Alaric’s projects for this year (by alaric)

This year's going to be pretty busy with settling into the new home, but I have a few projects.

1. Finish the ring casting I nearly finished before the move. That's a priority.
2. Resurrect my aluminium foundry. In particular, it's our bronze wedding anniversary, so Sarah's going to design a pattern for a sundial, which I will cast in Aluminium bronze, a nice alloy that I can make myself from my scrap aluminium and bits of old plumbing...
3. Continue with minor stuff on Ugarit, but as a milestone, build the distributed storage backend, which will rock.
4. Work on my wearable computer project. No specific milestone for this, as it's currently a long drawn out research/prototyping phase as I sort out many details.

Wish me luck... I usually suffer from "all my weekends getting eaten up", but as my New Year's Resolution has been to spend at least one day every two weeks doing something fun with my children, I'm going to be booking weekend days in my calendar in advance through the year for that and my own projects. Before they get filled up!

Mary’s First Word (by sarah)

Mary has been imitating sounds for months but as expected of a bilingual baby she hasn't really produced words with meaning they are just copies of what we are saying. She like Jean has been raised with baby sign as well so there is no real incentive to talk early.

But as we home in on her 1st birthday she has started to point at the cats and say yip! we'd say cat, she'd say yap. And then today she came out with "There's a cat!" no a word but a sentence - true she does not pronounce a hard T on the end of cat but it doesn't stop there - she then went on to say "Oh dear!" when she dropped her bottle.

Then we got the classic "NoNoNoNooooooono!" and so forth - so I have a baby that has gone from just babbling and copying sound (though in fairness she does 'sing' alot) to on that is stringing words together! I have no idea if this is advance or not - Jean did something similiar after her initial imatation of the word hurrah! She then didn't say anything until the January after her first birthday when I bought my red glittery shoes home - but again she went for a dramatic no talking - babbling sense.

So we are very proud of little Mary 🙂

The Emperors New Cupboard Under The Stairs (by sarah)

We are going to build a cupboard under the stairs so the area where the cupboard is going to be is now referred to as The Cupboard Under The Stairs which was fine until my brother came to vist and pointed out that there was no cupboard under the stairs!

So it has now become known as The Emperors New Cupboard Under The Stairs after the story of the Emperors New Cloths.

Parallel Worlds Collide (by sarah)

Sometimes I do find myself wondering what would have happened if Alaric hadn't given up the syntherziser and focused on just programming or had taken it back up instead of metal work - as it is he is talking about maybe getting one for the music room when we have more money/one comes up on Freecycle.

Well a few days ago a friend posted a link on my face book saying doesn't this guy look alot like Al. And I got a glimpse of that other world - well if Alaric was Australian and had stolen Phil Collins voice but still liked all the types of music he does and had me make the videos (in this parallel world I'd have done my back-up career and ended up as an animator/special effects bod).

The guy is called Goyte and it is very surreal for me to watch this - its a spot the difference puzzel! Watch this video

As it is I feel very tempted to make a parody of a bits of this guys songs including my little Wiggly Pets sitting in tripods holding passport photos of Alaric out in front of them. What this video to see what I'm talking about.

New Kettle! (by sarah)

This is our new kettle 🙂 Whilst pregnant I set fire to the old yellow one we had in The Bakery and whilst moving we wanted to keep a kettle at each house. So we went into town to buy some more crates for moving with and popped into Morrisions to buy some dins only to find that in the New Year Madness they had reduced this kettle down to £6!

Look at the way it gleams!

The cats like it

It looks so pretty and proper in place on the cooker 🙂