The last post recounted our final bits of Melbourne before flying back to London; to break the cliffhanger I’ll reveal that, yes, we did make it home!

This blog began as a means of recounting and recording an intense period of travelling so that in the future I would have something concrete to remember the whole experience by. A side-effect was exposing those thoughts and experiences to a bunch of other people (hey guys, that’s you!) – and it was definitely awesome to have people mention to me in real life that they enjoyed reading – but in the end it was mainly for myself. I’m glad to say that from that perspective it’s been a great success, because I feel that not only has it formed a collection of memories but it also influenced me to try to make more of/pay more attention to the time that I was spending that I knew I would later be blogging about. Plus take infinitely more pictures than I’d usually take – and that’s literal infinity, divide by zero, etc – and I’ve quite enjoyed that bit too.

Now that the period of travel is over I’ve spent some time thinking about what I want this to be in the future. Options abound, obviously, with a major obvious one being to keep it as just a travel blog and only resume writing when next we do some of that. I live a pretty active and fulfilling life, though, and the 95% of the time when I’m not explicitly on holidays contain quite a few experiences and general interesting life stuff; interesting to me, at least, no promises to anyone else! With that in mind I’ve decided I’m going to update it on a semi-regular basis with a recap of the previous period’s events.

Grumble grumble grumble, WordPress just ate 700 words I’d just written. Not happy. Let’s go again…

Anyway, on with the show; I give you – December!

We arrived back to London in the early afternoon of Monday the 8th; while we’d both sensibly decided to take the Tuesday off work I was due to start a new job on Wednesday. It was about as tough as you’d expect – I spent the three days trying to cram as much new knowledge into my brain as possible while mainlining caffeine and attempting to not faceplant asleep at my desk. I made it through to the weekend, eventually, but it wasn’t easy!

Oh, we managed to remember our wedding anniversary (10th December)! Eventually, at least – I think it was the afternoon before either of us realised. We’re really not very occasion-y or gift-y people.

A quick aside to talk about the new job, that seems like an important thing to go over. I’ve been there just over four weeks now and overall I’m very happy with it. I’m getting exposed to quite a lot of new and interesting things and learning a lot, and already starting to feel like I’m becoming mildly useful rather than purely being overhead! I like the overall structure of the team and I’m fitting in quite well with the two other developers. Social stuff isn’t huge at the moment but there seems to be a decent culture of going for post-work drinks on random days, which is a good thing. One month down and I’m feeling quite good about things!

Back to December; in our infinite wisdom we’d decided a couple of months before to arrange a cocktail party for a bunch of friends for the Saturday evening. To go along with the jetlag and new job stress we also had the preparations of food and drink for that to sort out. And as you may know, I’m a bit of a feeder, so getting that right is pretty important to me …! We had about a dozen people over, some of whom stayed the night, and I’m pretty sure everyone had a good time. I got to be mixologist for the night which I do quite enjoy, too. Have some photos.

The following week was again a bit of a blur. Jet-lag was still lingering like a bad smell – we’d not really given ourselves much chance of getting over it, to be fair – and we ended up with something on almost every night that week: people over for dinner on Monday, post-work drinks with a friend on Tuesday, out to a comedian on Wednesday, a work dinner on Thursday, people over for gaming and dinner on Saturday. Not something to complain about, but we were definitely fairly wrecked after all that!

Dave Gorman was the comedian on the Wednesday, he was excellent. Have a picture!

We’d deliberately planned for a quiet Christmas. Due to not having any but the minimum amount of time off at my new job I wasn’t going home for Christmas, and because all of our friends were off doing their own thing it was just the two of us for most of it. It was the first chance we’d really had to sit down and relax for what felt like a long time and it was really nice. I decided to challenge myself with some big many-hour cooking projects: A ‘vegetable wellington’ and a stollen. Both came out amazingly well and I got a huge sense of accomplishment and satisfaction from that. One of my favourite things to do these days is to spend time in the kitchen listening to podcasts and cooking or baking, so this was right up my alley. Again, some pics.

First, the Wellington – based on this recipe.

And then the Stollen, based on this recipe. I actually made two, one without the various ingredients (like raisins, peel etc. that Erin dislikes):

After our incredibly packed and somewhat stressful December the four days off over Christmas were exactly what we needed to recover a bit. Four day weekends should definitely become a thing!

We were planning on a slightly more eventful New Year’s – heading out to the countryside to a friend’s house with a few other people. We were both back to work in the gap between Christmas and New Year’s, though, and Erin in particular had a very long and stressful few days (who knew, end of year is a busy time in accounting!) so we ended up abandoning that plan come New Year’s Eve. Instead we were both in bed and asleep before 10pm on the last day of the year, wild things that we are. We did watch a very odd movie on the couch that night before bed, though – Black Sheep. Disturbing, pretty sure that’s the right word.

Friday morning, January 1st, I mowed the lawn. Not sure that’s normal, and hopefully not a “start as you mean to go on” thing.

2014 was an awesome year for a lot of reasons, hopefully 2015 will be the same – and so far I’ve no reason to believe otherwise. Onwards into the sweet unknown!