My grandmother always told me that you should only do fun things on New Year’s Eve because these would be the things that you would find yourself doing over and over again in the New Year. Tonight I’m cooking, cleaning and entertaining guests. I’m sure Marty would be thrilled if he thought I would spend 2005 cooking and cleaning but it really isn’t going to happen.

Happy New Year!

Waking up on Christmas morning to snow did make everything look magical. It also made it really difficult to get anywhere on time on Christmas day. But we still managed to deliver all our presents to our families. My little sister screamed with delight when she saw the pink furry boots we had bought her. Hideous things but they made Sarah happy.

Marty and I opened up our presents this afternoon. We got bought some great gifts and a few others that still remain a mystery. My dad bought me some sort of metal linked chain with a hoop at the end of it. Marty thinks it’s a necklace but I’m really not sure. One of my gifts from Marty was a book called Feng Shite: A little book of house messing. Don’t know why he thought I needed the book – I thought I’d already perfected this art.

For the first time ever I’ve been bought items from my Amazon wishlist. I’m going to have to keep this up to date. As I’d never been bought anything from this before I used it more as a holding page for books I was going to buy myself rather than anything I expected other people to look at. Thankfully Marty told me that his family were going to be using this so I was able to clear out all the books I’d already bought from other places.

This year was also the year for duplicate presents. I bought my grandparents a DVD player only to find out on Christmas Eve that my uncle had also bought them a DVD player. I bought Tony a book called The Strange Laws of Old England. Before I wrapped this Marty picked it up and started to read part of it to me. The story he was reading sounded really familiar. Tony had been talking about the same thing one day earlier in the week. At first I thought this was just a coincidence but the more Marty read the more familiar it all sounded. Yes Tony and I had bought each other the same book for Christmas. He had also bought himself a copy which he had already finished reading.

The results of my law exam arrived on Christmas Eve. It’s a terrible day to get results but thankfully I passed. And Marc I do realise that I’m still a girly swot – but tonight I just don’t care!

In an earlier post I have mentioned that Marty and I are trying to cut back on the amount of food we eat. As part of this we have a competition each month to see who can lose the most weight. For the first time since we started this I am winning. It seems that food poisoning closely followed by the flu will really help if you want to eat less.

For a while Tony had been putting new things he learned up onto his blog. Well I learned something new at the weekend. Scombrotoxin poisoning occurs between 1 and 3 hours of eating scombroid fish, for example mackerel. The microbes that contaminate the fish produce histamine from tryptophan and it is the histimine that causes symptoms such as hot flushing, headache and diarrhoea in the foolish people who eat the fish.

Next time I’d like learn about food poisoning from a book rather than by eating mackerel that had been sitting in the car for too long.

On Wednesday night I went to the technical meeting at Birmingham.pm. The first talk was given by John Pinner. He talked about payTHYME – an open source pay-roll system that Clockwork Software Systems have developed. The thing that interested me most about this system is that it is GPLed and they are planning on making money by selling support. As far as I can remember John said that it has taken them two years to develop. The system is being used by a customer at the minute but there is still more development work to be done as they want it to be certified by the Inland Revenue. I’m not really sure what I think about this business model and would love to know how much money has been put into development to date and how many hours of support they will need to provide to recoup these costs.

The second talk was given by Shevek on protection systems. The talk was well presented but not really my thing. Then Brian gave a presentation on the Fluxx project he is currently working on. This was the first time I had been to a meeting in Birmingham and I really enjoyed myself. After the meeting I was taken to a bar somewhere in Birmingham and then Barbie very kindly left me back to the hotel I was staying in.

I’m tired. I have spent about 12 hours today revising for the law exam I have to sit tomorrow. The course is vast. And because there is so much information I appear to have forgotten the parts of the course that I revised only two weeks ago. I am also having difficulty working out which parts of the course are the relevant parts. How can I tell which of the 40 or so Judicial Review cases are the ones that I am expected to know? I can’t possibly remember them all – and even if I could Judicial Review is only 10% of the course.

The only thing I have in my favour is that there is no way the rest of the people sitting the exam can remember all this either.

There was no way on this earth that Casey West thought he would get away with embarrassing me on the Perl Whirl. As Barbie said Casey really did play his ace card much too soon on the cruise. However, it was more fun watching Casey sweat than it would have been to play another prank.

But I did get my own back. I needed to find something that would embarrass Casey and I needed to make sure that there were other people around to witness it. As Casey and I don’t live on the same continent I knew that I couldn’t be there to witness his embarrassment – but I can live with that. I only had three places to choose from. I immediately ruled out his home because there wouldn’t be enough people there. That left me with his local Perl Mongers meeting or his workplace. I couldn’t really be sure he would be at the Perl Mongers meeting so I went with his work. So, I sent a large bouquet of happy birthday balloons to Casey’s office. And to make it even worse Marty decided that we should add two 40 inch balloons with the numbers 18 on them (and it was late so I went along with him). Just what Casey wanted. To be wished a happy 18th birthday.

Hopefully that will be the end of the birthday jokes and not just the beginning…

We arrived in Izmir very early in the morning. Well, it was just before 8am but it seemed really early to me as I had stayed up much too late the night before. Marty and I had booked a trip to Ephesus and we had to be at the pre-arranged meeting place for 8am. I must admit that when I first woke up I was really tempted just to stay in bed. But I’m glad I didn’t. Ephesus was really worth seeing. At first I was concerned that there was only going to be a few marble pillars to look at but once we got into the site it was fascinating. I’m sure that not everything the guide said about Ephesus was true (I was really unconvinced about the stuff concerning the last resting place of Mary and John) but it was very interesting.

I really can’t remember much of what we did when we got back to the ship. Marty wasn’t speaking so I assume he went to hear one of the speakers and I spent the afternoon studying. What I do remember very clearly is dinner. It was one of those nights when the waiters decided to dance. I didn’t get up to dance with the waiter as I really didn’t want other people looking at me. However, it seems that one of my friends had decided that I should be centre of attention at some point that evening. I’ve always hated the idea of having waiters sing “Happy Birthday” to me. You see it happening to people in restaurants and I always cringe. What I wasn’t expecting was to have the waiters on the ship come over with a birthday cake and sing “Happy Birthday” to me. The main reason I wouldn’t expect such a thing to happen was that it wasn’t my birthday. Not even close to my birthday. So imagine my surprise when the cake arrived at the table. To say I found the experience embarrassing would be a bit of an understatement. The people sitting at the table with me cried with laughter. The waiters looked really perplexed as I kept saying over and over again “but it’s not my birthday”. When asked to blow out the candle and make a wish I managed to lean over and hit the cake with my chest getting cream on my new top. All in all an interesting experience. It was fairly obvious at this point who the prankster was. Marty and I had been winding Casey up all week.

After dinner we played cards with Barbie down in the bar. He taught us a game we hadn’t played before called 6 Nimmt. For whatever reason this was not a card game that I found easy to play. Actually the game wasn’t that difficult. It would be much more accurate to say that this was a game that I didn’t find easy to win. I stayed up much too late chatting to Casey and Barbie and decided to call it a night once Randal and Co started on the triple shots.

We really should have got the hole in the dining room fixed. I can hear the rain drip dripping onto the floor. Maybe instead of typing I should go and get a mop and bucket…

The conference season just seems to get longer every year. I thought that the Perl Whirl would be the last one of this year. Seems this is not to be and that we are planning on attending the London Perl Workshop which is taking place on the 11th December. I’ve also just noticed the dates for E-tech. I suppose we need to decide fairly soon whether or not we are going to attend this next year.