random

We spent the weekend at the wedding of a friend of ours, where Kevin was the best man. Here's the two boys together before the ceremony itself:



The weather forecast was rather bad and although we didn't get weather as bad as we might have, it did rain on the post-ceremony photographs which was a shame! The day was great all round, the happy couple were infectiously happy and everyone else was dressed up and being happy along with them. There are more photos on my flickr account - although in a rather wonderful testament to what a good time I had last night, I don't have any photos taken later than the cutting of the cake. The evening event was a ceilidh and I literally danced the night away, not realising Kevin wasn't taking any photos either, so hopefully someone else did!

Congratulations to Andrew and Rachel, here's wishing them a long and happy marriage.

Here's the view from my hotel balcony yesterday evening:



So far the Netherlands is a great experience, my colleagues are friendly and its a lovely country to visit.

Whenever I attend a conference or other geeky gathering (GeekUp for example) I'm often asked for my card ... but I don't have one. I don't have work business cards, because only sales people need those, and I don't have personal ones because I don't freelance (or not usually). I finally cracked though and ordered cards from moo.com as recommended by many many people. Here they are:



On the other side I put the angel motif made for me by Gretchen from www.girlscantwhat.com, which I love and use as my online persona in a lot of places. She didn't quite fit and I didn't want to shrink her so instead she peeps out at you:



So if you see me around, and you'd like my card, try asking me again if I have one :)

We are cat parents. Orbit is a gorgeous glossy and slightly ditsy boy cat belonging to Cally who has gone abroad for a while, so Orbit has come to live with us. I'm not sure exactly how he feels about this so far, its much noiser here than he's been used to, but he's a cute guy and very welcome.

Here he is:



I've also started a flickr set of Orbit.

I was going to skip the essay thing and just write a quick "Happy New Year" post, but then I read last year's entry and couldn't help remembering how far I've come in what is really a short space of time. Two years ago I had no job and was about to move to Leeds, and this time last year we were in despair over the house buying problems.

Career

This year I changed jobs in the spring, to go and work for a small web agency (they think they're a digital marketing agency but I'm not convinced) as a web developer. More interesting than the job side of things is that this year, I met the PHP community.

PHP People

I haven't met the whole community, and hardly any of them in person, but meet them I did. Through phpwomen.org I have a mentor, the lovely Ligaya and she initially suggested I spend more time in IRC since that's where things happen. Usually I can be found on freenode in the #phpc and #phpwomen channels. In February I met Cal Evans, at the PHPLondon conference. This was a fabulous conference and I also met a few other people, including monxton from phpwomen and also Rasmus Lerdorf (father of PHP) although I was too overwhelmed to say anything to him! Since then I've made loads of friends and learned a lot from this community. In November I attended the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, and wrote about it for phpwomen. While there I attended some good sessions (of both conference and drinking varieties) and also got to meet lots of people - some friends that I knew already but hadn't met in real life, and some other new friends. I know the people I met this year will be a big influence on 2008 for me.

Home

This time last year we'd had all our belongings in storage for almost a year and had two house sales fall through in four months. Well, it took another failed sale and a full 5 months but we finally did it and bought our first house in May 2007. For the full saga (and a saga it was) read the house category posts, I warn you it does take some reading! Anyway we are now in possession of a 4-bedroomed house, set over four floors, with two bathrooms, gardens and a garage. Notably it has the kitchen in the basement, which floodes, and we bought the contents of the house, which we hadn't really planned for. Since buying the house we have had people in to patch up the roof and guttering, fit central heating, and totally rewire the house. We're now at a point where the brick dust and missing floors are gone and we can start getting the place straight. Plastering, carpentry and decorating skills are now in demand and at some point we need to figure out how to choose, purchase and lay floors. At the moment the house looks like a disaster area but the place is really growing on me and we really are making progress, even if that's not obvious to outsiders at the moment!

Website

Last year I did a whole round-up of the site and how I was getting on with it. I can't see me getting around to it this year, mostly because its not that interesting but rest assured that the bulk of my traffic is visiting the recipe pages! Here's a quick snap of the dashboard of the google analytics tool for this site, things seem to be a bit quiet over the summer, but maybe that's because I posted less at that time.

In Conclusion

2007 was a very good year, here's to 2008 :)

Tomorrow marks the winter solstice, the shortest day. Already we've reached the deepest, darkest part of the year (and its not all that dark, I'm only 53 degrees above the equator). Now begins the longer days and lighter nights, taking us through to summer time - yay :)