This is going to be a massive post about … sheep! Yes.

My grandfather used to own a couple of sheep (5 or 6?) so I should have been able to form a valid opinion an these animals but to be honest, sheep have always been a bit of a mystery to me. They were just standing in a shadowy corner of the field, slowly chewing their daily doses of grass. And that’s it. They don’t exactly have a wide range of facial expressions and they aren’t really as soft as you’d think.

And then there’s Murakami Haruki who made it know to the book-reading public that sheep are, yes, mysterious creatures. I highly recommend Hitsuji wo meguru bôken/A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance to anyone who hasn’t read it yet to see what I mean.

Do I think sheep are cute? No. Do I find them disgusting? Not at all. Do I think they pose a threat to those of us with a historical sensibility, especially if they have a star-shaped mark on their backs? Hm, maybe. Do I find them a bit fascinating? Yes, certainly. Do I think that it’s work collecting anything and everything related to them? Yes, absolutely!!

This is what one small area of our kitchen looks like:

Now, this is what our kitchen table looks like as a background for my growing collection of sheep mugs:

Aren’t they true pieces of art? All of these were bought in the past year and I hope to hunt out a lot more in the years to come :)

PONY BROWN, one of those great little Korean stationary designers, made a really great window stickers set that also featured a white sheep with a black face, my favourite kind when it comes to sheep. One of them went on the door of my room at my parents’ house, along with a sign consisting of alphabet stickers which I arranged to say “Schafzimmer” which is a little play on words because “Schlafzimmer” is German for “bedroom”, “Schlaf” means “sleep”, but “Schaf” (without the “l”) means “sheep”, so it means something like “sheep room”, or “the sheep’s room” :)

It looks like this:

And Topshop has awesome sheep ankle socks this autumn. They were available in boring grey, in red (which weren’t in stock anymore when I wanted to buy them) and in pink. I bough a pair in pink. They have white sheep with black faces and black sheep with white faces ♥

And that’s enough sheepish nonsense for today.

I’m too busy to make a new layout for this place (and I still like it a lot too), but after the (invisible) WordPress update earlier this week I modified the blog code a bit based on the new WordPress version so we now have tags for every post and a tag cloud in the sidebar. Yay!

I’ve sorted through the huge backlog of entries and have tagged everything back until the beginning of 2005, I think. I might tag older posts whenever I have some time to spare. Going through all the older posts, I’ve realized how much I used to blog until four years ago, before I moved to Berlin. I don’t think I’ll ever again have that much time to spend on the internet like back then, but oh well, it’s not that I’m not happy with the way things are now either.

Updating this blog to latest version of WordPress: done.
(Should have done it ages ago, it looks so much better and is so much easier to use than the one I had installed previously. But I’m always worried about the update process going wrong or losing my database or something so I try to postpone updates as long as possible.)

I have nothing really important to say at the moment, except that I’m very sad and worried and at the same time I feel completely powerless because I’m not feeling sad or worried about myself. So there’s nothing I can do except write this cryptic paragraph down which must be frustrating for you, the readers, and I’m sorry about that.

Tomorrow’s November 12. End of the ultimatum.