Matt & Kat

There is nothing like coming home when you’ve been away for ages.
I’m now 28 weeks pregnant, two weeks since pPROM and I was released from the hospital yesterday woop! I’m still taking things very easy, monitoring for any changes and visiting the day clinic twice a week so they can keep track of things… But I’m home which is fantastic!!!

Our scan yesterday showed Baby Brown is currently 2.5 pounds which is the expected amount of growth since the last scan and within the normal ranges for 28 weeks. Although there’s much less fluid around him this is obviously to be expected since the waters have broken. Baby still has some little pockets of fluid and although it continues to leak out the placenta makes more of it each day.

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For a while now I’ve been playing with the idea of storing my recipes online. I like the idea of having all my recipes at my fingertips wherever I am, easy to search through and safely recorded. Of course for me, living away from NZ, it’s also a handy way to have my favourite recipes here without needing to lug the cookbooks across the globe. On the big wide web there are of course plenty of sites that already allow you to add recipes but nothing was exactly what I wanted. So, being a web designer I decided it would be a fun project to create my own recipe application! www.omnomrecipes.com is the result of many hours umming and ahhhing and many more hours of hair pulling and stomping. I think in the end it’s quite nice.

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We’ve found a new apartment and we’re loving it. Before we went to Mountain View in April we moved out of our apartment in the city where we’ve been for the last 2 years. The city had been feeling very busy, bleak and unappealing to us so we decided it was time for a move.

Our new place is in Dalkey, a small village / suburb beside the sea south of Dublin. Dalkey is home to some lovely cafes and restaurants, 2 little fishing harbours and a handful of famous names like author Maeve Binchy and “The Edge” from U2.

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Almost two months since our last update, we’re getting lazy! In our defense it has been a busy few months.

After getting back from a long weekend in the UK and spending a week recovering from the flu (normal not Swine) I was off to San Francisco for the last 2 weeks of August. This was my annual trip to Google HQ in Mountain View to catch up with my colleagues there and meet some of the new people that I’ve started working with over the last year. As usual it was a very productive couple of weeks, being in the same timezone has that effect. I was there for two full weekends in between the work, so for the first weekend I drove southwards along the Pacific Coast Highway, unfortunately it was a very smokey/hazy day, so my photos didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped. The second weekend I spent in San Francisco itself, admiring the cable cars, and enjoying a cruise across the bay to Suasalito. Click the links in the previous sentences for the photos.

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Things are rather quiet here in Dublin at the moment. I made banana cake on the weekend, a maintenance guy came to repaint the bathroom ceiling today, I had a bagel for lunch… not too much to report really.

Of course it may seem quieter than normal right now because Matt is in San Francisco for work this week and next!

Nevertheless, there is still news to write about! Two weekends ago we were in the UK on a bank holiday road trip. We posted photos (1), (2) & (3) when we got back but now here’s a run down of what we got up to…

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As we turned inland from the French Riviera the landscape changed to old farm houses and fields of grapevines and olive trees – our first taste of Provence. We stopped briefly in Aix-en-Provence which I found very charming. The whole town seemed to be roofed with sycamore/plane trees – very pretty. Lynley and I enjoyed strolling through the market there and found some nice locally made soaps to buy. We had our first introduction here to the ‘Mistral’ which is a very strong dry wind that characterises winter and spring in Provence.

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We got back last night from a fabulous week away in France and Spain. We visited some gorgeous places, oohing at the stunning vistas and ahhing over the charming buildings and places. I’m feeling very relaxed and content after a week of good food and wine, warm sun and no work!

Part One – Côte d’Azur

Our holiday started on Saturday with a 6am flight to Nice (thanks to Kieron for the ridiculously early airport drop!) which placed us on the Côte d’Azur by lunchtime. We met up with Lynley who arrived by train from Avignon and together we spent the afternoon exploring. The center of Nice is impressive to walk around with cool fountains, big open spaces and the palm tree-lined Promenade des Anglais. We spent the late afternoon basking in the sun on the beach. The beaches in Nice are all rocks rather than sand and the water in early summer is still very cold for swimming. Despite that it was still great to relax on the beach for a while. We ate dinner in a restaurant called ‘Le Maori’ which featured a ‘Maori burger’ with egg in it and also an ‘All Black’ dessert. Hilarious.

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Another year is nearly at an end. It’s been a good year for us (and a busy one) with plenty of highlights and very few lowlights!

We’ll be enjoying a quiet Christmas day this year, making phone calls back home, eating some good food and packing for our flight on the 26th when we’re off to Scotland. We’re taking a week to see the sights and enjoy the celebrations in Edinburgh on New Years Eve. It’s going to be cold, very very cold – or so we hear from everyone we’ve mentioned the trip to! We’re hoping for a few days of fine weather – especially for the fireworks on New Years and so Matt can get in a few good photo shoots with his new tripod and the digital SLR camera.

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On the way to our work Christmas party earlier in the week, I was discussing the state of public transport in Dublin with a colleague and he suggested I watch this video, made four years ago, that nicely summarises transport in Dublin.

I enjoyed it, hopefully you will too: http://www.youtube.com/v/4YmvevAvhyM

It’s now four years after that video was made, and I could only see one aspect of it that has improved in that time. The busses now accept a smart card so you don’t have to carry the exact change every day, except there are a limited number of smart card types available so you end up paying more than your usual fare if you want to use one for a short trip, and they are not rechargeable, so you have to buy a new one every week.

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In one of my opinion one of the coolest products that Google has launched since I’ve been working there is the Google App Engine, a service that allows anyone to write a web application and host it on Google’s servers. Google then looks after scaling your application and ensuring that as it becomes popular thousands and thousands of people can use it without you having to worry about buying physical servers and all that sort of messy stuff. It’s very cool.

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