Matt & Kat

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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I got back from San Francisco (or Mountain View just below San Francisco to be precise) last Thursday afternoon, just in time to take Kat out to dinner for our fourth wedding anniversary. It was a nice welcome home after almost four weeks away. During dinner we were discussing that in June next year it will be exactly 10 years since we started dating! How time flies when you are having fun. We are looking forward to many more enjoyable years to come.

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I had a great Birthday yesterday. It started with a phone call from New Zealand in the morning from Mum, Dad, Chris, Rachel, Andrew and Sarah, perfectly timed so that it didn’t get me out of bed and arrived just as I was about to leave the house for work. In the evening we had some friends around for a bit of a party, a few games and lots of delicious food that Kat cooked. White chocolate mud cake, chocolate brownie, ambrosia and ice cream. It’s a good thing birthdays only come once a year.

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Phew, we had an eleventh hour crisis tonight as we began packing for Malta. With the suitcases nearly full and all in order I went to get our passports from the file in our drawer. One passport was found – mine, one passport was missing – Matt’s.

We searched the drawer, we searched Matt’s desk, with increasing urgency we searched every inch of the apartment!!! The passport remained missing.

We searched under couches, in kitchen cupboards and behind shelves. Nothing. By this stage we were almost resigned to spending our planned holiday in a NZ embassy instead of Malta.

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This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog).

It’s been a while since I last acquired new gadgets but I think I’ve made up for lost time with my last weeks purchases.

You may remember that I’ve had my eye on the Openmoko phones since early 2007, but in between shifting across the world and starting a new job I never got around to purchasing one of the first versions. The second version, the “Freerunner”, was released in June this year and I placed an order with Pulster, a local distributor, shortly after. The phones have been in hot demand, so I only received my phone last week, a wait of of almost 2 months, and it turned up missing one of the cables that was meant to come with it. Still some distribution kinks to be worked out.

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Aug 2nd – 10:02
Yesterday we made some eleventh hour travel plans for this long weekend. We’re going on the road – hiring a car for a couple of days and driving generally southwards to see what we find. Good company, lots of music and snack food, nice landscapes and quaint villages, and hopefully a little bit of sunshine!

We’re planning to stay tonight at Benvoy but other than that our plans are pretty fluid. I’m hoping we’ll be able to find some wifi along the way so we can update this post as we go!

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We’ve been kept busy the last few weeks with moving apartments. We’ve moved across town to a slightly older but more ‘homey’ apartment right in the heart of old Dublin. We look out the bedroom windows onto a sea of red brick and out our lounge windows to Christchurch Cathedral just across the road. Its nice to be really central, close to some great restaurants and shops. We have a local bakery and the ‘best chipper in Dublin’ just round the corner.

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I arrived back in Dublin safely on Sunday afternoon following 40 hours of travel from Sydney via Auckland (5hrs), LA (1hr) and Heathrow (another 5hrs). The best part about all the travel is that I haven’t really had any jetlag, I was back at work at 9:30 on Monday morning, and I’ve been back to normal sleep, wake, work, play, sleep routine without any ill effects.

My two weeks in Sydney were very enjoyable, the Google office there is very nice, looking out directly over Darling Harbour from nearly the 20th floor and with a fairly laid-back and relaxed atmosphere. I also caught up with our friends from Auckland, Sam and Manuela who have been living in Sydney for the last year or so and we swapped some stories about our various experiences living overseas and away from family which was interesting.

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What a busy first week back in Dublin it’s been!
I had such a fun time in New Zealand. I think it goes without saying that I loved seeing all our friends again and treasured the time we got to spend with our families. I only wish we got have stayed for 3 weeks more! There was a strong feeling of relaxation and comfort at being ‘home’ when we arrived in Auckland and as we drove the familiar road from Auckland to Hamilton. I’m loving being here in Ireland, the travel and the new places and people but it’s also helped me to see how much I appreciate NZ and all that we’re blessed with there!

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For the last three weeks we’ve been back in New Zealand (and briefly Brisbane) catching up with friends and family. It’s been a very busy, but fun time and it is certainly nice to catch up with everyone in person again. The trip has led to some interesting (and no doubt reassuring for some family members) observations.

When I left New Zealand, just over a year ago, I thought that I would be quite happy to live overseas for the next 5-10 years and apart from missing family I wouldn’t really miss New Zealand all that much. That seemed to be pretty true during the last year in Dublin. I was never consciously homesick or wishing to be back in New Zealand. Skype, VoIP and the Internet do a pretty good job of letting us stay in touch with family and friends, so while I was looking forward to visiting New Zealand I wasn’t expecting my thoughts and opinions about ‘home’ to be significantly changed.

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