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 finally got to see our professional wedding photos today. You can see 27 of them on facebook (no account needed but this link times out, so try logging in and using this link instead if it doesn’t work). We’re not sure yet about whether to get albums printed. Maybe the DVDs are enough?

Here’s a summary of this year. For previous years, see the posts on my other blog: end of 2006 and end of 2007.

January

Tim and I started the year at Woodford festival, camping in a rented non-waterproof tent in the rain!

February

For Valentines day, we had dinner at Green Palace, a vegetarian Thai restaurant in Newtown.

On the 18th, my grandad died at the age of 88 years.

March

I had planned to be at Wikia’s offices in San Mateo for two weeks in March. Pop’s funeral was scheduled the same time. So, after a week in California, I did a day trip to England and got back to the US on Tuesday for the rest of the week’s meetings.

Back in Sydney, Tim proposed to me on the 22nd, the day before Easter.

April

Tim and I were back in England at the start of April as I’d been invited to give a keynote at the JISC conference in Birmingham. I also gave a short talk at The Webby 5 & People’s Voice Voting party in London and we celebrated our engagement with family and friends in England.

We went back to Australia for Tim’s family reunion in Bellingen.

May

We chose our wedding cake this month. After withdrawing my previous visa application for “de-facto spouse”, I started health checks for a new application for a “prospective marriage” visa.

June

In June, Tim and I flew off in different directions. I spent a few days in Korea for the International Conference on Information Culture, and Tim went to San Francisco for a staff meeting.

Back in Australia, we had our 2nd engagement party – this time a barbecue with Tim’s family.

I also bought my wedding dress this month.

July

In July we went to Egypt for Wikimedia’s annual conference, Wikimania. We spent a few days as tourists in Cairo before getting a bus to Alexandria for the conference. Unfortunately I contracted what was probably E. coli from a dodgy salad at the Novotel at Cairo airport and spend most of the time in Alexandria extremely ill. We headed home via Abu Dhabi where we stopped for one night.

August

For the past few years, my birthday has been during Wikimania, but as that was early this year, I was able to properly celebrate and we has dinner at Rise, a Japanese restaurant in Sydney.

September

In September, we headed to New Zealand for a few days so that my visa could be granted (which had to happen out of the country). We flew into Christchurch because it was by far the cheapest flight from Sydney, and then went to the embassy in Auckland where my visa was approved.

Back in Australia we attended Tim’s 10 year school reunion.

October

Just a month to go before the wedding, but instead of working on that, Tim and I went to San Francisco. It was the first time we’d been there together! I spent the week at Wikia’s new office in San Francisco and Tim was just around the corner for more Wikimedia staff meetings.

November

We got back to Sydney just in time for Wiki Wednesday which I spoke at. A few days later my family arrived in Australia for the first time. We managed to fit in some touristy thing alongside making last minute plans for the wedding on the 23rd.

And finally a chance to relax! We had a wonderful honeymoon on Hamilton Island, part of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Cruising, sailing, snorkelling, great food, and lots of relaxing!

December

Of course I made up for it in December by spending a busy month catching up before celebrating Christmas with Tim’s family in Bilgola.

My plans for next year include speaking at Linux Conference in Tasmania, attending Wikimania in Buenos Aires, making the final transition to Australia (my parents are still looking after all my junk and receiving lots of post for me!), buying a house, and doing all I can to make Wikia profitable for the first time!

Here are three photos from our honeymoon at Qualia on Hamilton Island. The first shows our own pool – an infinity edge pool overlooking the coral sea. The second is a view of Pebble Beach where we had lunch most days. This one was taken from a boat when we went on a sunset cruise. The third is one of the views from our pavilion.

The honeymoon was wondeful.  As well as relaxing, swimming, and eating great food every day, we also went on a cruise, went snorkelling at Chalkies Beach, visited the very white sands of Whitehaven beach on Whitsunday Island, and took a 16ft Catamaran out for a sailing trip. Tim even convinced me to keep my laptop locked in the safe for most of the week!

This is a word cloud made up of the top 100 words used on this blog!

Slightly edited to include our names and remove some common words

Image created using Wordle.net and available under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

We’re married! The wedding and honeymoon were great. I’ll write all about it once I’m caught up on 1000 other things. Here’s my sister’s photo of us cutting the cake. Thanks to everyone who came to wedding, and also to everyone who sent congratulations offline and online.

Tim went to Taste on Sussex Lane for his bucks night on Thursday and I went to Ayurvé spa followed by a great Japanese meal at Akaneya for my hen party on Friday. Today we did some last-minute shopping and almost everything is organised other than my packing for the honeymoon.

Following tradition, Tim isn’t seeing me the morning of the wedding, so our Best Man, Vincent, has just taken him away to a hotel. In only 12 hours time, I’ll be having pink champagne and bagels for breakfast with my family as everyone starts arriving from 7.30am onwards. I would write more but I’m terrified of breaking off my new nails!

Very excited!

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the ceremony. If you’re attending, you might want to skip these posts to avoid spoiling the surprise on the day!

This is our wedding blessing which will be read by the celebrant after the reading and before the declaration of marriage.

“Tim and Angela, marriage is the joining of two people, the union of two hearts. It lives on the love you give each other and never grows old, but thrives on the joy of each new day — Marriage is love. May you always be blessed in your hearts with the wonder of this special day. May you always be able to talk things over, to confide in each other, to laugh with each other, to enjoy life together, and to share moments of quiet and peace, when the day is done. May you be blessed with a lifetime of happiness.”