Matt & Kat

On Thursday last week we became the proud owners of a three bedroom house in Claudelands, Hamilton, ticking off the second major task on our todo list for our visit back to NZ.

We had been looking at property in Hamilton since before we left Dublin thanks all the listings available online. Our original thoughts were that we’d like to find somewhere that needed some work but was still in a reasonable condition such that we could rent it to good tenants until we return to NZ at some point in the future. Once we got here and actually started looking in person it became fairly clear that there wasn’t a huge amount of new properties coming on to the market at the moment, and what was available didn’t really fit into that category. In the end we purchased a nice house that was built in 1947 but had been heavily renovated in 2006 and really shouldn’t need much work at all when we return.

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We’re back in NZ right now and will be here till the end of the year. It’s wonderful to be home and spend some quality time with family, see old friends and enjoy cafes and places we haven’t been in ages. We arrived into NZ on Oct 27th – nearly 3 weeks ago already and we’ve been pretty busy since then with family and friends to see, a wedding to help with and some house hunting too.

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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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We finally had time to sit down and sort through the 600 or so photos we generated over the past week. For your viewing pleasure we’ve cut them down to the following highlights:

• Zurich and surrounds (Winterthur, Rapperswil) – ignore the first 10 winter photos, they’re from an earlier Zurich trip!
• The Rhine Falls – one of our day trips out of Zurich, it deserved a gallery all of its own.
• U2 360degree tour in Dublin – We saw U2 in Croke Park, Dublin on Monday night, Awesome concert.
• Car on Fire – A Mercedes parked behind our house “burst” into flames at 4:30am on Wed morning, providing some uneeded excitement!

We’re off to the UK this (long) weekend, so expect to see some photos of Stonehenge and the Banksy exhibit from Bristol Museum next week.

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Last week in Zurich was nice and relaxing. I enjoyed sleeping in and spending afternoons visiting different places in the city. I visited a Museum of Design one day and the Zurich zoo on another. I wandered around the old city and browsed the shops a lot.

Zurich seemed very orderly and very expensive. The people there were generally quite reserved. Nobody smiled on the tram and most people are quite unwilling to speak English. Despite this the city is nice to explore because everything is so clean and organised with great tram, train and boat services. The city really runs like clockwork.

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We’re in Zurich this week, I’m here for work and Kat managed to get a week off work to relax and join me which certainly makes my traveling for work much more enjoyable.

We arrived yesterday (Saturday) in the late afternoon and found our hotel/apartment with no problems. After settling in I took Kat on a quick tour of the central city / lake area which I’d sort of explored on a previous visit last year. Our first impression, at around 6pm on a Saturday was how quiet and sparsely populated many of the streets in the center of town were, all the shops were closed and there weren’t really that many people around even at the lake front. We had dinner at a nice “Gratin” restaurant near the central train station, delicious food.

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

It’s been a while since I’ve taken any sort of quiz like this, so when David Farrar from Kiwblog posted his results today it prompted me to give it another go.

My Political Views I am a center-right moderate social libertarian Right: 1.33, Libertarian: 1.97 Political Spectrum Quiz

I completed the quiz pretty quickly and felt the need to answer ‘it depends on the specifics’ to many of the questions, so take the results with a grain of salt. I think it is a reasonably accurate description of me though.

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Ever since we booked our cruise holiday in January I’ve been eagerly awaiting May 29th, excited to flee the grey cold weather of Dublin and cruise the Caribbean in style with our fabulous friends Kieron, Lucy, Joey and Robbie.

There was so much packed into our holiday last week that I don’t know where to begin in describing it. Lets just say it was 9 days of fabulousness! Memories of our tropical sunny holiday will keep me warm through the Irish ‘summer’ 😛

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Thursday morning saw us make an early start from Avignon as we tried to fit in a quick trip to Carcassonne to see the walled city that one of our favourite board games is named after before catching our train to Barcelona from Montpellier in the early afternoon, a total of roughly 400km of driving. Thanks to the French motorway system and the generous 130km/h speed limit we managed this in just under 4 hours which gave us just enough time for a quick visit and a few photos in Carcassonne itself!

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