Spring Comes to the Woods

From my regular walks. Some flowers are in my garden, but the delicate clover blossoms are in the woods, where they’re grabbing the sunlight now before the trees grow their leaves.

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I planted these last autumn, and the package promised almost black flowers. Well, never trust a package, but they ARE lovely.

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Will I ever get people who use poison against dandelion? I hope not.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

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Let’s Play: At the Legoland 1

I have no idea when I became a person who goes to amusement/theme parks. Probably an unexpected side effect of becoming a parent and family cultures. We were not a family that went to theme parks. In fact, the only one I ever visited was the original Legoland in Denmark when I was six years old on a holiday with my parents. Mr’s family usually didn’t have money for a holiday, so their holidays were occasional day trips that included amusement parks*, so when the two merged and the kids learned about the concept of theme parks, we became people who go there.

Since the Easter holidays were badly timed, we decided against a week in nearby France and instead booked a two days trip to the Legoland in Bavaria. The very redeeming feature there is the wonderful Lego creations, which I’ll share with you, together with the anecdotes of the Giliell family at a theme park.

Our first attraction was the Safari, where you sit in little cars that roll on trails through the savannah.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved
Interestingly, the grey animals come out looking like badly pixelated images from the dawn of computer graphics in the pictures.

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You could get a nice shower there.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

 

*We do come from families that are remarkably similar and different at the same time.

Get the Party Started!

It’s Good Friday, which means that in Germany you are officially forbidden to have fun. I’m not joking (that would be illegal), there is a “ban on dancing”: No public dancing (clubs must be closed), no frivolous movies.

Coincidentally, it’s also my grandpa’s birthday today, he would be 98! So instead of mourning a fictional character, let’s celebrate a wonderful man who was a humanist and socialist, always fighting for justice. And the best grandpa of all as he gave us the most precious gift a grandpa can give: time.

Taken in 1993. By the look of the garden and the fact that he’s wearing a dress shirt it could even have been his birthday.
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The smile you see usually spelled mischief. He never lost that boyish joy. I swear he even cheated at chess and that’s a whole other level.

So, here’s to you, grandpa!

It’s also my uncle’s 60th birthday tomorrow and to celebrate with the solemn seriousness the occasion deserves, we made him a piñata:

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He wants money for a new motorcycle helmet and we’ll make him work for it.

So, get the party started!

Tummy Thursday: a Sweet Surprise

Well, do you remember this?

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Which got turned into this:

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And sent off to Germany, where it got turned into this:

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Again, thank you very much, voyager. It is most delicious and no comparison with what you can buy here as maple syrup, no matter how often they say “Canadian grade A”.

And I swear that one day you WILL have the opportunity to share it with me in person.

Wednesday Wings: The Birds of Spring III

An old German children’s song is about the joys of spring, when “all the birds are here already”.

From the list of “blackbird, thrush, finch and starling” you can assume that those birds used to be more migratory or simply tried their luck in the woods back in those days.

There are different thrushes living here, but they are rare visitors to the garden, but can be found in the woods.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

 

The Woman with Lapislazuli in her Teeth

I’ve had this tab open for ages because I really wanted to share this story with you, which is cool and sad atb the same time, as it shows how modern notions of society have clouded the vision on the past.

What Anita Radini noticed under the microscope was the blue—a brilliant blue that seemed so unnatural, so out of place in the 1,000-year-old dental tartar she was gently dissolving in weak acid.

It was ultramarine, she would later learn, a pigment that a millennium ago could only have come from lapis lazuli originating in a single region of Afghanistan. This blue was once worth its weight in gold. It was used, most notably, to give the Virgin Mary’s robes their striking color in centuries of artwork. And the teeth that were embedded with this blue likely belonged to a scribe or painter of medieval manuscripts.

Who was that person? A woman, first of all. According to radiocarbon dating, she lived around 997 to 1162, and she was buried at a women’s monastery in Dalheim, Germany. And so these embedded blue particles in her teeth illuminate a forgotten history of medieval manuscripts: Not just monks made them. In the medieval ages, nuns also produced the famously laborious and beautiful books. And some of these women must have been very good, if they were using pigment as precious and rare as ultramarine.

Read the whole story here.

Monday Mercurial: Bee happy!

Apparently, one side of our garden has been overtaken by common sand bees/ mining bees, andrena flavipes.

I noticed a lot of activity last week and right now it’s all buzz and swarming. I was at first confused since wild bees are usually solitary and it took me all of my google -fu to find out that the most likely explanation is that it’s a nesting aggregation and the huge traffic we’re seeing right now is the drones hanging around to have a lot of sex before they die, so in a few days the whole thing will be over.

This is a relief because in about two weeks the workpeople will start rebuilding our garden stairs and stuff and I was worried that the bees would get in their way or would have their home destroyed. As far as I’m concerned, having those bees here is like a knighting for my garden as an insect friendly space.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

At work!

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A different kind of wild bee.

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That fruit tree is currently BUZZING.

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New Drawer

It all started with a reasonably small box arriving from the USA. It grew into chaos.

I must say, we are not tidy people. There are folks who are tidy by nature, or who work hard on being tidy, but we are neither. Our time is scarce and we both agree that it can be spent on much better things than cleaning, so we usually put things into the big plastic boxes we use for shopping and every other week I empty them cussing like a sailor. Every once in a while I try out a new system to make being tidier easier, to various degrees of success.

With the resin supplies, I tried different ideas. The last one was putting the stuff into those decorative cardboard boxes you get at Ikea and storing those in an old book chest, but it was too much and also came with lots of searching, so I made another attempt with an Ikea Malm drawer:

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

Everything nice and clean, at least for now.

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Resin, tools, cups. The small scrollsaw that I use for cutting resin is right next to the drawer. Yes, it is full. Much has happened since that first small box.

Friday Feathers: The Birds of Spring

First, a solemn fellow or two. Or proof that life is fucking disappointing, because whenever in  a fantasy novel a crow or raven lands in front of you they have a message from some overlord or lady that sends you off on an interesting quest. All I got was being croaked at.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved