Not much to be vain about, but I blame the sun in my eyes. Anyway, I've been very successful at not getting myself photographed, so this one is the only recent(ish) picture that I can show. It must be about four years old, because I recognize the garden gate of our previous house. The other pictures here are older still and there's usually a child involved. I haven't changed much in the past few years, there's only some more grey in my hair if it's not covered with henna.

Something about myself

Well, this is hard. I'm probably not vain enough for a vanity page - or is that a sure sign of vanity?

I was born in Haarlem (for those of you who have only heard about the Netherlands: it's about ten miles west of Amsterdam, which makes it in the North Sea according to my Pocket Rand McNally World Atlas, but I can assure you that it isn't) in 1958, during a snowstorm that still gets mentioned in the papers every ten years or so. My father worked with the Dutch Railways so we got to live somewhere different every few years - I envied classmates whose aunts and grandparents lived only blocks away and had lived there all their lives, but when I grew up I was very sure that I didn't want to be all too near my parents, so I went back to Haarlem where they didn't live any more.

I can't chalk up as impressive a CV as Boudewijn's: mine is more like lace, a lot of holes held together by some pretty bits. Instead of a career I worked in a supermarket, a warehouse, the typing pool of a mental hospital, two bookshops, innumerable offices in the Netherlands and England, and studied musicology, medieval Latin and Romanian, often two or more of those at the same time.

When Boudewijn and I moved in together in a schoolroom converted to a cramped flat, I decided it was time to settle down. I started to train as a programmer, when translation work came my way and I found out that that was the thing for me. I did manage to learn a smattering of C and Pascal, but it's so rusty (and useless for what I want to do) that I've decided to teach myself Python as soon as I have some time on my hands. Not that that's likely to happen soon, of course.

At the moment I'm trying to divide my time and attention between bringing up three daughters, working on my invented world of Valdyas and its language, writing a novel set in that world, doing volunteer work for our parish (the Orthodox parish of SS. Peter and Paul in Deventer) - mainly maintaining its web site, baking prosphora and being between 20% and 50% of the choir depending on who else turns up -, studying a little theology, running a roleplaying campaign, and all those things too small to mention that still take up most of the available time.

Irina