Since then it has been visiting regularly – actually, I think there are two hedgehogs regularly. They always come at dusk, and they seem to just love catfood. They will crunch noisily on the dry food or gobble up wet food with lots of grunting and snorting.

On Tuesday night we saw a tiny hedgehog actually sitting inside the bowl while eating the cat food. It was really cute, but its small size seems a bit worrying because it’s much too small and light to survive the winter. This afternoon it came back to visit in broad daylight while the neighbour and I were chatting outside, and we were both surprised because they are nocturnal and rarely seen before dusk. We fed it some catfood and watched the little guy walking back and forth on the driveway, always sniffing for food but not finishing what was right in front of its nose.

It turns out that at least two of our other neighbours know the little hedgehog as well. Apparently it’s been wandering around on our street in broad daylight, sometimes looking for food but today just lying there, looking very weak. One of the other neighbours gave it some catfood as well, and after that it walked over into our garden.

A little later in the afternoon the hedgehog was once again sitting in the food bowl and eating and was looking a little more perky. The neighbour’s cat and I followed it around a bit until we lost it in a hedge a few houses down the street.

I’m sure that a lot of people are now keeping an eye out for the little hedgehog, but it’s still going to be hard for it to gain enough weight in time for hibernation…

Here it is, with some of the catfood for scale; it’s about 10cm long and weighs about 100g – that would be around 4 inches and 3.5 ounces.

As usual, click for a larger version. André also posted a photo of the little hedgehog.

Click to enlarge.

“Dem jetzigen Urteil nach müssen Aufwendungen für häusliche Arbeitszimmer nun auch dann von der Steuer abgesetzt werden können, wenn das Büro nicht den Mittelpunkt der gesamten Arbeit darstellt. Voraussetzung sei, dass kein anderer Arbeitsplatz zur Verfügung stehe, hieß es zur Begründung.”

Dazu gibt es auch in der Süddeutschen Zeitung einen Artikel:

Schäden auf A 1 in Norddeutschland: Marode Fahrbahn.

Link via Schockwellenreiter, der sich auch mächtig darüber aufregt.

Verkehrsforschung: Flaschen auf die Bauarbeiter. “Verkehrsforscher Michael Schreckenberg über den ganz normalen Wahnsinn in der Hitze des Staus.”

Dorfläden: Selbst ist der Kunde. “Wenn Lebensmittelkonzerne ihre Filialen in Dörfern aufgeben, gründen Bürger zunehmend ihre eigenen Läden.” Von Georg Etscheid.

Afghanistan: “Schießt der Papa auch auf Menschen?” “In Afghanistan erleben deutsche Soldaten den Ausnahmezustand. In Deutschland leben ihre Familien in Angst – so wie die von Matthias Reinz. Ein Protokoll” von Dagmar Rosenfeld.

Hamburger Schulreform: Der Glaubenskrieg. “Sollen Schüler länger gemeinsam lernen? So will es die Politik in Hamburg und NRW. Der Schaden wäre groß.” Von Thomas Kerstan.

Weltaidskonferenz: Einer wurde geheilt. “Mehr als 33 Millionen Menschen sind weltweit mit dem Aids-Virus HIV infiziert. In Berlin gelang Ärzten jetzt ein Wunder.” Von Ulrich Bahnsen.

Die Zeit vom 29. Juli 2010.

Monterey Bay Aquarium: Anthology of Deep Sea Squids. Amazing foootage!

Luke Jerram’s Glass Microbiology:

“These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena. Jerram is exploring the tension between the artworks’ beauty, what they represent and their impact on humanity.”

Links via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

While I was trying new things I thought I’d give free-motion quilting a try. I have a darning foot for my grandma’s machine, but it turns out that free-motion quilting is quite hard if you have to operate the turing wheel with one hand every time you start or stop sewing. This means that you can only hold the quilt with one hand and thus lose a lot of control over it. I tried twelve different designs, some of which I found at Leah Day’s Free Motion Quilting Filler Project and some of which I made up myself. After I had so little success with the darning foot, I changed to the presser foot and had much better results although the going was very slow. The quilting looks alright on the front, but the back shows some minor errors which are very well visible because I used white fabric for the back.

Another new thing I tried was sewing one-step binding on by machine. It worked for the most part, but the mitered corners look a bit bulky because of the seam allowances from the two colours that meet at each corner.

All in all, I think it turned out alright, and I learnt a lot while sewing this 60 x 80 cm (24 x 32 inch) quilt. Here’s a photo, but it’s a bit dark because the sun was already setting. (Yes, the grass in our garden is very dry, we seem to have a bit of a heat wave at the moment…)

“The ISS is now so large that it takes astronauts about six minutes to go between the two farthest points on the space station — and that is by ‘flying,’ not walking. Enjoy this video tour of the interior of the ISS, filmed earlier this year.”

It’s about 150 x 200 cm (59 x 79 in), and the pattern is called Plain Spoken. It’s from Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr’s book The Modern Quilt Workshop.

The colours of this quilt were inspired by the colours in our living room, especially the couch, pillows and the table runner:

Now I’ve got to make up my mind about the backing fabric (I’m also going to include at least one row of the front pattern, since I had to re-sew four of them because of a difference in seam allowance), the binding and the thread colour and pattern for the quilting. Any suggestions?

The Plain Spoken quilt pattern seems to be very popular – take a look at other people’s Plain Spoken quilts on Flickr or Dioramarama’s Modern Quiltalong. There also is a Flickr group with photos of other quilts from The Modern Quilt Workshop, the Modern Quilt-Along.

(Wow, three posts in one day, that’s more than I usually manage to do in a month these days!)

“BBC World Service has over 500 audio documentaries you can download. The subject matter is incredibly wide ranging, for example, internet cafés, the influence of Islamic art on William Morris, South African female AIDS activist Thembi Ngubane, Yiddish, the importance of cows, novelist Chinua Achebe, financial risk management, Obama as an intellectual, the physical and emotional effects of a car crash and many, many more. If the quantity and variety are overwhelming, you can subscribe to a podcast, which delivers a new documentary to you every single day.”

I plan to listen to some of the documentaries for a start, but have also subscribed to A History of the World in 100 Objects – the first 30 objects/episodes are online so far, and the next set of programmes begins on 17 May.