January: My Dad turned 60 and retired, great weekend in a National Trust property.

February: Ria and I had a few days in Krakow including Valentines Day at Auschwitz.

March: Had a weekend near Helensburgh at Strone Cottage – outdoor hot tubs are one of mankind’s great inventions.

April: Saw Honda’s Asymo, destroyed my website, went to a huge 50s themed charity party.

May: Spent a long weekend in Arran, travelling there on the train and then the ferry. Did some nice but very, very wet walking. First round of redundancies at work.

June: Lovely wedding, lots of warm evenings drinking outdoors, saw numerous films at the film festival. “Our” birthday picnic.

July: Went to Whitby and visited my parents at home including a day trip to York. Began the great flat hunt.

August: fringe, fringe, fringe and found a nice flat! 2nd round of redundanices at work.

September: Moved in with Ria, had a weekend in London, rounded off the festival, re-designed my website.

October: Had two weeks in New York, Boston, Chicago and New York again. Amazing trip – wanted to return immediately. Numerous halloween parties.

November: Finally had our flat warming party, my cousin in Kansas got engaged.

December: The Jackson & Phillips families went for a weekend in St Andrews together.

Happy New Year!

So yeah, this is one of of those “catch up” posts for the new year that everybody seems to be doing. It seems my last post all about me was over two months ago when I moved into my new flat. Slackness.

What has happened since then you ask?

• I went to Prague – lovely city. Weather wasn’t great and we attempted to visit the Jewish Cemetery on the Sabbath (skills). Lost Ian a couple of times, drank Bekerovka and developed a taste for Mojitos.
• My sister visited for a weekend – we climbed Arthur’s Seat, went to the Samhuinn Halloween thing and general did touristy stuff
• Met a Girl
• Spent Christmas at home with the family. Got lots of shiny things including socks, chocolate and booze.
• Listened to a lot of Girls Aloud
• Spent Hogmanay in the Opal Lounge with friends – terrible food, but they compensated us with an extravagant amount of free Moet, wine and cocktails
• Played far too much Scrabulous on the all-encompassing world destroyer that is Facebook
• Went to Edinburgh Zoo for the first time – Honey Badgers rock! (so do penguins)
• Played Crysis (omg shiny), BioShock, Halo 3 on the 360 and just bought the RockStar back catalogue on Steam
• Assisted in the making of Tapas and had a great evening eating said Tapas accompanied by Mojitos

So I all moved into my new place. The move was pretty painless, mainly thanks to the help of my Mum and Dad who came up for the weekend. My Dad drove a van we had hired and we got everything shifted fin two trips. Got my ADSL from Be activated within about four days and after some firmware updating shenanigans with the modem I’m all up and rocking. I did manage to trash my desktop PC in the moving process though, so I’m taking it as an excuse to upgrade to an uber-rig. I’m getting a dual core Pentium and 2 gigs of RAM (which is crazy cheap at the moment). Check out some quick snaps I took of my new place on flickr.

I have a new flat! Kerry and I have amicably decided to split up and so for the last month or so I’ve been looking for a new place. I finally found a nice play on Causewayside in the Newington area of Edinburgh. It’s a good bright flat in a decent area of town and has been refurbished recently with new fittings. I’ll be properly moving all my stuff in two weeks but in the mean time I’ve got to buy all that fun stuff like: duvet, cushions, decent curtains etc. I’ve never lived on my own before, it’ll be nice to do whatever I want, whenever I want!

Yay, woo.

I went for a nice ride along the canal this afternoon. Behold my route using the fancy new Google Maps embedding:

View Larger Map

It was my birthday yesterday, as the title suggests I’m now the ripe old age of 26. To celebrate we went out for an (always awesome) curry at Kushi’s with Ian and Neil. Good food and good company.