And so ends another year.

2008 was one of the hardest, but also most rewarding, years of my life.

Some of my favourite moments:

• Helping catch Galen as he was born in the sitting room or our home
• Seeing mum and Nick again
• Every moment with Galen
• Scoring my first 100 in cricket
• Writing and releasing another software application for a business and seeing a significant positive impact to that business
• Our trip to Belfast to see a certain group perform

Some of my least favourite moments:

• Spending a Saturday night saving our property from a flood
• Losing a cricket match when the other team needed 32 runs from the last 8 balls
• The “summer”
• Some of those nappies

There were a lot more positives than negatives.

As expected, Galen has turned our lives upside down. In 2009 I hope that I can restore a little bit of balance to my life.

It’s 11:15pm and I’m at my desk, in our cottage, slowly getting things ready so that we can move back home.

Carpets and lino were laid on Thursday and it looks great downstairs. We now have carpet in the hall, in the bathroom, and underlay under it all. Mmm, comfort.

Sherry’s computer got fried in the flood, so with the insurance money plus a bit extra I bought her a 20″ iMac which I’m now in the process of setting up. Part of this involves copying over all her data. Said data is on a number of partitions spanning three drives.

To get the data over I am doing the following:

• Plug HDD in to borrowed computer
• Enable Internet sharing over the iMac’s ethernet port
• Plug a spare router in to the iMac, and then to the borrowed computer
• Boot computer with a Gentoo Minimal Live CD
• Start sshd server
• Find the right partition(s) on the drive and mount them
• On the iMac, connect to the machine via SFTP
• Drag files over to the iMac
• Repeat for each drive

It’s hard to describe just how much I’m looking forward to going Mac –> Mac in the future.

It’s nearly five weeks now since we moved out of our home.

Thankfully, they’re nearly at the point where they can put carpet and lino back in which means we should be home by the end of next week, just in time for Christmas.

Our gorgeous little man was 7 months old yesterday. It seems like only yesterday that I caught and then welcomed him into the world.

On Saturday night, just as we were putting Galen to bed, water started leaking into our kitchen.

I raced outside, looked behind the house, and was shocked to see a huge river of water streaming past.

With all the rain we’d had, along with the soaked fields and some blocked drains, most of the water from the hill behind our house had decided to divert towards us. There is a bit of a slope down to a drain on the track behind the house. The drain couldn’t cope. The water started pooling, then, as it rained more, streaming past the house.

I went to check the drain and the water was above my knees.

Soon after this I went back inside and the water had started coming into our sitting room.

As quick as we could we took as much as possible upstairs (some things had already been damaged by the water), and with buckets, mops, towels and sheets, did our best to get rid of as much water as possible.

Unfortunately, with all the water outside, it was more or less a losing battle until we could stop the water from pooling behind the house. Andrew (the farmer) came over and built up a bit of a dam up the track which helped, but it still took a while for the water level to drop back down.

By this time there was 2-3 inches of water in our sitting room, and plenty more in the kitchen. I removed somewhere between 50 and 60 full buckets of water from the house, and Sherry removed plenty too.

Eventually everything settled down and we were able to mop up the last of the water, look down at our sodden carpet, and get some sleep.

On Sunday morning we ripped out the carpet and started packing. We have a house to stay at until our place is liveable again, but things are pretty manic at the moment.

We’ve had windows open and the fire going and the dehumidifier on. Hopefully the floor and walls will dry out quickly so that we can get new carpet in and the house back to a state where we can move back in. Of course, we can’t do this until we can guarantee that it won’t happen again. Hopefully we can sort out insurance stuff, arrange to have a wall or something put in behind our house to stop water pooling, and then go from there.

We’re all fine at least.

I’ll be in London from Sunday afternoon on the 26th of October. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’ll be staying, but hopefully I can catch up with at least someone.

The appointment at the Passport office is at 9:50am on the Monday morning. I’ll be catching a bus back to Taunton whenever that has finished.