Well, I've been a bit quiet on the blog front lately, largely due to the fact that we've finally moved house! Hurrah!

Here's a camera-phone snap of the moving van and sold sign, outside my fantastic new house in Stirchley in Birmingham. As you can probably gather, it's fantastic.

We're pretty much all settled in now, though the spare room is a bit of a swamp of boxes (you can walk across, but your feet tend to get stuck along the way). We even had a few hours of sunshine yesterday afternoon, meaning that we could get out into the garden and tackle the lawn, hedge etc. Fun!

I've also managed to save myself quite a lot of money by taking a bit of a different approach to the telephone in this new place. BT wanted £125 to re-install a phone line (someone had cut the cable), which I wasn't going to pay. This was a prompt to try my hand with VoIP (voice over internet protocol) instead. So, I signed up for cable broadband and bought myself a router with a phone jack on the back. After signing up with VoIPTalk, I can plug in my normal phone to the router and get much cheaper phone calls. In fact, there's pretty much a flat rate for calls to any part of the world. When you consider that Marla is from the US and we talk to people over there quite a bit, this is brilliant.

Rather bizarrely, as the thing is all routed through the internet, it doesn't matter where you claim to be located either. So, we've signed up for two phone numbers (a couple of quid each per month - cheaper than the line rental), one here in rainy Birmingham and the other a local San Diego number! So people in California can now make local calls, which get routed through to our house phone like normal! Amazing, really, and it all just seems to work, so far.

Anyway, furniture all in now - anyone want a washing machine?

It's sold! At last! Yay! This is a relief beyond measure...

At last, I've had an offer accepted on a really nice house. Assuming all goes to plan, I'll soon be the owner of a nice two bedroomed Edwardian terraced house in Stirchley.

I'm really quite excited, as I've been renting for around 18 months in Birmingham, since selling my place up in Yorkshire, going off travelling, and settling back here in Brum to go back to university. Anyway, I decided to do a little research online into Stirchley - to see if there were any local websites or any blogs or other webby things. It seems that there's not much. BirminghamUK.com has a page about Stirchley, with a picture of one of its many many Indian restaurants. There are in fact two such establishments within about one minute's walk of my potential new house... yum.

A rather odd thing which did turn up on my ask.com search (I was actually quite taken in by their marketing strategy of asking why most people rely on just one search engine, when they wouldn't rely on (say) one source for their news, or research), was this site offering a method by which people in Stirchley could get in touch with "Orientals and East Europeans" for dates. One of the charming adverts posted on the page reads:

"Ive been told by many people that I'm very easy to get along with, are a very good listener. I'm very clean as well as Drug Disease-free. I'm docile, physically affectionate (as well as emotionally), caring, passionate, sensitive, intelligent."

"Docile", "drug and disease free"? Well, you've got to aim high, I suppose...

Another site which I quite like about this city is BirminghamItsNotShit.co.uk. This site very aptly advocates Birmingham as a fun and happening place, in just the way that Brummies would. It's genius. You can even buy from a vast range of BirminghamItsNotShit goodies, such as t-shirts, mugs, fridge magnets and the like. Brilliant. I've also noticed that this very blog of mine has found its way onto the list of Birmingham-based blogs headed by the title "Brum Blogs - they're alright". Thanks for the link guys!

Oh, and talking about links to my blog, I'm also now on the Birmingham Linux User Group's Planet, an aggregator for the blogs of some of the group's members.

Right... I'd better do some work... will write more about the house as the situation unfolds.

I just spent the best part of last week in Wales. My girlfriend's family came over from California to visit, and so we've been travelling around visiting various places. I reckon we must have notched up about 1000 miles (including the two trips to Heathrow) in our whistle-stop tour of the Midlands and North Wales.

The weather in Wales particularly was amazing. We took a walk up around Cwm Idwal on Thursday and I got this shot, with which I'm really rather pleased.

My parents have also had the builders in this week on their house, and some major structural work is going on (pics to follow).

Well, summer appears to be almost upon us and I'm planning on getting out and about in the countryside with my camera over the next few weeks.. so expect more!

It's not been an eventful week, except for a couple of things.

Firstly, I woke up yesterday morning to an incredibly sharp pain in the back of my neck. Not really able to move it much all morning, and being in quite a lot of pain, I stayed home and tried to stay as still as possible. Movements seemed to cause cramp-like spasms, which felt like someone was stabbing the back of my head. NHS Direct revealed that in fact I had torticollis, a condition which doesn't seem to be too well understood, but usually clears up in a few days. Well, I still can't move my neck too well today, though the spasms have mainly stopped. I think it'll be a while until my full range of movement returns.

Reading around the common causes of torticollis, I noticed that amongst them were stress and poor posture. I have been spending quite a bit of time arched over a computer this last week, and I wonder if that was a trigger. Well, I'd do almost anything to avoid having this thing again, so perhaps in addition to sitting up straighter, I should take up yoga or something.

Satisfied that my house sale is going through well, I went to see another house this week. I've expressed an interest in a few houses around Stirchley in the last couple of weeks, but am not in a big rush. The one this week needs a lot of work doing to it - and this is reflected in the price. I'm quite excited by the prospect of being able to put in a new kitchen, bathroom, redecorate everywhere etc. but I wonder if this is really the wisest thing to do, considering how busy I am with my PhD research and teaching at the moment. I'm currently trying to gather information about just how much the work would cost... and have yet to make up my mind what I think.

This weekend I finally accepted an offer on my house in Leicester. Yay! It's not been on the market for too long, when you consider that we've had the Christmas period, when moving house is the furthest thing from most people's minds. Still, it's gone to the solicitors to sort out now, and I'm hopeful that it will all go through smoothly, unlike a false start that I got into right at the end of last year.

This means that I can now start looking seriously at where I want to move to, and I've decided that the part of Stirchley which borders on Bournville is the way to go. Apart from having a few nice victorian streets with some relatively inexpensive houses still, it's also right on the train line, meaning with a four minute trip to University and only slightly longer to the City Centre. The trains are still cheaper than the buses round here too.

I know a few people who live round there already too, which is helpful, and they've all recommended it. I'm now off to look at quite a few houses this week!

Has it really been almost a month since my last blog entry? Wow, I've been busy. It really is rather crazy; so much has happened in the last few weeks. Much of the business of November has centred around the entire of the rest of my immediate family moving house within a matter of days.

My parents have finally moved completely to Wales, moving from their two houses to one, and my brother has moved in with his fiancee in their own house. All of this within a few days was quite a task!

Anyway, details aside, all went smoothly and a few photos are on Flickr. I think we're all still recovering, however.

In other news, I've now started my PhD, and got my desk and everything. I've even received my first month's pay, which was nice. The topic I'm supposed to be studying is still rather like a misty spectre in front of me though. I know it's there, but I can neither grasp it fully, or explain to anyone else what it's really about. I have been recently reminded though that I do have three and a half years with which to get to grips with this, so I don't feel overly stressed. The reading so far has been interesting, as have been the research meetings. I'm also demonstrating in a Java workshop for MSc students - something I do find rather amusing considering that I only learnt Java myself a few months ago for my own MSc project. Still, I haven't been found out yet. Ssssh! :-)

Well, as this photo shows, after months of work I am finally almost finished in doing up my house in Leicester ready to sell. I had a couple of valuers round yesterday who seemed fairly impressed with the state the place is now in, which is some relief.

To be honest, I'll be quite glad to be shot of the day-trips from Birmingham to Leicester which have become quite a regular part of my life over the last few months. And thanks to road-works at both Spaghetti Junction on the M6 and at the Leicester south motorway junction, my average journey time has been around two hours, rather than the 55 minutes or so which I'd been used to.

The traffic jams on the Leicester ring road - something unavoidable in the current state of affairs - have been the worst. Yesterday it took me nearly an hour to get a couple of miles. There are consolations though: I quite enjoy people watching in traffic jams, and James Morrison's debut album is quite fantastic and also fairly soothing on my otherwise frustrated mood.

So now... the house goes on the market. And we watch and wait.