forum will start in earnest!  

It's raining here, quite enthusiastically - which means I'm looking forward to a nice cup of tea. Otherwise today was filled with boring bits of maintenance work, and it feels like it should be Friday already, but I'm somehow pretty sure it isn't. Ah well.

 And as it's raining here, maybe you will enjoy this little video about a traditional rain protection made from palm leaf sheets:

Today I learned that there's a group of scientists doing a Planetary Health Check... at, not surprisingly, https://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org/.  If you'd like to do your daily doom scrolling with some nice flashy red colour, that's a good place to go.

There's a whole news page there as well, with all kinds of news around planetary changes and developments. Including some good news, which is nice to read. They also have a "solutions" section, though that's mostly geared towards larger businesses and policymakers.

Stuff like this makes me both hopeful, because there's people trying to change the tide before it's too late, and hopeless, because it's getting more and more obvious that we're speeding up towards a wall as a species, and still way too little is happening to stop it. That is true both in Germany and globally. Yes, it helps that a lot of us are, as individuals, trying to do eco-friendly stuff, but we also need the governments and really big players to drastically change some things.

And now I'm going to go and cuddle the cat. Because we all know that content cats, much like cat content, makes things better!

I've finally made more photos of things to go into the shop - needles, to be specific.  

When I'm sewing, I like to use non-ferrous needles for wool fabrics, but strongly prefer iron or steel needles for linen. Usually also for silk, but that may be due to the fact that I can usually get thinner needles in iron than in brass or bronze.

Anyways, these are hand-forged in Germany, and they will finally go into the shop in the next few days! 

I'm off to Bamberg today - set-up for the exhibition has started, and I will be there for a day or two to help set up a few things. Already very excited, and looking forward to all this!

Sometimes there's a chance thing that I stumble upon - like today, when I was checking social media, when I found a picture of a curious bridge, with the explanation that this was a special kind of towpath bridge. The design allowed the horse to change sides without unhitching the towline.

The bridge looks really beautiful: 

It's on the Macclesfield Canal in Britain. If you'd like to read more about roving bridges, there's a Wikipedia article about it, and there's a few more images of the bridge, towing horses, and general information about boat towing here at exploringgb.co.uk.