Sunny Friday.

It's getting hotter and hotter outside; too hot to think or to do a lot of stuff. Even the cat prefers being inside today, out of the sun and heat.

In fact, she prefers lying on my arms. As I sit at the desk, trying to work. If she weren't so cuddly and cute as she's curling up between the computer and myself, with her one paw on my one forearm and her shoulder and head on the other... it's not conducive to good and typo-free typing, though. Especially not when her paw is on the touchpad, doing things with the cursor it's not supposed to do.

Thank goodness it's Friday, though, and there's an end of the week's work in sight. On the list for today, among other things: Looking at pictures from 12th and 13th century German manuscripts, preferably pictures that show peasants. The image database at the British Library is my friend for this, for now.

Searching takes time, though. Especially if you want to make sure you get as complete a picture as possible - because then you can't narrow down the search terms too much. After all, the search terms only find the things other people have identified and tagged as such a thing.

This means you might find mis-labeled items and miss a lot of unlabeled ones. So I learned a long time ago that if you want to have the bigger picture, or a proper overview, nothing beats using a very general search term and then just going through every single entry in the massive list of hits. Yes, it is a nuisance, but I have hit a lot of paydirt with this method.

So, even though I cannot search for "peasant" and get all the things I want to find, advanced search is still really, really helpful. I'm narrowing down place and time, and then I look at the pictures. Which is a nice task for a hot Friday afternoon...