"Happy Birthday dear dblog..."

Life is so busy it almost passed us by... A big happy first birthday to this blog, which has been broadcasting now for 12 months and 1 day. It sure has gone quickly. We're into our ninth month here in London now, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but still... I'm pleased we've made it this far. Since we started logging stats we've recorded over 2,500 unique visits to the site, which hardly makes this the internet's busiest site. Since June I've been able to block our IP address so the site doesn't record visits from our housemates or maintenance visits that I make to the site. We're still receiving from 200-300 unique visits a month. (You count as a “unique visit” each time you come back on a new day, so weekly visitors get counted four or five times a month...) So, looks like there are at least a couple of people out there that are reading this! Thanks for keeping on coming back. We'd be interested to hear from you sometime (who are these visitors?)... Why not email us, or better yet leave a comment on this entry. Just click the "Comment" link at the end and leave your birthday message! Meanwhile we look forward to another year of broadcasting here from babbage.tv.

The upcoming broadcasts will include some long overdue photo pages for a number of trips we've made: to Whitby, Eastbourne, Tuscany, Paris, Bristol and Bath, Paris again, and Snowdonia in Wales... The thought of writing all those photo captions is quite exhausting. Perhaps we should have made a rule that we wouldn't go away again until we'd uploaded the last photos, as we seem to be getting a bit behind. With the holiday season nearly upon us though, I suspect that we may soon be even further behind. We'll be staying in London for Christmas itself, with two of my cousins from Australia, Katie and Rebecca, coming to stay with us. We're getting excited thinking about their arrival, and I know they're looking forward to their big trip. We'll also have another New Zealand couple joining us on Christmas day, which along with our housemates will make eight for Christmas here.

We've needed to be more organised than usual with Christmas presents of course, though we weren't organised enough for them to go by sea. I emailed Royal Mail in October to find out the seamail deadline, figuring it would be soon, only to discover that as far as they were concerned it had already passed! D'oh. Well, we've airmailed all our gifts now for Australia and New Zealand. We're glad to have the shopping finished, and are choosing to think of the postage in pounds sterling, trying not to calculate what it was in South Pacific Pesos. Meanwhile, shopping essentially done I can now begin the slide into holiday mode with the first of a number of work Christmas functions tomorrow. I'm looking forward to ten days off over Christmas, coinciding with Bronwyn's two-point-five weeks. We're hoping we may be able to spend New Year's out of town with some friends in York, though we need to talk to them about that yet. If you live in York you know who you are, and you should be receiving an email real soon!   : )