Entries from February 2010 ↓

Don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but on TV programmes and in movies, whenever someone leaves their job they seem to do so with only one box. A brown or white file box, often with a lid and sometimes with a plant. Seems a bit dubious to me because I seem to have a lot of stuff around and under my desk, not to mention the collection of orange pens and post-it notes.

However, today we packed up our desks in the likely event that due to Xero’s continuing growth spurt new people will need to sit at our desks while we’re gone. After recycling my non-essentials I was very surprised that I have stuffed my 3 years at Xero into ONE box! Includes my collection of orange things, cup, framed pictures, the Xero User Guide when it existed in book form, a ream of orange paper and more!

It now waits in the storeroom with my special orange chair for my return.

So that’s our desks spring-cleaned, and the apartment – have scrubbed pantry, shower (with a toothbrush even!), fridge, balcony pots; emptied, scrutinized and repacked cupboards under stairs, basins and hot water cupboard and we’re now down to eating strange meals to use up bits of random food from freezer, fridge and pantry. And to top off the weekend The Mister went next door to see our neighbour who we don’t see for months (so she probably wouldn’t've noticed we were gone) to tell her about a stranger coming and going from our apartment only to be greeted by a stranger staying there while she was away – looking rather rumpled and disturbed in a bathrobe so he’s quite embarrassed. Dammit. The first time I’ve ever got him to go over to the neighbours and that. Now he’ll never go again. Sigh.

Just in the nick of time before heading away I finished Aidan’s rather complicated cable and moss stitch vest. It wasn’t the original pattern which called for some kind of v-shaped knobbly bits so I had to get out a bit of paper like Nana used to and work out how many stitches across, less the 8 for the cable and 2 either side of the cable for the reverse track (so that the cable ‘popped’) then work out the knit-2-purl-2 sequence with what was left to create the double moss stitch!

It worked (after unpicking a couple of times) and looks great! It took me so long though so he’ll not get much wear out of it as he’s growing fast.

Had a wonderful wonderful evening on Mt Vic last night with Sara, Lucy & Jif to say farewell and toast to new adventures. Quite a perfect spot really, overlooking the airport. Poor old Jif is being left behind but the rest of us were getting high on bubbles and pizza and looking ahead to our new lives in Sydney (for them starting today and lasting forEVER) and ours in New York, shorter, but starting next week!

We’ll miss you guys!

Attended my first ever Webstock conference at the Wellington Town Hall last week. It’s a collection of internet celebs & cool dudes talking about things they’ve done and places they think internet and our lives online are going to go. About 20 of us from Xero attended the 2-day conference – all decked out in our Xero gear (which didn’t go unnoticed!)

Half of us went on to the ONYAs Awards (as in ‘Good On Ya’) on Friday night to recognise stars in the online world. Xero picked up 3 of the 4 awards we were nominated for which was great and The Mister had to go up to accept one of them. I did a quick write up with some photos and a video of an amazing digital light-show that used the Town Hall pipe organ as its centre piece on the Xero blog.

Following are some notes I took during the 2 days so you can stop reading now if you want to, no more pictures, just notes to self really!

Continue reading →

Had a lovely afternoon playing Top Models at the beach with a proper photographer taking family photos this weekend – everyone was together for Pen’s birthday and our gift to her was some family photos seeing as it’s not often these days that we’re all together, kids and all. Here’s one of my favourites and you can see more on Flickr.

The boys also recreated a scene with the 3 of them wearing matching yellow t-shirts with their names on them when they were (as best we can work out) 10, 8 & 3 which was hilarious and went down well. Trying to get Craig to wear his t-shirt into work but he’s not keen, apparently yellow is not his colour!

Happy Birthday Pen! xo

Not so often we have a cooking failure and it’s pretty demoralising when it’s for a dinner party! Sigh. Guess the hand held beater is just not good enough. There’s no time, and no saving it

Great to have the in-laws visit the parents in Awakeri over the summer break – sounds like a good time was had by all with great views, ice-creams and stories.

Someone pointed a camera at me at work the other day and now I see it’s turned up on their Flickr photostream.

Yes, still very orange

This year I’m doing a project that quite a few people have done – Project 365 – which is to take a photo every day of the year. I don’t really have an artistic goal in mind, not aiming to get better at taking photos or anything like that, it’s just I take quite a lot of photos of random, every day things anyway so I thought I might as well make a conscious effort to take and publish one photo a day.

So, January is over and I have 31 photos for the project so far.

The photos are published on Flickr, in my set called Project 365.