War of the Words (by sarah)

Saturday (20th April 2013) will see me taking part in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Slam! It takes place at Copa in Cheltenham and is £7 or £5 for concessions.

I am desperately trying to memorise some newer poems for this! If anybodies about came and see some fantastic poets (not me the other guys!).

My back is fixed! (by alaric)

Over the past few years, I've been getting worsening pain in my lower back. An ache just to the right of my spine (where it joins to my pelvis), with shooting pain down to my right knee; sometimes it would be so bad I couldn't stand up straight. At first this would only happen if I'd had a hard weekend carrying boxes or doing long drives, but it became more and more frequent, until I was having to carefully watch my posture in every aspect of my life for fear of triggering it. Read more »

My Little Explorer (by sarah)

Mary loves getting herself ready for outings.

She knows we take supplies, like blankets and picnics and of course a walking stick!

Red Nose Day 2013 (by sarah)

Catching up on all my photos again :)

We had a three fold Red Nose Day spanning several days!

I made cakes for the Cubs. Red nose cake pops, cherry scone things which were diary and wheat free along with the dinosaurs, and cupcakes in red cake cases.

I made up games and craft activities such as get the red noses in the hoops, draw the red nose on Alaric, make a fluffy red nose and so on.

Then Friday Mary had to go to Nursery in red spotty clothing - Al whisked her away before I could take a photo :( But I did manage to get Jeany and her Wacky Hair :)

The it was off to Centre Arts who were doing Red Nose Day stuff in the shopping centre in Cheltenham. there was a cake competition which I had forgotten all about!

The Giant Cupcake was baked by Vanilla Pod Bakery and was raffled off for £45. The Red Nose was made by one of the ladies at the centre and was actioned for £20.

Recipes for my bakes will be appearing on Salaric Cooking.

Lojbani Chicken or jbojipci (by sarah)

Just before we moved to the new house I came up with the idea of Lojbani Chicken, a character who would help Jean or anybody else understand and learn Lojban but I wanted it to be more than that. I wanted some sort of all languages web-comic thing which is obviously very complex and so it never happened - there were some biro sketches in the back of a note book and that was that.

Then I saw this year is Lojban's 25th and so I sat down and revisited the idea of my chicken. The result was more biro sketches and Mother Lang and her two daughters Coni and Nat, they live on a farm where Lojbani chicken is one of the animals.

A full first story will hopefully be appearing on Wiggly Pets soon :)

Once the image above is digitally edited (this is just what I russeled up using my new birthday pens and colouring pencils.) there will be speech bubbles saying such things as fi'i - meaning welcome.

Other existing characters include Esperanto Cat and Toki Pona kitten. I haven't decided yet what creatures should represent any of the natural languages - mainly due to worrying about offending people :/ I might do something like have made up creatures for natural languages and real animals for the constructed languages - suggestions welcome :)

I am hoping to produce some more of the characters as part of the 100 birds in 100 days challenge I am currently doing over on Orange Monster.