It’s cold.

It’s very cold.

It’s so cold that the ice on the car didn’t melt all day.

We stayed in and took the Christmas decorations down.

The first half of today was taken up with the start of the “clearing out the garage” project. I did fairly well and removed a car’s worth of stuff to the tip. I also put 5 items up on Freecyle to give them new homes rather than put them in landfill. One of the items is Georgina’s old Biorb aquarium and we had a little confusion with the first person who wanted it as they only wanted the air pump for their current aquarium, but it’s the wrong type. Hopefully a few people will turn up tomorrow and collect.

In the afternoon, Scott and Megan visited us. The boys got over-excited as usual! Scott in particular was a champ this visit and played hide and seek with them for a good while. Jon and Ben also shown them their new DSs, played new board games and we also got out the marble run which was great fun. I took lots of photos with my new flash too :)

Today was the first day back at work and we all worked from home. Of course, as a result, we couldn’t access our job control system which is served from the office as the ADSL router at the office crashed. Nevertheless, a fair amount of work was done, even if it wasn’t the most productive of days.

We’ve had a relaxing day at home as it’s so cold that we wimped out of going to the zoo. Instead we went out for a meal at the Three Pears and it was excellent. I do like how well they treat children there and the food is good too.

In the afternoon we played on the Wii and Jon and Ben have been enjoying their new DSs too. I also managed to get up the Christmas photos.

To finish off the year, I thought a quick summary was in order.

January

We started the year with a trip to the zoo. I attempted to get a photo of a waterfall with that blurry water you see the good photographers do.

February

The highlight of February was talking at the UK PHP Conference in London.

March

A quiet month with most weekends doing something with the family. We went for a walk by the river Severn one weekend. There are many swans.

April

April saw a very nice PHPWM meet-up at a pub that served pies as well as pints. It also snowed.

May

May is the month of birthdays in our household as both the boys and myself celebrate. It also marks the start of the camping season for us.

June

After May, June was a quiet month. Prince Charles took a ride on the Severn Valley Railway though, which I enjoyed photographing.

July

July saw sports day for our eldest son and a week’s holiday camping in Norfolk towards the end of the month. I believe that that week in July was the only hot week we had all year.

August

We went away for our second week’s camping and visited Legoland. The kids loved it.

September

A busy month with our youngest starting school. Also, I went to ZendCon!

October

We started the move to Birmingham for the company with two members of staff there. The Wispa also returned to the shops.

November

The highlight of November was speaking at the inaugural PHPNW conference.

December

The last month of the year saw both kids in school plays and most importantly, my book about Zend Framework was published!

Here’s to 2009!

I went to see Jon in his school pantomime this evening. All of year three were the chorus and had to dress as a pantomime character. Jon was a pirate and looked very good. The show was excellent with the Wicked Witch stealing it from everyone else with an excellent performance.

Another week has passed. Work-wise, I’ve been concentrating on getting a project completed and working on my processes. I have a very long list of stuff to get done and it can get quite hard to keep on top of it. I’ve started putting in place some systems that may help. Next week is Dawn’s last week with us, so I’ve also been preparing for my new role as the main project manager for the company.

At home, I’ve been finishing off some indexing for the book along with answering questions from the copy editor. I’ve also made significant progress on my presentation, for next month’s conference talk. I’m really slow with graphics though and have spent over 4 hours on a single image so far.

This is a picture I took on Thursday of the Birmingham Assay Office. I’m not totally happy with it, so will have to try again some day.

This weekend I finished taking out the dead bush at the side of the house by removing the stump and roots. It didn’t take as long as I feared which was nice and I also got time to finish off the editing of the appendices of ZFiA and fix some indexing problems.

To celebrate being on up to date, I played World of Warcraft last night which was nice and relaxing. I need to play more often really.

Today, Nana came over to the great joy of the kids who wouldn’t stop interrupting to tell her things! We had a very nice Sunday roast too!

It appears that if I don’t take a photo, then I forget to write here!

This week has flown by and I’ve done loads of work and nearly caught up with my todo list which is nice. On the book front, I’ve only got AppendixA to look at, but there’s a fair few chapters outstanding from my co-authors. No doubt, I’ll have more indexing to do too!

I was in Birmingham today and took this photo:

A quiet day, as all Sundays should be. Jon had a free music lesson at one of the music shops in town. Georgina took him and thought that teaching a group of eight 7 to 9 year olds was too many kids in one lesson. It’s hard to tell how keen he actually is to learn the guitar though. If he’s keen, we’ll see if we can find a more focussed teacher.

I’ve started thinking about how my talk in November will look and run. I started preparing the material a couple of weeks ago on an ad-hoc basis, but hope to start getting the talk together over the next week or so. I’m going to need lots of practice!