The Book of Ashes

2007 - the year of weddings 11:01PM

2007 seemed to be the year to get married. I'd only been to a few weddings in my entire life and then suddenly 5 in one year. It must be that age. Next Saturday my sister gets married. All good.

2007 was also the year of the big overseas holiday. My first experience of Europe, travelling through the Greek Islands, Spain, Ireland and London. What an excellent trip with so many experiences along the way. I finally got a taste for olives and feta (ahh the Greek salads), I got to see the ancient ruins at Athens, travel to Barcellona and try the paella and sangria as well as see the Gaudi architecture (the sagrada famila is the most freaky building I've ever seen). There was the Alhambra in Spain and the free tapas, not to mention the most excellent flamenco dancing we found while in Ireland I got to see where Tom & Corina and Martin live in Dublin, do a pub crawl around the pubs on a Sunday and finally find a Guiness that I like. Down in Cork we stayed at the flash Balymaloe house and travelled around the countryside in a campervan with a non-toilet trained puppy. We took a fishing boat out to Skellegs Island where monks built a stone staircase up the steep island slope and lived in stone huts and I managed to make it to my sisters engagement party. London I got to catch up with Bev & Jo and Dan and to finally see where Crispy lives. We got to travel on the tubes and see the powerhouse that is London. We also experienced 2 for 1 cocktails at B@1 which was cool. Crispy also took us out for an excellent day.

Hardly recovered from our return trip we managed to buy ourselves a house out in the burbs or the 'ror as Jo calls it and loose our weekends to work around the house. We put up a new letterbox (after the posty sent us a letter of complaint that the current one was too rusty), weeded everything in site, planted some strawberry plants which are bearing some wicked returns, a lemon tree (which is growing slowly) and a pohutakawa tree. I managed to chop through half a pine tree and stack it under the house as well as acquiring an initial basic set of tools to prove myself a real man. The current project is a raised garden in which to grow our own veges although technically that is now being worked on in 2008.

2007 was the year that global warming took center stage and made us start worrying about all the plastic bags we're using, the trips we're making in our cars and planes and the waste we, as individuals, generate every day. It was the year of massive growth in the TV industry with LCDs and plasmas dropping drastically in price and the OLED screens joining the party (don't they look sexy?).

Work was interesting and chaotically busy for the entire year. It was a year when we hired a new guy to fill the gap and are still looking for another. We also got a projector, another GB of ram each and duel monitors to combat the code.

2007 was another year for Google to make its mark on the world. It was a year for ideas and maturation of those ideas.

2007 saw in my first mortgage and my biggest ever debt. Anyone want to place bets on how long before I pay it off? :)

2007 is a great number (007 - James Bond). It contains my lucky number 7. It went bloody quickly though didn't it?

It brought in interest free student loan, the introduction of the kiwi-saver which in many, many years to come will return much money to kiwi's. It brought with it few returns from the stock market (NZ one anyway) and the government reaped huge surplusses in tax. It bought an end to the crazy housing market (pretty much exactly on the date we bought our house) but not an end to one of the highest interest rates in the developed world.

And towards the end of it all it brought all my family here to Wellington to gather for my sisters wedding. My house has never seen so much alcohol and probably never will again.

So now I wonder, what will 2008 bring us? What goodies lie in store for those that hope? I have some ideas, I know whats on my wish list. We shall just have to wait and see...