Matt & Kat

It’s been said that pregnancy can be a rollercoaster, and we’ve well and truly experienced that over the past few days. It started with a great weekend – our friends Graeme and Ruth from London were visiting and we had a wonderful time showing them around Dublin and chatting about life, vegan food and babies. After dropping them off at the airport, we made a quick trip past Ikea and spent the evening assembling the cot and changing table, full of excitement to see our baby’s room starting to take shape! The weekend was a high point.

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The last 3 months have been an exciting time for us… On August 27th we learned that I’m pregnant! We were both delighted and a little dazed and overwhelmed (even though it was planned) about the new adventure we had stepped in to. Now, at the end of the first trimester we’re still delighted of course, a little less dazed and very pleased now to be able to share our news with everyone else.

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Since well before we arrived in Europe, Turkey has been near the top of our “must visit” list. It’s a very interesting country in terms of landscapes, history, food and culture – oh and history, did I mention history? There’s a lot of it there! Turkey is also a huge place and we were faced with difficult decisions choosing which parts of the country to see! In the end we opted for quite a well worn tourist track from Istanbul down the western coast via Gallipoli, Ephesus and Pamukkale before finishing with a relaxing week in a small resort town called Kalkan.

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Last weekend was a bank holiday here in Dublin, so we took an extra day off and had a 4 day weekend in Norway. Scandinavia has been on our todo list for a while and given that we haven’t managed to visit any new countries yet this year it seemed like a good time to see a new place.

We had an enjoyable weekend in Oslo, although when they say that Norway is one of the more expensive euro countries to travel to they’re not joking! The city was a bit smaller and quieter than I was expecting for a national capital but very tidy and it seems very well equipped with public transport and all the other amenities that make life as a tourist pleasant. One quirk was an over abundance of street mimes, you couldn’t walk 100m in the central city without one of them standing there… weird.

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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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We’ve been in Mountain View for 2 weeks now and I’m enjoying many things about life here, especially the warm sunny days and the wealth of fresh food available at the weekend market and the local Whole Foods store. I’d forgotten what fresh veges should be like after so long shopping from Dublin supermarkets. Everything seems to grow bigger and brighter and tastier here as well as lasting much longer (coz its local and fresh!).

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Happy Easter everyone. I hope your long weekend was well-stocked with chocolate goodies, plenty of relax time and some quiet moments to reflect on the reason behind the holiday.

Matt and I spent this Easter visiting Donegal, in the north-west of Ireland. It was great to get out of the city, see some beautiful natural landscapes and breath in the fresh country air. We stayed at Coxtown Manor near Donegal town, a charming place nestled in the country amid spring daffodils and frolicking lambs. It felt very much like spring in Donegal except for the bone-chilling wind and the tell-tale frosting that remains on the tops of the hills. Like the rest of Ireland, the warmer weather has yet to hit Donegal. Nevertheless, we had a great time driving around the area and were impressed with the landscapes – white sand beaches, mountains and valleys, lakes and cliffs.

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

I’ve been eagerly looking forward to the release of Xero Personal which has been heavily promoted b Xero and BNZ (as MoneyMap) for the last few months. Unfortunately my first impressions of the product today are extremely underwhelming. Xero Personal is definitely not worth anywhere close to $5/month for me at this point in time and I’m unlikely to even keep using the free trial.

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Not wanting to risk life becoming even remotely boring, we’ve decided to change jobs, move countries (temporarily) and move apartments over the next 2 months. Change comes all at once!

The trigger for all this change was one small decision that I made to move from the team that I currently work in, to a new team (still at Google) where I’ll be helping to maintain the front-end web serving infrastructure that powers Google. Part of that transition means that I need to go to Mountain View for 6 weeks to get to know new team-mates and come up to speed on various bits and pieces.

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