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Work this week has been… interesting. Let’s leave that there.

In other news… Jenny has been training as a yoga teacher for the last 18 months, and passed her first teaching assessment. This involved a number of friends taking a class taught by her, all watched by an assessment person. She passed with flying colours, so, true to the original yoga philosophy, we all went and got pissed.

On Saturday we went to visit my mother’s mother, who is fast catching up with my father’s mother’s 90-ness. We ate food, did the diificult science clues left over in her crossword, and talked at length about nearly everything. I took some photos in the garden, which is now getting on for 30 years older than it was when I carefully painted the walls with a bucket of water and an old paintbrush.

I continue to plan a shed of my own… although it’s unlikely to be as sturdy or large as my Grandpa’s one. I’ll start as soon as it’s warm enough to go outside and stroke my beard about it for more than 5 minutes at a time.

Finally, I picked up next month’s issue of Dazed & Confused, which includes a very excellent article on young Benjamin Northover.

This week featured one thing which made everything else pale into insignificance, and that was the spectacular weekend visit to Suffolk for Grandma’s 90th birthday.

The entire family assembled (for the first time since the arrival of its latest member) for a couple of nights in Walpole. We had a big meal on Saturday, at which I got drunk enough to not take any decent photos and make a short speech (which wasn’t nearly as tricky as the speech I’ll have to make later this year as Simon’s best man. Shit.)

On Sunday we went for a long walk which is usually longer because usually most of Suffolk isn’t flooded. The “Eel’s Foot walk” goes from Minsmere, through forest and heathland, to a pub called The Eel’s Foot. Here you have a pint of Adnams, and then keep going round to the coast and back up the beach for a while to where you started. We had to cut out the last bit and retrace our steps, which involved commandeering a passer-by’s bike to get us through the floodwater.

Work was relatively uneventful. We’re building stuff, continuing with our mission to make everything really good generally, one way or another.

The team’s Project Manager, Karen, on the other hand, has been having less uneventful times recently, having become an internet phenomenon with her blog about her husband’s sleep talking. She was on ITV during the week, explaining it all. We all gathered round and watched. She doesn’t normally wear that much lipstick.

In other news:

• it’s not snowing anymore
• I haven’t really been paying attention
• Etc.

This week, time seems to have accelerated back to its usual high speed. The xmas break was pleasingly long and gradual, and I managed to forget everything to do with nearly everything, which is good. Now, we’re back to the familar mix of trying to wake up, commuting through London (through the snow, this time), working, commuting again, eating, and finally sleeping. Hopefully it’s just the contrast, and it’ll all settle down.

But it’s not been a great week. I have discovered again what I do for a living, and it seems to involve existing in a fractal version of ‘Groundhog Day’.

Thankfully, it’s not all work-work-work (remember this?). I made lots of things Sunday, including bread, chocolate brownies, soup, and a blackboard. Bread I do more-or-less every week, but it gets better every time. Brownies were actually a first… I misjudged the timing slightly and they ended up more liquidy in the middle than I wanted, so sadly we had to scoff the whole lot in a very short space of time. Soup was… for lunch. Blackboard was for Kai, who makes things too, and who made me a pair of bike-helmet ear-warmers last year.

I have decided to set up a way to sell these blackboards somehow… I think they may appeal to a certain sort of person. We shall see.

Other things from this week, in no particular order:

• Grandma (the Peggy Vesta Northover) was 90. We are all descending on her place in Suffolk for a party at the weekend.
• I went for a meal with my dad and brother, which was good. We usually meet for a pint at The Angel in The Fields in Marylebone High St, which is a good pub. Good.
• Went for a meal with Hannah and Vincent (that’s ‘Vansarn’ with a French accent, mind you), and ate waaaay too much cheese. It was a Raclette party, though, so that was the general idea.
• It was still snowy, and dangerously icy, but it seems to be melting now.

And, as they say, so on.

Right then.

The first few seconds of 2010 were spent on my hands and knees in someone else’s flat in Dalston, feeling simultaneously a) annoyed that I was on my hands and knees in someone else’s flat in Dalston and b) pleased with myself for having fixed the connection between someone’s iPod and their hi-fi just in time for the stroke of midnight. The next few hours were drunken, but the resulting hangover wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

We had a party on New Year’s Day. After a long walk in the sunshine, we spent the day clearing up the house and making food. I baked a ton of bread, and made celery salt for Bloody Marys… which was probably not quite as worth it as I thought it would be. The bread and Bloody Marys went down well, along with excellent vegetarian chilli and about 15 tons of baked potatoes made by Jenny. Lots of people turned up, and I was having so much fun I forgot to take any photographs (apart from the resolutions one, above). We drunkenly cleaned the house up before going to bed. Rock and roll.

We spent the next day, the final Saturday before returning to work, not cleaning the house but sitting by the fire. Before getting warm, however, we got very cold swimming in London Fields Lido with Ben and Caroline. At home, we settled down and I read the whole of ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy, and Jenny did 95% of her new 1000-piece jigsaw. We started at about 3.30pm, and - without any real breaks - stopped at about 10pm. Not bad going.

Sunday was spent panicking about the fact that we were going to have to go back to work. I went with Ben Martynoga to Hackney City Farm for a few hours to shovel shit into bags¹ (for our respective gardens).

Work started the next day. I won’t give a day-by-day account…

The week was basically spent remembering what I do for a living. I tend to genuinely forget if I go away for a while. It’s a good sign, I think. I tell myself.

The project I work on (which is still a bit of a secret) progresses. We launched the first beta version to the live servers on Monday, but it’s restricted for now so you can’t see it unless you’re us. It’s quite good, but not there yet. Meanwhile, I wrote an article for the Web Developer Blog, which I’d been meaning to write for ages.

It snowed a lot this week. It’s very very cold in our house. This is the coldest it’s been in this country for the whole of my life. The trains and roads are frozen and not working, in a slightly pathetic way. I hope it clears up in time for us to get to Suffolk next week Grandma’s 90th birthday… or that, at the very least, the real breakdown of the transport system waits until we’re firmly out of London and have had a chance to get ourselves a decent supply of tea, toast and Marmite.

1. It was fun, but it reminded me a bit too much of work. ↩

If I’m going to do a quick review of 2009, it had better be quick, because it’s extremely 2010 now.

So, in no particular order:

• I became an uncle, when young Scott Northover came into the world
• Jen and I grew lots of vegetables in the garden - it’s not quite a baby, but it’ll do for the moment.
• We did a ton of work on our house, and now the kitchen and the room next to the kitchen are really good
• I raced in the Brompton World Championships in Oxford, for the first time, and missed my target time by one second exactly
• I did tons of work at work, and the project is (as ever) getting closer to being a) good and b) out there. Time will tell.
• I decided to start trying to take a photo every day and upload it to Flickr. The idea was to take self-portraits reflected in things. I managed to keep going for nearly two months, but I ran out of steam. I think my favourites were numbers 8, 13 and 46.
• We went to Italy for a couple of days, and it was great (even though it fucking snowed, which wasn’t really part of the plan)
• I made a lot of bread, inspired by Richard Bertinet’s book ‘Dough’, which is very good