I pretty much gave up blogging this year except for a post about a talk I gave in Sydney and two about our wedding photos and new house. Instead, I made a few hundred posts to Twitter and some to Facebook. But here’s a round-up of the year.

January

We started the year watching the incredible fireworks display on Sydney Harbour from Blues Point Reserve. We arrived late afternoon and claimed the last patch of grass for our picnic blanket. I’d seen these fireworks so many times on TV from England 11 hours before midnight! In real life, they were by far the most spectacular fireworks I have seen in my life, made up of more than 100,000 individual firework effects!

Photo by coquetboy from flickr

I went to Tasmania for the first time as Tim and I attended the Linux Conference in Hobart where I gave a keynote. While we were there, I managed to lose my wedding ring down the sink and missed half a day of the conference waiting for the hotel maintenance to try and retrieve it, which luckily they did!

Our wedding photos arrived this month. You can see more on Facebook.

February

In February, I gave two talks at Media09 and at the New South Wales Knowledge Management forum.

March

2009 was a good year for Wikia, starting in March with Nielsen’s report that Wikia is the 5th fastest-growing online community.

We attended a Wiki Wednesday at Telstra where Tim gave a talk about MediaWiki.

Tim had a staff meeting in San Francisco. As Tim was going to be in Berlin in April, we both travelled to Europe at the end of March.

April

We attended a MediaWiki developers meeting in Berlin in April and then spent Easter with my family in England. I then went to Melbourne to talk about the “Future of Search” talk which was badly timed since Wikia Search had just announced its closure. We went to the comedy festival for Tim’s birthday.

May

In May we attended Wiki Wednesday at Google. We also celebrated our 6 month wedding anniversary.

Wikia was listed as a top 10 growing property on Comscore.

June

Not much happened in June outside of work. Wikia’s rich text (WYSIWYG) editor went live across most of the sites, greatly increasing the number of editors.

July

In July, we started looking for a house to buy. We initially thought about areas near Gosford but we decided to try north of Wyong and spent quite a few weekends checking out various suburbs on the Central Coast. We managing 8 viewings in a 3 hour period one Saturday!

August

I’m sure I must have done something interesting for my birthday, but according to my Google calendar, I updated some stats and had a meeting. I think at 32 my memory started to fade! I do remember that I got a huge amount of fruit from my parents which I turned into really nice banana bread.

Soon after my birthday, we drove down to Canberra for the Wikimedia GLAM event. We stopped at a beautiful historic village called Berrima on the way. I bought some tea from Mrs Oldbucks Pantry and I’ve been a tea fan ever since, cutting down to 1 coffee a day.

Later in August, we saw Patience or Hot Chocolate in Newcastle which Tim’s brother, Ben, was playing in.

Wikimania this year was in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We took a couple of extra days there to explore. We had a great time walking around the city and we also saw the Cemetery and Zoo. The flight there was great as the plane was almost empty so I finally got to use up many years of Qantas miles and upgrade us both to business class.

September

On September 20th, we bought a house at auction. It was sort of within budget though way more that we were considering when we started looking in July.

The house we were renting went up for auction the same day but didn’t sell. I found out while writing this that is has finally sold (in December). It had been on and off the market since May 2008. A change of real estate agent, along with a big tidy up of the garden, a new kitchen, and replacing the ill-fitted curtains with new blinds must have helped. I don’t know how much it sold for, but the larger house next door sold for $540,000 at around the same time. It has been advertised as “offers over $495,000″, far more than we paid for a house three times the size 90km north-east of there.

I experienced my first dust storm on the 23rd with red dust filling the air (and the house). The photos are surreal. I had no idea what it was when I woke up but of course it was a trending topic on Twitter so I soon found out.

Wikia announced profitability this month! Tim bought me champagne to celebrate.

I passed my driving test in 1994 but I’ve never owned a car, so I’ve barely driven since I left home at 19. I decided as we were moving to a suburb with no local shops that I really needed to be able to drive, so I took some refresher lessons. I still need a lot more practice. And I never could park.

October

Tim went to San Francisco again, which left me alone to pack up the house ready for the move the following week. He managed to do the same when we moved from Melbourne to Sydney. We moved on October 30th.

November

My laptop did not survive the move – being basically thrown into the back of the car rather than packed as the removalists showed up 3 hours early. So I got a new computer this month after surviving on my little EEEPC for a while.

We settled into the new house in November and finally bought a sofa. We hadn’t had one since we gave away the old one on Freecycle before leaving Melbourne two years ago! It took a few days to get the hot water and oven working, but there haven’t been any major problems. A few small things need fixing like the rangehood and the air conditioning. One problem I’m not sure is easily fixable is the shower. The water spills out of the shower instead of down the drain, presumably because the whole floor is not angled toward the drain enough.

We celebrated the move with a house warming party on a wonderfully hot day on the 21st.

The same weekend, we went into the city to watch the musical Wicked and to celebrate our first wedding anniversary.

I miss the valley views from the old house, and the wildlife. There certainly aren’t wallabies in the new garden, and I’ve not even seen a lizard so far. Instead we have a bunch of bugs. All sorts of ants, Christmas beetles, moths, and a lot of spiders. I saw my first redback spiders and learned that vacuuming up wolf spiders does not kill them.

For most of November, we lived in an almost empty street as we’d bought at auction and moved in much sooner than the others. People have since moved in to 4 of the houses.

Wikia continued to grow, reaching a new milestone of 10 million US visitors this month. Newly acquired LyricWiki reached 1 million pages and the French Wikianswers launched. As I write this, we now have almost 27 million people worldwide visiting each month, with an equivalent rank of being the 81st most popular site according to the Quantcast stats.

November marked the start of my 5th year in Australia.

December

We spent Christmas at Tim’s aunt’s house. I made a nutloaf, cranberry sauce, and chocolate & cherry pinwheels. We got some great gifts which we needed for the new house including tea, coffee, a painting, a wall hanging, and a salad set. Tim bought me a WikiReader.

We plan to spend New Year’s Eve watching the fireworks at Gosford.

Time to revive this blog with some news.

Inside our new house

Tim and I bought our first house today! We’ve been looking for a while now and recently found a newly-built house available for auction. Not really having any idea whether it would go for a price we could afford, we turned up at the house today hoping not to leave disappointed and we didn’t. We were lucky to have only one other couple bidding against us and we got it for a price slightly higher than we’d been planning to pay but still at a great price for the size of house in this area.

The house was built three years ago but never occupied, as the investor defaulted on their mortgage and it’s been in the hands of the bank ever since.

It’s a great looking house and quite central to everything we need. Being on the Central Coast, we’re not far from Tim’s parents but also not too far for trips into Sydney and still close to a train station with fast trains into the city. Its a short drive to the beaches in the east or to national parks and mountains in the west.

We hoping to move in at the start of November, if not before.

My other news is that I’ll be an aunt again in April as Helen is expecting her and Richard’s second baby.

Helen's scan. Either my first niece or my second nephew.

We went to Myer in Chatswood on Monday to create our gift registry. I was pretty disappointed with their range and we managed to get only 16 things on our list before we gave up.

Unlike many couples, we’re not in the usual situation of already having furnished our home and not needing anything. Neither of us are motivated to go out and shop for that sort of thing, so we’re mostly still using whatever Tim bought when he was at university. And what I bought at uni is at the back of my parents’ garage 10,000 miles away. To give an example, we moved into this house last September and have yet to buy a sofa despite giving away the old one on freecycle before we left Melbourne. So, it ought to be easier than this to find something we both like and need in Myer.

Gift photo by Marta Crowe from flickr available under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

We found out today the owners of the house we’re renting want to sell it as soon as possible! Our lease runs out in October. I’m not looking forward to moving just when we’re supposed to be making the final preparations for the wedding.

We don’t currently know where we’ll move to, but it probably won’t be Hornsby, despite having just chosen a celebrant from Hornsby and a venue just a few kms away.

I did wonder briefly about buying our house which is on the market for $499,000 but as the ad says, it’s perfect for renovation or rebuilding; not so good if you just want to live here. It’s fine for now, but it’s too small, too close to a noisy street, and too much in need of work for us to seriously consider it.