Unbelievably we’ve been married two years already! We’ve had a nice chilled weekend to celebrate and yesterday ended up in Selborne, where there just happened to be cream teas available in the tea parlour at Gilbert White’s house:
| Year | Gift |
|---|---|
| 0.5 | Hot chocolate |
| 1 | Cake |
| 2 | Cream tea |
Instead of a honeymoon to look forward to this year, we should finally be moving house this month, if all goes well! The results of the survey arrived on Saturday and at least there were no surprises there.
After a year of weekly Friday anniversaries and a six month hot chocolate anniversary, we’ve made it to our first real anniversary! After an inspired mini wedding cake from Jo I think the new symbol for first anniversaries should definitely be cake!
Big wedding cake:
Mini anniversary cake (genius!):
Very much looking forward to elevenses… and of course another year with Jo!
I seem to have been far too busy to get any time for blogging lately. Actually, it’s the finishing off posts that I’ve been having trouble finding time for; I do still keep adding to the number of unpublished posts, with this selection boosting the number of drafts to 38:
Instead of finishing any of those off I’ve been…
We’ve been married almost a year so it seemed like it would be a good idea to finally do something with some of our favourite photos!
The canvas has arrived, and looks great, but it’s still sealed in a back to keep all the dust off from…
We have two front doors; one on the outside and one on the inside. I added the outer door not long after moving in to create small enclosed entrance hall/porch, which has been great for shoes, coats, assorted junk, and getting rid of anyone trying to sell something without letting out all the heat in the process. The old front door has needed a coat of paint ever since, but because I never look at the outside much I only painted the inside, until now. As a result, most of the house is currently covered in dust from all the sanding!
A bit of an impulse buy, but after gradually increasing the number of boxes I have plugged in all the time (ironic since it all started with the Current Cost meter!), I’ve cut down a few with a FRITZ!Box. Pretty happy with it so far: it’s a neat combination of ADSL wireless router, file/media server and DECT base station. Plus, thanks to a tip off from Jee Labs, @jthouse will soon be following @andy_house‘s lead and sending me an SMS if I miss any calls.
Apart from being in German, the FRITZ!Box media server works very well with the Joggler, so I’m still really happy to keep using the default Joggler software. For now that is: the Joggler appears to have been discontinued, and my question to O2 about creating Joggler apps seems to have vanished as well. I didn’t have much/any luck using Flash Develop, which is a shame because it seems to be a decent IDE, but Nick has been getting on pretty well on Linux. His Joggler music app looks very promising.
I have been keeping an eye on various Joggler hacks and the first one to have me seriously tempted, is Opera mobile running on the Joggler. I did briefly boot Ubuntu off a USB stick, but I don’t think it’s worth it just yet. On the other hand, Jolicloud does look like it might be ideally suited to running on the Joggler, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work. I’m still hopeful that someone will get Jolicloud booting on the Joggler though; any ideas?
Actually, I think Sony have got a much better idea of how devices like the Joggler should work with the Dash. Getting something like that running on the Joggler would be awesome.
@lauracowen sparked off some great discussions on the Homecamp group, and I definitely like some of the ideas in Ian’s blog post. I had a chat to Laura on Friday, and the idea of a ‘boost’ is probably a good starting point. I’m sure that would help lower my gas bill, although I’m wondering whether an even lower tech solution might work with my existing heating controls. We often turn on the hot water to top it up, but forget to turn it off again. So, since there is currently no boost button, I’m tempted to just get a basic timer to sit next to the controller to set a reminder to come back and turn off the hot water after a short period. Or I guess I could even use the kitchen timer that’s already in the microwave.
We spent yesterday in London, mainly to see The Woman in Black, which was excellent. It was hard to work out which of the blood-curdling screams were from the audience and which were part of the production! We also had some time to visit the National Gallery, which brought back a few memories of art lessons.
See how much things have changed since I ruined Turner’s Ulysses deriding Polyphemus with an oil rig?!
Really enjoyed Inception although, now I think about it, it’s riddled with plot holes that I never noticed at the time. Guess that’s pretty normal for dreams!
I’ve also been posting on the MDM Workbench blog, so there’ll be fewer work related posts on here now. (Still figuring out how to decide which blog to pick for MDM posts.)
This weekend was our six month wedding anniversary, unfortunately Schott’s Almanac was no help at all working out what the traditional six month wedding anniversary symbol is, only starting after a whole year with cotton. Since there doesn’t seem to be an agreed upon six month symbol, I choose hot chocolate after we enjoyed one at the end of a very relaxing afternoon retracing part of our wedding tour of Hampshire. If you’re in the area, I thoroughly recommend The Old House Hotel and the Marriott Meon Valley; they were both superb on our wedding day.
(I was pretty pleased with the results of tinkering with Open Street Map for our wedding invitations although, after stories of some of the detours our guests took, it may not have been worth it!!)
It’s been a mad six months which seem to have flown past with a brilliant honeymoon in Canada, (unsuccessfully) trying to move house and playing in the snow!
Looking forward to the next six months!
Well, married for almost two months but finally got round to posting something after the honeymoon, choosing photos, and post-wedding distractions! After much planning (largely by Jo of course!) the day was fantastic- it couldn’t have gone better. The main thing of course was that we did indeed get married… in Basingstoke. Admittedly not the obvious choice, but being a registry office helped the budget, and it was the nicest one we found:
It even had a park right next door, perfect for some wedding photos, for which we were very lucky to have a photographer in the family! The only slight downside to Basingstoke was where to go after getting married. By some amazing luck we finally stumbled on The Old House Hotel which wasn’t too bad a journey- we didn’t lose any of the guests at least, although I think there were a few sat nav inspired scenic routes along the way!
The next hop on our touring wedding was much shorter: just round the corner to the Meon Valley hotel, where I have very fond memories of an enormous chocolate cake. Special thanks to Jo’s sister’s boyfriend for suggesting ‘The Final Countdown’ as the last song, and Nick the DJ for actually playing it- that’ll teach us not to have a play list! (Well, no play list but Abba and Oasis were banned!)
Thanks to everyone who came to celebrate with us, making it such a wonderful day.
Reentry from honeymoon to real life was softened a bit by this…
…which was waiting for us when we got home this morning. Looks like the cake fairy got in while we were away! And the milk fairy had restocked the fridge so we could start making up for missed tea without any shopping delays!
It’s been a fantastic September so far, but it’s not over yet. The rest of the month I will mostly be:
But first, of course, I’ll be eating cake! (And sleeping!)
Now that they have all been sent (hopefully!) here’s a snap of one of our wedding invitations, which we prepared earlier…
They also include a lovely map, thanks to OpenStreetMap, and a very detailed information sheet, just in case the internet encounters a terrible catastrophe and stops working in the near future. If you ever decide to make your own wedding invitations, I would definitely recommend keeping it simple… or just invite 3 people! Actually, deciding who to invite has been the only stressful bit of the process so far- I would love to invite everyone but that’s not really an option, in any economic climate, not just the current one.
Took a while but finally 74 invitations (and one prototype) have all been hand crafted…
…and with plenty of time to spare! Just have to write them all and post them now. Hope there are enough!!
Very happy to report that Jo and I got engaged yesterday. From what I remember, one knee was involved and, after confirming it was for real, Jo replied, “Of course I will!” Here’s where I proposed:
Jo looking shocked
Nice weather as you can see!
No planning for the actual event has occurred but I’m sure there’ll be a few more posts on the subject along the way.
Notes from a small field 