So my epic holiday is nearly over … i go back to work tomorrow after more than 3 weeks away. I actually can't wait to get back! I so enjoy the work that i do, and i appreciate the structure of knowing what is going to happen each day.

Here is my holiday summary:

• A few days at home relaxing and getting ready
• Four days in Germany
• A week in De Panne, on the North coast of Belgium over Christmas
• Back home and time with family and friends
• Dealing with horrible damp mouldy walls that got really bad when we were away

For more details and photographs, read on … but beware of the mould pictures if they might squick you out!

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I'm home again, safe and sound. Today has been ein schöne Reisetag – we spent most of the day travelling, but it was nice weather. I will make a holiday picture post later, but for now i'm just delighted to be back on the Internet!

I fixed the MyChores problem in a matter of minutes. Fortunately i had backed up the user-uploaded pictures not too long ago, so in the end we only lost 32 pictures. I've also had some help from William, the owner of HostingRails who came up with a few suggestions as to what might have happened and how i can ensure that it won't happen again.

I saw my dad and stepmum briefly this evening, and my lovely sibling Felix is staying over tonight. We will probably all be going to Harvest Church tomorrow, which both delights and excites me! We're also having a big family get-together at my grandparents' house tomorrow! Yay! :)

I have had a nice meal, done the washing up, wiped the kitchen surfaces, tweeted on Twitter, and i'm slowly getting through 10 days worth of emails. Feeling a lovely sense of normality returning.

Remember i said my CouchDB on Rails series was being translated into Portuguese? It's done, courtesy of Leonardo. Here are the links to the separate instalments: Tradução: CouchDB on Rails by Aimee. Awesome job, Leonardo!

Tomorrow we travel to Belgium, so tonight is my last chance to connect to the Internet, unless my trusty netbook can happen upon somebody's unsecured wireless when we're away. In a fishing cottage on the north coast of Belgium, i should say chances will be slim.

We've had a great time here in Germany. We visited a friend in Cologne yesterday and had a good look at the Christmas market there. Today we made some delicious mince pies.

MyChores is missing all its user-uploaded pictures and there is nothing i can do about it until i get back home. This makes me sad. HostingRails are being supremely unhelpful and i am regretting entering a 2-year arrangement with them. I think they were the best at the time, but a lot has changed this year, and i am sure that when the time is up there will be lots of better options for me to pursue.

Somebody is translating one of my CouchDB articles into Portuguese for Brazil. I feel honoured! :)

Since FireStats tells me that most people come to my blog searching for Caturday, have a cat for tomorrow! :)

more animals

Happy solstice, Chanukah, Christmas and new year.

Today i have posted Christmas cards, been to church, had a lovely lunch at church, read about Iterator and Mediator in Design Patterns, had a little nap, gone out with my sweetie to the final day of the Christmas market, gone shopping for a few things for when we come back from holiday … and now i am back in my bed trying to relax a little before it's time to make dinner! A friend is going to phone me soon, i think.

Tomorrow i need to finish reading Design Patterns, wrap Christmas presents, pack my suitcase, and generally prepare myself for the holiday. On Tuesday we travel to Germany for a few days. I'm very much looking forward to seeing a good German Christmas market because it's been a few years since i went to one.

After a short stay in Germany we'll be going to De Panne in Belgium, for a nice peaceful Christmas in a cottage by the sea. Should be absolutely wonderful! I will most certainly be taking my netbook with me. I've got a socket adapter so i can keep it charged up. Even if i can't get Internet access, i certainly hope to do a bit of work on MyChores over the holiday.

This may be my last post of the year, so … happy holidays to everybody! I wish you all love, peace and happiness, and very best wishes for a wonderful year 2009.

For my birthday, my wonderful partner made me a little voucher. It said:

Birthday Voucher for ONE MYSTERY EXPERIENCE DAY OUT

It was all beautifully decorated and everything. So today i redeemed my voucher! :)

We went on the train to Portchester (i somehow had a feeling we'd be going to Portchester because i love castles and i've always said i'd like to see Portchester Castle). My partner made a big deal of teasing me, making me think we were getting off at Fareham …! Also, when we got to Portchester, we went entirely the opposite way from the castle, up the hill. It was a fairly steep climb, but it meant we got to see this view of Portsmouth Harbour:

Later on we joined a walk organised by the English Heritage – a guided tour of the old buildings in Castle Street leading up to Portchester Castle. There are some really interesting and beautiful cottages:

The castle is really lovely, and the grounds are so peaceful inside the castle walls.

We also had a tour of St Mary's Priory, which is situated in the castle grounds and is nearly 900 years old.

Here i am, just outside the castle walls, on the shore of Portsmouth Harbour. I'm showing off my new Songbird tshirt! :)

Thank you so much to my beloved, for a wonderful mystery experience day out! :D

We had a nice weekend away with goodarcher: a bit of gardening, a bit of de-cluttering, lots of chatting and socialising, a bit of Torchwood, and a wonderful trip out to Bosham and elsewhere around and about West Sussex today. It was absolutely lovely. Met some nice new friends and had a very peaceful time. Came home in time for me to squeeze in a few chores, heheh! :)

The clock change is annoying me like it usually does. What's the point, anyway? Everything feels wrong to me today and the time seems to be passing incredibly slowly. Except it's now supposedly dinner time and yet it still feels like late afternoon. Why do we have to go through this annoyance twice a year anyway?! I generally try to ignore British Summer Time as much as possible – i shift my working hours to 9-5 during the Summer as opposed to 8-4 during the Winter. As far as my body clock is concerned i am working the same hours; it's everyone else who has changed!

I reinstalled Debian again the latter part of last week, and i think i now know exactly how to install Ruby on Rails (and more importantly, how not to). I'll write a post about it later. The good thing is, i am now updating MyChores to be Rails 2.0.2 compatible, so we can start to use the speed enhancements and API options of Rails 2.

Next week i am on a C# course in London. I am looking forward to it because i like learning, and it'll be good to understand exactly what this C# thing is that i've been programming in! I am pretty good at feeling my way with programming languages, but i'm sure i'll be hugely better at it once i know all the tricks and tips! :)

I also get to spend a night with nyecamden which will be fun! :)

I am in a distinctly holiday mood! Once i leave work today i am off for five days until Tuesday! :)

Not doing anything special, just taking some time to relax. I will try to avoid Winchester city centre if at all possible whilst people are re-enacting the murder of Jesus. That sounds rather gruesome to me.

I just saw this interview with Grace Hopper, one of the first ever computer programmers, and developer of the first compiler. What a fantastic role model.

- "So how did you know so much about computers?"
- "I didn't! It was the first one!"

LOL, i want a 'nanosecond' too!!

I had a lovely Shabbat experience with my partner. It was a couples retreat workshop in a hotel, with meals included, activities, opportunities to think about what is important to us as a couple. We met some lovely people there, and had a very good time. The meals were excellent, plus we pigged out on kosher Oreos (yum!) and we had a red wine that i actually like!! It is from Israel, really sweet! We were fortunate to be able to bring some home with us! :)

The whole thing was very spiritual, and symbolic. I enjoyed participating in the traditions, and i especially liked singing in Hebrew. There was a guitar player among us who made the songs very lively and everyone enjoyed singing. It's great to sing psalms in Hebrew because you find out they actually rhyme!

I can say one thing really well now – almost every prayer begins with it!

Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohaynu Melech Ha'olam
Praised are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe

I think we have made at least one new friend that we will keep in touch with … probably more via Facebook. We are also intending to observe Shabbat as a weekly ritual at home together. This means no Internet from Friday evening to Saturday evening – and on the plus side – no chores either!! I think it will be really good for us both, to take a break and spend some special time together once a week.

Yesterday, as we still had the car, we went for a nice drive out into Wiltshire, doing some family history research. In a church cemetery we met a friendly couple doing the exact same thing, and they invited us into their holiday motor home for a cup of coffee and cake! :D On the way back we passed Stonehenge, and went through Wherwell, which is a beautiful village that i have loved since childhood.

We had an exciting journey back because we actually ran out of fuel! It's amazing how far you can drive in Hampshire and not find a filling station!! By some miracle we managed to get home although the gauge was reading zero for at least 10 miles!

I hope everybody had a good Christmas break. I had just about the best Christmas ever. My partner's parents came to Kent – specifically to Platts Heath, the tiny hamlet where my mum lives. It was so nice to be staying just around the corner from my mum, and our families got on very well indeed.

Here is a picture of the view from the cottage window this morning – just before the fog had lifted:

We ended up celebrating our Christmas on the 24th. We had drinks up at my mum's and met a lot of friends and neighbours. We had a great little international corner going on – German, Italian and French people all chatting together! :) Later on my mum came down plus my two brothers and we had a lovely cosy evening at the cottage. We cooked food and served it buffet-style … only it didn't really all fit on to the table so it overflowed on to chairs and the floor! Heheh! Everyone found it quite amusing to eat Christmas dinner off the floor! :D Towards the end of the evening it seemed appropriate to open our Christmas presents. The custom in Germany is to open presents on Christmas Eve anyway, so it worked very well. It was nice because it was so free and easy. Usually you have all this faff with going to church and having the Christmas dinner and everything. We just sort of skipped all that and did it differently! :)

I was delighted that our two families got on so well. My partner's parents met my dad's side of the family last year, but hadn't met my mum and family yet. But we had a really lovely time and i went to bed feeling absolutely full of love and happiness to feel our families merging together.

Yesterday my mum took me to see my nanna who has Alzheimers. It is sad that we have not seen each other for so long. Nanna has deteriorated so badly that it is hard to recognise people or string together any words into a meaningful sentence. But we did get some lucid moments where Nanna's eyes opened and looked deep into ours, and we heard some words like "It's lovely that …" and "That would be marvellous!" and a really heart-felt "I love you" to my mum. I believe that Nanna is happy. We were about to go and Nanna started crying and pulling us back. So sad. It affected me much more than i could have imagined it would. I went back again today and got some photographs. Here is a lovely one of the two of us together:

Another busy day tomorrow – with my dad's side of the family this time. They'll be staying the night and then we have a friend coming on Saturday! Still not decided what to do for new year though …

Is there a scientific law which states that clocks are more likely to stop when you're away on holiday than when you're at home to notice them stop?

The last two times we have come home from a trip away, one of our clocks has been found to have run out of battery and stopped. They had previously been running for months, maybe years without stopping, so why should they stop during the time that we were away?! Even when we were only away for 5 nights!!

The books i am currently reading cause me to ask questions like this all the time! I am now reading "Chaos" by James Gleik, which is a welcome relief from the last three scientific books i have read, which gave me a very depressive view of entropy – the state of disorder. Entropy can only ever increase, never decrease. Any system, left to its own devices, will become more and more disordered – which is why my desk gets messy and needs tidying. But even then i am expending energy in the form of heat for the work done in order to tidy the desk. Heat is a disordered form of energy so entropy still increases!

However, the book of chaos tells me that there can be order within chaos, and the most beautiful example it gives is the red spot of Jupiter. Whilst chaotic storms are constantly occurring all over Jupiter, the red spot somehow remains constant: a place of order within the chaos. Simulations have been created to model it, and they produce the same phenomenon. This makes me feel a little more positive about entropy.

Well, we had a very nice break away, and a very good journey home. I think that 5 nights away is probably my personal optimum, although i felt ready to come home yesterday, i was content to stay another day. We had a really lovely time.

In other news i have just been told that Winchester is the least green city in the whole of England. Oh dear.