Another year is over, so I get to show off some photos that recap the year!

January

We started the year with a visit to the zoo!

There was also snowy weather last January and on the last day of the month, we put our house on the market. We would be accepting an offer on it in late October.

February

In February, I took pictures of canal boats.

The PHPUK conference was also in February, where I presented a session about Windows Azure and PHP.

March

I took my best picture yet of Worcester cathedral.

April

April was all about my wife! She had her first tatoo done.

and spent some time in hospital having her appendix removed

May

The big event in May was php|tek. I struggled to find a single picture that captured the conference for me, but went for this one.

June

June saw another conference: DPC in Amsterdam.

This photo of Chris Shiflett was also popular:

July

Photographically, the main source of all my photos was my aunt and uncle’s 40th wedding anniversary, of which I haven’t published any of the photos :)

August

I took the kids to the Severn Valley Railway in August, but the main event was our friends’ wedding!

September

September saw the inaugural PHPSW meeting in Bristol.

I also tried to take a photo of a glass of red wine with a white background. This proved to be much harder than I expected

October

The Severn Valley Railway’s autumn gala was held in October

October also saw the fantastic PHPNW conference come back to Manchester.

November

I tried my hand at photographing fireworks

December

The snow really fell in December. So much so that we had to abandon a trip to London having travelled 13 miles in 6 hours.

Mitchel and Rachel married yesterday and we were invited! Jon and Ben were pageboys with Jon also acting as ring bearer and got to carry the rings in and give them to the best man. The kids looked so cute in their suits!

Rachel looked stunning in her dress. They both gave a speech at dinner; Rachel’s was very emotional and I’m not sure that there was a dry eye in the house by the end of it. It was an excellent day and we wish Mitchell and Rachel the best in their new life together.

The new washing machine arrived today. It’s an LG and very electronic. Every time you touch any knob or button, it beeps or plays a tune!

Our AEG washer-dryer died last night. Rather spectacularly it blew all the fuses whilst I was on a conference call to America…

Today we’re buying a new LG. We went to the local retail parks to view washer-dryers at Currys, Comet and Apollo 2000, but they were so much more expensive than buying from dixons.co.uk. Hence, we came back home and bought over the Internet. I can see that over time, retail shops will become less and less relevant.

Whilst Jon was at a party today, I went down to the river and took these pictures of seagulls. I took around 70 photos in order to get these three!

I’m really pleased with all three.

I seem to have lost the habit of posting here for some reason. Probably because it doesn’t feel that much actually changes.

Over the last month or so we’ve started decorating the lounge/dining area. I completed the dining area at the weekend, so we’re onto the lounge over the next few weeks. I’m expecting this to take a while as we’ve got both boys’ birthdays coming up over in early May with associated parties at the weekends. We also have a Christening coming up on Sunday which should be fun.

My laptop’s motherboard died and it is in for repair. I’m currently using an old desktop with Windows Vista on it and fee like I’m in limbo as I have just a minimum of data on here. Using Windows again after using a Mac for a 18 months is proving hard too as I keep pressing the wrong keys!

Only 2 more days to go though!

(hopefully!)

Georgina celebrated her birthday today with tea in bed opening her presents with the kids. The kids were at home all day as the school was closed due to the snow. As a result they had a lazy day and then we went out for a meal this evening at the Beefeater as they are so good with the children there.

Happy Birthday, my love.

Seem to have had a run of unhappy clients where most of their problems haven’t been our fault. Today’s was though :(

Fortunately, Georgina has baked biscuits!

After a meh week, this weekend has been quite good. Yesterday was spent doing chores. For me, this meant that I’ve succeeded in chopping down the remaining bushes from the front garden. Just need to get the roots out now.

Today, we went over to Jacky’s for lunch to celebrate Georgina’s upcoming birthday. Jacky took us out to The Weston Cross where we had a very nice meal. One nice thing about this pub is that they do not skimp on the vegetables served with a Sunday lunch and it was all nicely cooked and not stodgy. In the afternoon, we had hedgehog birthday cake, which was excellent also!