2005 Year in Review

I'd done this the two other New Years I've had this blog, but last New Years I was away from home and my computer, and it was too hard. But I did spend quite a bit of time reading through my blog and picking out highlights, and it seems a shame to let all that effort go to waste. That and I've spent some time today reading the icq log with Stu from June last year - that momentous June where I fell in love with him. It was certainly a roller coaster year.

I'm going to back-date this, so probably only people that get this via a news feed will see it (Stu and Dave I guess heh).

Some highlights:

* By far the biggest highlight was meeting Stu. I knew very early on that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him
* Dave & Yvonne engaged (well technically they got engaged in 2004)
* Jumped out of a perfectly good aeroplane (with parachute attached). It was great, but too expensive to do regularly. That and the risk of dying and leaving Stu is perhaps a little high
* Had a great night in January where I had about 15 people over to watch a "slide night" on a data projector of my USA photos
* Installed apache on my photo server conspiracy so I could put in referer rules and stop people bandwidth-stealing my pics
* Went rock climbing with Campbell
* Saw Peter Jackson in person talking about the Lord of the Rings and King Kong
* Went snorkling a couple of times with Campbell
* Went to quite a few BookCrossing meetups, mostly to see Yvonne and me brother
* Lost many many hours of my life staring at the world from space with Google Maps and Google Earth
* Had a second lot of krib babies in May (six of which are still alive - would have been more if I'd taken better care of them)
* Watched all six star wars movies in order in one night. Probably a once in a lifetime but a must for any Star Wars geeks
* Got a blackberry and used it primarily for communicating with Stu
* Read Harry Potter 6 in a day
* Went live with a new website/cms at work after half a year of work
* Lots of trips to Queensland, one to Noosa, one to Yass to meet Stu's family
* Took up guppy breeding
* Saw Fiddler on the Roof and Topol live
* Took ~1500 photos of the renovation process of Luc's place

Some lowlights:
* Grandma Coates died in January, which was expected but still really sad
* Wasn't invited to George's birthday, came very close to never seeing her or her family again
* Expensive fire-safetyifying of the building
* Three days sick off work from two different flus, the most sick I've been since 1999
* Had a server get compromised from a week-old exploit in Backup Exec. Found within half an hour and rebuilt it that night
* Regular video nights pretty much stopped, as Striker was working over the weekends

In the fish tank department, got a brand-new-second-hand tank off a neighbour, and all its fish. Lost the biggest (4cm) tetra (which was 2 1/2 years old - old for a neon tetra!), a black angel, and the parent kribs. Took a tank to work for the krib babies and added guppys to it later. Somehow got ich in the big tank.

Was commenting to Stu today on what a mad year the past year has been. Certainly meeting him has been one of the highlights of my entire life.