Suddenly we’re already in February and 2015 is well under way. Time, entirely predictable and yet always surprising; funny the way that works.

After the slightly manic December (and November, and October…) January was a bit quieter. Only a bit, mind, I look back on the calendar and there’s still a fair bit in there! All pretty low key, though; here’s a run-down.

Work is still going fairly well, now over the hump of the initial ramp-up and into the next phase: getting comfortable with how everything works and delivering my first few real projects. I had my first week of support/on-call and it went fine. In the new job it means being in the office from 7am-5pm and not really anything extra to do outside of that, much more bearable than the 24-hour on-call that the last job had. I continue to be happy with my choice of new position, although my probation period of six months means it’ll be a while until I’m fully settled down there. Still all positive early signs though, at least!

American Football is the only sport I follow these days, and January is the biggest month for it as that’s when the playoffs are. Saw some very enjoyable games, but it meant I had to struggle through some very tired Mondays; games ending at 3am do not make for a good night’s sleep, surprisingly enough. I should mention that I’m writing this post at 2am while watching the Superbowl so tomorrow (today!) isn’t going to be a walk in the park either! (Late edit: my team won, totally worth it.)

We’ve been doing bits and pieces of house-related stuff this month, the main thing being 850kg of slate delivered to fill the front garden bit. We spent a very cold 90 minutes one evening shovelling it over the wall, Erin having first ripped out all the green bits and put down a weed mat. This is what nearly a tonne of slate looks like; it definitely looks much better spread out on the ground.

We’re hoping to do some major work on the back half of the house this year so we’ve had a bunch of builders out having a look to give us some quotes. Very much related, mortgage renegotiation time is coming up as well so we’ve had a surveyor out to do a valuation. More developments on those things over the next few months hopefully, followed by a summer of breathing in a lot of dust while bits of house fall down around us.

We had a great impromptu pizza night at ours with about a dozen friends, the first time we’d all been back in London since early November. Erin made 5 awesome pizzas, I managed to get rid of most of the accumulation of sweet baked things from the freezer that had gradually been building up over the last 6 months. Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of the literal full-table spread of sweet stuff, but I did get a couple of photos of the group at least!

Because Sid and Abby were away over Christmas they hosted a “Christmas in January” dinner for us and a few others. They cooked an amazing meal, plus I got to try egg nogg for the first time. Mmmm, delicious. Here’s a picture that Sid took; I think it was supposed to be of all of us but he got a bit distracted by the food, can’t really blame him though! Don’t ask what Abby is doing, we weren’t sure either.

We had them over for a gaming day later in the month, obviously there was food. Constant attempts to out-host each other are fun! For our Saturday of gaming I spent all of Friday evening (7pm-1am) and then all of Saturday morning (8am-1pm) in the kitchen; I say that not to elicit a guilt trip, more to give an idea of how much fun I have preparing for this kind of thing. Have some pictures and descriptions of all of the things; it’s fine to start salivating 😉

Lunch was: a 7-layer dip, a sweet potato and feta pie, and home-made focaccia. The 7-layer dip in particular was a great success so you’re going to get the full sequence of that.

After lunch there was gaming, so obviously there were (home-made) dips.

Dinnertime rolled around…

And there was soufflé for dessert! My first attempt, and it came out very well. That’s home-made ice cream in the background.

Mission success – people rolled out the door that night.

While I’m on the subject, here are a couple of miscellaneous other things I’ve cooked/baked this month.

First up, a recreation of the Greek Walnut Cake that I first tasted in Delphi. It wasn’t quite the same but it was pretty damn good! Syrupy as all hell, delicious.

Apparently I was on a walnut kick, because I made some Maple and Walnut Biscotti:

And on the savoury side, these were quite interesting (and delicious) – beef burgers with a slice of spicy-mayo-filled-avocado in the centre. Sounds a bit odd, but definitely worked!

Ok I’ll stop foodgasming now. Sorry about that. (I’m really not).

I’ll probably talk more about it in a future blog entry, but I’ve been spending a fair bit of time writing my own web app to organise all of my recipes. It’s been pretty slow going – a combination of having to learn a whole bunch of new stuff, plus struggling to find enough time to keep going with it – but the last few weeks I’ve had a renewed burst of enthusiasm and it’s almost fully functional now. Some of you have already been exposed to the huge shared recipes documents I’ve been maintaining, they’ll soon be deprecated in favour of this new world order! Maybe I’ll link to it next time.

We spent a Saturday visiting friends in the countryside, which as always was a lot of fun. We’ve had the pleasure of introducing them to boardgames over the past year or so, now we have to feed their new addiction every now and then. It was a very gainful day for me specifically, too: not only did Dave send me home with a hunk of his excellent home-made Christmas Cake (alas, there is now none left), we also were served with something I’d somehow managed to miss out on entirely over Christmas – Christmas pudding! Three of us packed away this entire pud, I think I’m proud? I was certainly full.

The last weekend of January (the one that’s just finishing as I write this) we took a surprise short trip back to Ireland. My mother’s birthday was during the week so we did a very quick Saturday-morning-to-Sunday-evening pop over, which she was entirely in the dark about. A bit exhausting, as tightly-spaced travel tends to be, but worth it. I didn’t take any good pictures, but here’s the birthday cake.

So yeah, that was our January. It seems even busier than I thought now that I’ve written it all out, but it was all excellent stuff – hopefully the rest of 2015 proves as good! And now it’s bedtime; 3am and my team has just won the Superbowl. My alarm will ring just after 6, but worth every bit of it.