In front of the clothes shop next to the little supermarket I went to because I didn’t want to get wet yet again, cold and all, I saw this:

(thanks, anonymous harpist!)

Playing Greensleeves and other tinkly music of that sort, very melodiously and with obvious dedication and enjoyment.

I stood listening for quite some time, put some money in her hat, and asked if I could take a picture to put on my blog. She said yes. Sadly, I forgot to ask her name.

If this is you and you happen to be reading this, or it’s not you but you happen to know how to contact her, could you drop me a line, please?

The cryptic title will become clear towards the end…

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Now, of course, I find that the design breaks anyway in Firefox because it doesn’t like non-floated and floated pictures side by side. And I don’t want to make the text and the picture one picture, because the text should stay in the middle of its box and the picture shouldn’t leave its position on the right.

And why the text heading shows up with a grey background is a mystery. [ETA: that mystery solved: somehow blosxom thought the heading of the previous article was part of the header; when I let the header inherit the body background, as it ought to, the text heading inherited the div background. Ah well.]

Back to the drawing board once again.

[ETA: made the text-like object float left as a kludge. Don’t make your window too narrow.]

Several people told me that the letters of the subheading were falling out of the header, especially with larger text and/or narrow windows. Making it specialised <h1> without bottom padding and <h2> without top padding instead of <h1> with <br> and a smaller-type <span> fixed part of the problem— Konqueror and Firefox keep <br>-ed text together, with the padding all around the whole thing, Safari puts padding between the lines too. But still the tail of the ‘g’, and especially of the ‘p’, crept into the article space. The header needed to be 200px high because of the picture, so I couldn’t very well let the padding take care of it.

“Make the text a picture too,” my other half suggested. I must admit that I’d thought of that, but I’m usually against pictures-of-text where actual text will do: I feel it’s something that bad (incompetent, not evil) or lazy web designers do. But after some thought I gave in: the heading is now a picture of the previous heading at its best, set on a background of the same colour (#d2cfd8, which I called “ingridgrijs” in kcoloredit), centered in its <div id=”header”> so it stays neatly in the middle on a wider screen. The overall design still breaks at large font sizes —the text runs into the sidebar— but I’ll fix that when I run out of other things to do.

(Also, if you don’t have URW Chancery or Zapf Chancery but rely on your generic cursive font for text headings, the font won’t match; sorry about that. I’ll fix that when font-embedding technology comes of age.

Art class at the Kunstlokaal yesterday, the first (for me) of a new season. I knew about half the students from previous years (Gilles, for one). Of the rest, one was new enough to be uncertain about the actual drawing, but fortunately not about me-in-the-nude. (Strange: I’m not self-conscious at all about being naked in front of a small crowd, but for undressing and dressing I’m glad of the screen; it seems that most models are like that.)

The task set was not just to make a ‘boring’ model-and-background drawing, but to think outside the box: add something unusual, tweak the setting, or make a cutout of only a small part. This last indirectly inspired my blog makeover.

Pictures (commented) after the cut.

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A plethora of cats this time. Two in the town centre (in fact in the same street), two in the “old shell”, the town’s pre-WWII expansion.

The orange tomcat ran up to me on my way to sit for the art class, saying “mrowowow!” and wanting to be petted, not to have his picture taken. Here are the previous efforts, unedited except for resizing:

			(click on the thumbnails for a larger picture)

I still want to bake cupcakes and bring them to your house and pet your cat! Please send me a mail message with your street address.

Here’s the new episode, taking place in Veray. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of all the NPC hangers-on, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.

It all started with the picture at the top right. One of the students in the art class I was sitting for made it, and as I was taking a photograph of it I thought “I want that as an avatar!” But, come to think of it, I don’t currently do much that I need an avatar for, so I’m using it for the blog. It looks much more like me than any photograph I can find: my back and shoulders are quite unmistakable. Thanks, Ingrid!

This morning, instead of going to church —because it was clear that the family cold had caught up with me, my throat didn’t want to sing and my head didn’t want the company of lots of people— I sat down and revamped the whole thing, as I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

I’m still working on a calendar (I do have a plugin that sort of works, but it refused to go back neatly to the page it came from so I got URLs like http://www.valdyas.org/foundobjects/index.cgi/2007/church/2006/, and generated single-article pages without the breadcrumb trail that I’d just been tweaking to look the way I wanted) and on an atom feed to keep the outdated rss 1.0 feed company. Also, I haven’t done the comments page yet, but <sob> I get hardly any comments anyway.

(And just now my other half shows me the page in Safari, where the sub-heading falls out of the header; back to the drawing board!) [ETA: fixed that —the fix is more elegant anyway]

Note: the blog is optimised for Konqueror only. It’s such a personal thing that I think I’m entitled. If you’re an IE user and you think it looks rotten, I recommend upgrading to Firefox; that doesn’t have as pretty a cursive font as Konqueror or Safari, but it was good enough when I looked at it.

For reference: Petrus en Paulus nieuws. If you want to follow what I’ve been doing you may want to open it in a new window, but that should be your choice, not mine.

A while ago the webmaster of another parish sent me, as webmistress of our parish, his changed link. I took the opportunity to check everything on the links page while I was working on it anyway. Several parishes, for some reason mostly in Belgium, turned out to have their website set up as a blog. At first it seemed strange, but it sort of grew on me, and eventually I thought “I can do that too!”

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Someone in Romania googled for ‘lionel rychie’ and, because I have a Useless Blob called Lionel (warning: he’s jumping up and down), and there’s someone called Rychie Korbes in Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, and valdyas.org has a whoppingly high page-rank, the third entry on the results page pointed to the Hans Brinker names deconstruction.

Which the person from Romania proceeded to let Google translate into Romanian.

I happen to be able to read a little Romanian— just enough to see that the English-Romanian Google translation is as hilarious as the Dutch-English one, but not enough to actually correct anything (as I’ve done with other pages of mine that I noticed people had had translated). The universal translator is a long way off yet.

Google does ask “Did you mean: lionel richie” which is probably what the person from Romania was looking for.

To get Rychie Veray (a town: Veray-on-the-Rycha) instead of Rychie Korbes (a girl probably called Rietje) one has to search for ‘lionel rychie veray’, and there’s only one hit for that— well, four if you let it show all the variants. Which is strange, because the Rychie Veray post is much more recent and has been read much more.

This, unlike the previous one, is the answer to the Queen’s letter. Here are the same events related in Cora’s notebook.

She spells “Ceti”, making it plausible that Valdyans will pronounce it with a palatalised /kj/ because /e/ in Ilaini is quite far forward and tends to have that effect; rather like Italian chiesa.

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Gospel of the 14th Sunday after Pentecost:

Matthew 22:1 And Jesus answered and spoke to them again by parables and said: “The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who arranged a marriage for his son, and sent out his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding; and they were not willing to come. Again, he sent out other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed, and all things are ready. Come to the wedding.”’ But they made light of it and went their ways, one to his own farm, another to his business. And the rest seized his servants, treated them spitefully, and killed them. But when the king heard about it, he was furious. And he sent out his armies, destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy. Therefore go into the highways, and as many as you find, invite to the wedding.’ So those servants went out into the highways and gathered together all whom they found, both bad and good. And the wedding hall was filled with guests.
11 “But when the king came in to see the guests, he saw a man there who did not have on a wedding garment. So he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
14 “For many are called, but few are chosen.”

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This letter was in a sealed wrapper with the following text in both Ilaini and trade Iss-Peranian:

To Alysei Athal astin Velain, king of Valdyas, in Valdis. Into his own hands only.

If you can open the seals on this letter leaving it intact and in a state to be read, you are either King Athal and perfectly justified to do so, or you are a spy of much more ability than is fitting for spies and you would do well to report to the King so he can take you into his service. I think, however, that the latter case will not occur.

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Cora —it’s fitting to spell her name as she’s taken to spelling it herself— wrote this before getting the queen’s letter.

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A friend of ours moved to Germany, just across the border. He can still come to church and sing in the choir: there are people in the parish who live in the Netherlands but are farther away.

His house has an orchard. Last year he had a glut of plums and brought bags full to choir practice to give to whoever wanted them (and I had a lot of yummy plum jam!) and this year it was apples.

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They sent a very fast messenger with it and it arrived just in time: she’s about to leave for Veray. Athal had fun preparing the kingly proclamation!

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The old black-and-white cat in the market wouldn’t part from my backpack. The young orange one in the new not-quite-finished shopping mall was eating someone’s discarded lunch.

I’ve never been able to distribute cupcakes for cats’ humans yet, but the offer is still valid: please send me mail with your street address.

… what if all those people who have been finding my web pages by searching for linguistic terms (“nouns and adjectives”, “noun classes”, “relative and reflexive pronouns”) really think it’s an official, scholarly linguistics site? About a language spoken by real live Earth humans? Should I put a disclaimer on every Ilaini page, making it clear that it’s an invented language?

It’s probably an effect of our absurdly high page-rank, which is itself an effect of my other half’s exploits in the KDE community. Whatever people search for that happens to be somewhere on our pages, valdyas.org is likely to turn up on at most the second page.

Eleventh week of Timoine, part II.

Sometimes Khora’s thinking is so alien to me, and yet so plausible, that it seems that all the Valdyans are wrong and should take a leaf out of her book. For instance, about the king’s and Aidan’s sister Ayneth:

She seems very strange to me: she told me she “sneaked away from Valdis” without even taking her leave of the King and Queen. Which also means she did not carry any letters for us! The princess has governed the Kingdoms for Athal when Athal was in Iss-Peran, and perhaps that has tired her out. Whether that is because woman should not govern, or whether it is because she has no husband, and the care of a country is big to carry when one does not have a husband or wife to share the burden with, I do not know.

(In fact she did take her leave of the King and Queen: as soon as she was sure that everything would go right without her she said to them “you can manage, can’t you? I’m off to Turenay, then”. They weren’t writing letters to anyone yet at the time, or she’d have carried them.)

And yes, she was fed up with the regency, and glad to be able to go where she was about to go when she was suddenly called to be regent. Otherwise she’d have gone with Radan, almost two years ago. Now she is indeed tired, not because women shouldn’t govern, or because she has no husband (or wife, indeed; she does have a lover, who is away to the war— it’s the baroness of Lenay); just because she’s nineteen, and was inexperienced when she started, and though she’s a good organiser, organising full-time for a year and a half does tend to wear one out. What she needs is a few solid weeks of no responsibility at all, after which she’ll be so bored that she is bound to think of some undertaking. Perhaps we can have her set up a mail system.

This spans two game sessions, split in the middle of the dinner party.

Here is the letter Serla found (PDF)

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We had to stop in the middle of a scene, but that was Moyri’s scene anyway (that’s why there’s no companion piece from Moyri yet: it will be two parts in one).

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Father T being in Paris with the younger acolytes so they get the chance to serve in the cathedral, we had Father M, our junior priest. He’s been trained in the Serbian church, but recently joined our exarchate and is serving as Fr T’s apprentice. He hasn’t often celebrated the Liturgy on his own yet, perhaps not ever before today.

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This letter was sent a few days after Khora’s and Aidan’s letters.

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Part 8, 11th week of Timoine.

I should really write some longer stuff in order not to look like a Twitter feed, but (quite apart from Real Life and roleplaying) I’m restyling the Ilaini grammar pages and that’s sort of labour-intensive. It does me teach lots of CSS: spiffy table-styles for all occasions.

Also, I’ve been trying to get search working on the webpage, but all I’ve been able to do is make an index, not access it once it was there. Ah well, first things first. In the meantime, if you want to find something, try adding site:valdyas.org/irina to an ordinary Google search.

Here’s part 7 (the first lot was 1 to 6):

Khora’s notebook: tenth week of Timoine.

ETA: now it works. At least it went to the index earlier, not to nowhere.

With the new web design it was easy to stick a statcounter on every page. I’m surprised that my website gets about three times as many hits as my blog (but that won’t keep me from blogging).

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Here is the notebook that Khora has been writing since she started working at the hospital in the second week after the Feast of Timoine. When she writes more, I’ll add it to that page (but notify of it here).

I’m not blogging about headscarves today, but if I were, I wish I’d written this post by Monica. (Except that she likes rock and reggae, and I like folk and renaissance and boogie-woogie; and that I suspect she covers her head full-time whereas I do it only in church)

Both Raisse and Moyri are so pregnant that the adventure has to come to their door…

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