Dan Rooke’s Blog

It’s been a while since my last post, please forgive me!

We moved house successfully (just about) and have now been here for over a month. We’ve been busy working on modernising the house with help from friends and family. After sorting the essentials (tap in kitchen, shower etc.) we have nearly finished decorating the lounge. There’s quite a learning curve to wall paper stripping and then putting up lining paper Hopefully we’ll be sorted soon, and I shall post some pictures.

It was also my birthday at the beginning of the month, for which I received a wonderful Canon EOS350D Digital SLR camera. My lovely wife Becca organised this with everyone. Thank you very much to all who contributed. I used it well for Chris and Jess‘ wedding which was also at the beginning of May. I shall have to get out and use it some more when I have some time.

I finally got round to taking the exam to become a Zend Certified Engineer for PHP5 yesterday. I passed! I will hopefully be listed on the ZCE yellow pages that Zend maintain within 24 hours. I’m quite chuffed about that, let’s hope employers recognise it! I have some practice tests left if anyone wants to try it. Professionally, I think I shall be focussing on getting more experience under my belt now for a little while.

Just a reminder that we’ll be moving house on Saturday. We’re mostly packed up and ready to go now! Wish us luck!

We had a great weekend visiting my Aunt and Uncle near Redditch in the Midlands. We visited Warwick Castle on Saturday and had a great day out watching a siege re-enactment, an archery display and a (very interactive!) falconry display. It was a little commercialised and would probably not have been as good a value for money if we hadn’t had a buy one get one free voucher!

While we were in the Midlands, we spotted a Bonsai tree shop near to the house, namely Dai-Ichi. We’ve been casually looking at getting one for a few weeks now and thought we’d pop in and take a look. They had a very large selection to choose from at all different levels of maturity and budgets from £10 - over £1000! It was all very impressive. We decided that we would buy one and we went for an Acer of about 18 years old. It has been recently potted up and so looks very smart and tidy and shouldn’t need any attention in this area for a year or so. We also bought the necessary other items such as a care book and a suitable plant food. Hopefully we’ll be able to look after it well and I shall aim to do regular updates so that you can see the progress!

At the start of 2007 we decided that we wanted to purchase our first house. So we got cracking and started looking in earnest after casually looking for the past two years. We soon found a two bedroom Victorian through terrace in Golcar out to the west of Huddersfield town centre.

We soon arranged a viewing and instantly liked it. We have looked around a few houses now and this was a very spacious two bedroom house in comparison to those that we had seen previously. We also really liked the area being high up above Huddersfield and Halifax practically on the top of a moor! The population of Golcar is predominantly elderly people and young families. It is quite a bit further out of town than where we are and so should be quieter. We will be a 5 minute walk from the village centre with shops and a library as well as having two small pubs within easy walking distance. We will be next door to a doctors surgery and a top rated infants school. We will be able to see Huddersfield’s Castle Hill from kitchen and bedroom window!

We promptly put an offer in and after a few more our offer was accepted. We soon got the wheels in motion in January and after a few miscommunications on the part of the estate agent, we look set to go. We are really looking forward to moving and taking on the challenge. We are in theory all ready to go, we need to sign on 6th April looking to move on 28th April. Let’s hope we don’t suffer any more hitches!

Take a look at the area on Google Maps.

Well, it’s been a little while coming but the new theme for my blog is now in place. I think that it looks a little cleaner personally and provides more functionality. I hope that you like it, please feel free to comment.

I’m also doing some work on organising and updating the information on here. And I shall try to post a little more regularly!