We are going skiing for about a week, in a village in Upper Austria, so this site won’t be updated again until around 8 February, when I hope to have some pictures of the trip. I am not much of a skier, having wrecked a knee skiing about 10 or 15 years ago, so I plan to accompany Gamma to her ski lessons while everyone else is on the slopes (it is common for Austrian kids to start at 3 or 4, so at about four and a half she’s not too young) and spend any spare time rewriting a novel or drinking Hefeweizen beer.

I appreciate you coming here to read this stuff, and even more I appreciate those of you who take the time to leave a comment or write a mail. Until I get back, I recommend that you visit some of those great sites in my right hand sidebar. I love all of them equally, of course, but have lately been re-discovering the sites I have linked to the longest, from the very beginning of Feral Living way back when (sometimes I have the feeling that I have been writing here for ages). Sites like Riley Dog or So Blue It’s Black. The latter is actually defunct now, Moira has stopped updating it and has started a new literature blog, which I recommend highly. Other old links that I still enjoy a lot are A Blog With a Name that Keeps Changing, Words Mean Things, Anti-Drug, Something New to Look at Every Day, Dangerous Monkey, Bauke, Garden of Eden, and Uren.Dagen.Nachten, which is in my opinion the best European blog, even if you don’t speak Dutch. I am mentioning these particular blogs not because they are better than the other ones in my sidebar, but just because I haven’t talked about any of them in a long time, although they are still all very good and worth reading, so go there now.

Finally, I’d like to mention that the Shoe Project is not dead, and is scheduled for a relaunch soon, like in February or March of this year. There will be a few slight design changes and it will have a new URL, all as yet to be determined. Besides 150×150 images of shoes, I hope to include also a short (optional) text by the contributor about the picture.

See you in a week.