Christmas Swim

Every year the Monkstown rowing club where I used row has a Christmas morning swim for any lunatics who want to freeze their arses off before the turkey. This year loads of lads did it and one brave lad even did it in a thong, the guy in the lead in this shot:



Catriona´s Dad took his boat just outside the pier to get a new angle on the proceedings.

Christmas in the City

Here´s a few photos of Cork for those of ye further afield this Christmas. it´s Oliver Plunkett Street, Patrick Street, City Hall and of course Hillbillys.





Margaret

Best of luck Marcel!

This is Chris, James and facing the camera, Marcel, who I work with. This is usually what I see at work when I look right, but alas no more as Marcel has moved on to a new job! Farewell and good luck.

Margaret

Christmas

This is a funky bookmark Charlie sent the other day from Australia. Suggestions for names are welcome When choosing, take note of its underlying sinister nature.


And this is my amazing new phone curtosy of Mom. As you can see, not only is it a phone, but also a portal to a new dimension. Great!

Christmas tree!

This is my lovely assistant Kat displaying the glamerous Christmas Tree fashion of Arthur Road London. Wonderful.

Decoration

This is a decoration that´s hanging in our front room in London. Hugh got me a fantastic digital camera for Christmas so there´ll be hundreds thousands and millions of photos from now on!


Margaret

Mystery Photo

This is an interesting photo i found on my camera the other day. I think it's a magnet on my Mom's fridge. Who knows?

I'm off back to Cork this evening for Christmas, so here's a picture of good auld Shandon.


Margaret

Fancy Dinner

I got some old rolls of film developed recently and these are from a fancy dinner I cooked in Passage aroudn a year ago. Above is Charlotte, a friend from college who is now travelling around South America somewhere the last I heard. Below is Claire, who is currently teaching English in Japan.


And last but not least here's Yvonne, Laura (massive smile, fair play) and nigh on invisible behind the amazing drink disguise is Niamh.


Margaret

Cover yourself up!

Myself and Kat from work went to a festival a few weekends ago, and here's a spectacular sight we saw! Also here's Kat trying to steal the limelight by climbing sneakily on board a race boat via a super bike. Excellent!


Margaret

Fish Pond

This is the fish pond we have in our back garden. These photos are pretty dark as i took them before work a few mornings ago. The pond is covered in a netting which keeps the damned neighbours millions of falling leaves out of it, and stops birds, cats, etc eating the fish. The bamboo canes stop the netting falling into the pond.


We have lots of statues and stones keeping the netting weighed down. This is one of them, he's some form of high brow garden gnome. And finally the fish themselves. I think there are around 20 of them and they are around the size of a hand.


Margaret

Christmas Party

I had my work Christmas party last night in Turnmills in Farringdon. It kicked off with a champagne reception, followed by exquisite meal and much dancing and craziness. Here we are having a bit of a boogie on the dance floor.


This is Marcel and Chris. They are developers in my team. Marcel is the guy who took the photo of me that became the flickr icon of the day. Chris is showing us his business face. Lovely.



Margaret

Our House

Hugh and I have moved into an apartment in Holloway. It's around 10 minutes walk from the Arsenal stadium on one side, and around 30 minutes walk from Camden on the other side. Holloway is a great place too with loads of cool bars and shops and even a cinema.

This is our kitchen. It's really nice and has loads of counter space. The rest of the kitchen is really big and there's loads of space for a kitchen table, fireplace, music system and these days, a Christmas tree. I'll get a picture of that soon.



This is our front room, with telly and couch. It's a grand size and the couch is pretty comfortable.



If you walk to the arch at the end of the front room, you come to the conservatory room, with the Wii set up. It's deadly. Plenty of space for jumping like a maniac playing the Wii, and also note the wealth of drawer space.



And last but not least, my bike, Betsy 2. Those of you who are familiar with my bike will recognise it, but it's actually a different bike! By pure fluke our local bike shop was selling this exact copy of my bike when I was looking to buy one. Fantastic.


Margaret

XBridge Bowling

Yesterday myself and Hugh went bowling with a few of the lads from XBridge. It was fantastic fun. Hugh did quite well and played some pretty impressive bowling. I played utter rubbish and played some impressively disastrous bowling.

Standing next to us in the picture above are Christine, Jeff and Martin. Below is Kat (who was in direct competition with me trying not to be the outright worst) showing off her own unique bowling style.


Margaret

XBridge

This is a few of the lads that I work with in XBridge. This was a few weeks ago at a "Teck Drinks" party. This is, left to right, James, Ross, Christine, Me, Marcel, Phil, I think that's Jim in the background and Ritesh. Most of us are developers, with a few business people thrown in for good measure.

Margaret

We're in London!

Hi everyone. Sorry it's been a while, but now that we're settled in London we can start blogging again. Me and Hugh moved to London a few months back and are living here:


We have the ground floor of a converted terrace house, and have a little back garden and everything. We even have a fish pond in the back garden, i'll try and get a picture of that soon.

Since moving over we have both started new jobs, Hugh teaching music in a primary school in Notting Hill and me work as a software engineer in the financial district in Moorgate. We also joined the Brent Symphony Orchestra and played our first concert last Saturday.

It was in a place called St John's Wood and was good craic. A friend of mine from work came and took some photos. He's a really good photographer and puts his favourite shots up on flickr. The one on the top here got flickr's icon of the day award during the week. This is his account:

http://flickr.com/photos/7431997@N02/



Margaret