April 2007 - matnkat.com

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Donkey work

Kat: For some time we've been planning to create a website to portfolio our work as developers, and now we've finally got round to it on Iteracy. Lesley came up with the name after an evening of brain-storming, during which Mat and I only came up with nonsense.

It became clear that we needed a "professional" site after a meeting with a client last week. He had tried to visit this site to see an example of our work, but mistyped the name and ended up at mattnkat.com who, spookily enough, also design websites. Our suspicions were aroused when he said that he'd found our website interesting - particularly the link to the miniature donkey ranch. I have nothing against donkeys per se, but we've never featured them on this site to my knowledge (before now). Without being unfairly critical, the design of the other site wasn't exactly what the client was after and it's impressive that he still wanted to have the meeting with us.

On a different note, last weekend we went to the wedding blessing of Vicky and Josh in the Unitarian chapel at Great Hucklow, Derbyshire, followed by a Big Cream Tea. Their relationship is a real fairy-tale romance, with ten years of separation followed by a happily-ever-after ending, and it was wonderful to see them together at last. When they first got back in contact, Josh sent Vicky a dozen red roses for every year that they'd been apart. Her parents then turned the flowers into rose petal wine, which was used during the blessing ceremony. What a beautiful story!

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Where the bloody hell are we?

Mat: Sorry about the lack of updates, but until now we've had nothing concrete to actually say. When we arrived back in the UK we were full of (often contradictory) ideas about where we were going to live next; for the first few weeks we changed our minds every day. One day in particular we went from wanting to move to Valencia in the morning, were dead set on going back to Brighton in the afternoon, and were looking at a map of Somerset by tea time.

After the first week we decided that the UK wasn't as bad as we remembered it and maybe we could live here for a while, so we went on week-long recce of the south west of England taking in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. Eventually we decided on a small town in Cornwall called Lostwithiel, where our friends The Wassons live. It has a population of 3,000, five pubs and most important of all - a squash court. We found a small house for rent near the town centre for a reasonable price, but baulked when it came to fill in the application form: we're hardly model tenants on paper. Self-employed, low income (it was enough to live on in Aussie!), no credit history for the last two years, living with parents; no surprise then that they asked for guarantours for the rent, which makes us feel like we're 20 again and renting our first flat in Brighton.

We just found out that they've now accepted our application (thanks to Kat's ma for guaranteeing us) and so we'll be moving in within a couple of weeks. It remains to see how we'll cope with living in a small town - the nearest Indian restaurant is five miles away, and we've no idea where the nearest art-house cinema is - but the Wikipedia article about Lostwithiel is pretty short, so even if we don't find any work down there we can keep busy updating that.