My 28th Birthday (by sarah)

For my 28th birthday Alaric made me a butterfly cake out of the left over swiss roll and chocolate from christmas!

I'll be posting about this over on Salaric cooking for those interested in how he did it 🙂 But there was a lot of chocolate involved and Jeany got to lick the pot out - eek!

After she was hyper from that we sent her off to a place called Magic Land in Cirencester for her friend Jame's birthday. She had a great and exhusting 2 hours jumping on soft play kits and the like. Al had forgotten the camera so I photographed my boots and things - I love having a camera again. But I was sad as I thought I had lost all the cool pictures of Jeany sledging as the camera was only showing 2 pictures but it wasn't - it was becuase Al had put my birthday presant in the camera - an SD card that has like 1600 picture capacity on it!

The camera was only showing me what was on the new card and not what was on the internal memory!

He also got me a card reader so I can extract not only these picks easily but all those that are traped on the cards of the old cameras!

I had a nice long bath with defoliating face scrub whilst they were at the party too. Then they came back and Jean had more things than she went with!

Each child had got a presant and Jeans was this book of paper dolls you construct and then dress up - we sat infront of the fire on her road map mat and made the two princesses from it! I'll do a bigger post about them on Salaric Carft along with the lovely Japanese stickers Andy gave her which she decided to stick half of in my diary as she knows I love stickers 🙂 We also made some pictures out of them that are now on the fridge - I'll put these on Salaric Craft too 🙂

Al made me a cheese fondue with crusty bread and raw cualiflower, he didn't get time to cut the other vegtables up but there turned out to be just enough for the fondue dipping anyway!

Barbara came round and we opened a bottle of fizzy wine we'd got as a christmas presant (the fondue was made with christmas presant wine too).

I got out the fluted glasses from the wedding as I now have them back in the house and no longer in storage!

Andy also sent back a birthday presant with Al for me which was four lovely slate coasters which come from the same place as our slate place mats and that we got as a wedding presant. I was so excited about this I decided I should lay the table with the slate stuff purely so I could use them! I also got out the four butterfly napkin rings my brother and his girlfriend got me last year!

Al bought the butterfly cake out - me and Jean blew the candles out and Barbara took her piece over to the Mill to eat but even though I warned her the candle holders where still on the cake she managed to chomp one of them up which she duly returned as her TV wasn't working and she needed Al to go and fix it for her.

Me and Al then put Jean to bed who had had two party loads of cake and sugar and was very very tired! We then played chinese checkers - or attempted to work out from the rules how to play, I eat some chocolate fondue that had ment to be desert to the meal and went to bed.

the end

Birthday Blues (by sarah)

I wasn't going to do anything for my Birthday but Al wanted to do me a meal and so Fondue was settled upon and then we invited Barbara and I thought it would be nice if I could have a friend there. So I texted my friend Andrew who lives in Cheltenham on the off chance he'd be about as he tends to go home to Essex at the weekend.

He didn't respond which was fair enough as it was short notice but the thing is I almost texted Alex I had some how forgotten. I've been so busy the last few months and then I felt bad and cried.

Jean and Al spent most of the day at one of Jeans little friends parties and so I spent the afternoon photographing boots:/

Barbara then forgot that it was my birthday and thought Jean was being silly when she said it was mummy's birthday. She then disappeared just after cake (taking the cake with her) to watch TV.

Al had got me lots of yummy things for a chocolate fondue and I thought Yay! But he doesn't eat chocolate and I discovered that chocolate fondue isn't that much fun unless your sharing it.

I then realised that I've been here for three birthdays and I know know one my age, Andrew is planing to move away and Alex is gone. I've made friends but there not the same age as me and though it may seem mean I need people who are the same age as me - people who have the same type of worries and the like.

I'm sure were I've gone wrong.

Sorry I will do a nicer post about my birthday tomorrow.

Sledging and the end of Chistmas (by sarah)

I ment to put these up sooner but forgot - Jean was finially coxed onto the seldge. Here are the photos of her being dragged around by Barbara.

After that it was time for the decorations to come down, Jean helped me until she decided there was enough tinsel to make a nest out of and went to sleep!

I think Jean enjoyed this Christmas. This was origonally supposed to go up on the sixth so no panicking out there!

Web-Empire (by sarah)

As some of you may know I have being doing my MRes at college part time but I have also been attending business courses and mentor sessions set up for me by the Prince's Trust and as a result have steamed ahead with my business idea.

I am now officially a Web-consultant and designer and thanks to skills I learnt or at least found out about during my undergraduate and my Masters I have discovered I am better (To my horror) than alot of the compertition. If one more person asks me if I use dreamweaver I may just scream!

Ok so I know I am lucky in the fact I have the techno guru at my disposial if I ever get stuck but to be honest it is all alot simpler than I thought it would be.

So here is my Website, the business is called Web-Empire and is a unique blend of art and technology just about right for my skill set I would say. You see I've had a eureka moment in that I feel alot of technical and sciencetific stuff is inaccessible to people mainly due to artificial barriers of what people expect things to be like - I will no doubt do a longer post on this at some point (if I get the time with all those nice new customers I'm hoping to get).

I want to make things accessible and I want people to lose this concept of dichotomy which allows dangerous psuedo science to slip in.

I'm hoping that web-empire will be a nice approachable business which will help its customers 🙂

I hope you all like the web-site feed back is always appreciated. It also has a blog where nice little articles on the world of the web will go, along with book reviews on web, business and art stuff. Not to mention I am constructing a hopefully useful glossary.

Information Request II (by sarah)

A little while ago I requested information on cooking and recipes this time it is of a more technical nature - infact what I would love very much is information on the history of computing, electronics or anything loosely related to them 🙂

I want to make Web-Empires blog and glossary a proper useful resource for people to use plus it is sort of related to a novel I am writing!

I hope this isn't me being too cheeky!

If any one can recomend some books I could read as well that would be much appreciated 🙂