Irina's Front Page

Welcome!

You've probably followed a link in a newsgroup to find out who is behind that signature. Here's my vanity page with something about me and a small photo gallery. As we have a digital camera these days, the photo gallery may get larger, but I don't promise anything.

New!

I've finally succumbed to the urge to blog, though I don't feel I'm part of a community by doing it and I don't want to commit myself to an update rate. So here's Found Objects. (While you're about it, have a look at Fading Memories, Boudewijn's ditto)

Things I do

My great passion is the imaginary kingdom that I've been developing since the early nineteen-nineties: Valdyas, as well as its language, Ilaini ("the languages").

I've written one novel set in Valdyas, which is languishing in a publisher's slush pile at the moment. A second novel is just past the 50K mark. If you want to read something by me while the novel is in abeyance, here are some stories in Dutch set in the same world. I've tried and failed to translate them into English; if you think you can, and you'd like to do it, please drop me a line.

I read. I'm active in the Orthodox church. I play and run roleplaying games.

I'm also a parent, a translator and a cook/baker; no links for that, though. The kids may put up their own pages soon (they have a rope-skipping page already, in Dutch) and they have designed and built LegoHack.

Here is a recipe for Valdyan nut balls and one for Turkish lentil soup (suitable for fast days). I'm working on a real recipe section.

Sort-of-technical information

I'm converting these pages to CSS, after resisting for a very long time because I erroneously thought that it was a Microsoft thing. Shame on me. It should still be possible to read almost everything with a text-only or text-to-speech browser. If you have any trouble at all, tell me what the problem is and I'll try to help.

All the new pages are in charset ISO-8859-15 instead of ISO-8859-1, making it possible to use the euro sign: € (not that I need it anywhere).

I don't plan to use frames, applets or cookies in the normal pages, now or ever. The blog has its own scripting which I don't have so much control over; if you get a cookie from rempt.xs4all.nl, it's OK to accept it because we won't use it to track or spam you.

Web site portfolio

This is just a ploy to get spiders and crawlers to notice my other sites, of course. Though it isn't really necessary for the parish: try googling for "orthodoxe parochie deventer". Also, this is one thing I know I'm good at, and I want to show off.

Orthodoxe Parochie Deventer - our parish
Raad van Kerken Deventer - the local Council of Churches
Volksdansvereniging Chaverim - my folk dancing group (I'm the woman in the green calf-length trousers)

Administrivialities

All external links on the sandy-background pages were valid on 30th March 2000, those on the green-background pages on 10th April 2002 or later, if that is stated on the page. If you find one that doesn't work, please tell me. External links are in italics, unless I've forgotten.

If your bookmarks point to www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/<whatever>, you might consider changing that to rempt.xs4all.nl/<whatever>. The valdyas.org pages are updated more frequently.

Please read the FAQ

... if there's anything you wonder about, for instance why there's no game information on the Valdyas pages or whether I'm Russian.