Anyone from Cork driving to Kilkenny for Podcamp on Saturday? Our original plan was to go up on Friday via a convoluted circuit of trains, but unfortunately there is now no way I will be able to unchain myself from my desk tomorrow to undertake this all day journey. This means I need to travel up on Saturday.

As I am scheduled to speak (Marketing Strategies for Blogs and Websites: How to Pimp Your Own Ride Without Making the Internet Hate You, if you like that sort of thing) I sort of need to be there. Thus, I am looking for a ride. I am happy to provide petrol funds, and will even provide fresh baked muffins if it will help.

Ideally, I’d like to transport:

• Me, John and Eimear the wonder dog, who is an excellent car traveller and sits curled up at my feet in a foot well for the entire ride as unobjectionably as possible.
• If that’s not possible, John and Eimear can stay at home and have a more local adventure on Saturday, and just a seat for me will be completely appreciated.

If anyone can offer either flavour of lift, I’d really appreciate it! Thanks :)

The Irish Web Awards short list were announced yesterday and I was delighted to see that Twitterfone and Spicendipity are both in the running for Most Beautiful Website in Ireland, and that Spicendipity has also made the running for Best eCommerce Site. There is some very fierce competition in these categories, so this is definitely one of those occasions where it really is an honour just to be nominated.

They are also interesting and in some ways, contrary categories. Most Beautiful is pretty straight forward. It’s a beauty pageant, and whilst beauty is in the eye of the beholder,  the contestants are not expected to sing, dance, twirl batons or play the trombone. Don’t get me wrong; I like the competition of a good beauty pageant as much as the next gal, but the criteria for this category are, by definition, blissfully superficial.

With ecommerce, however, it’s not just looks.  There’s a massive array of criteria for what makes a good shopping experience, and God only knows what the judges look for in terms of talent. High wire acrobatics? Gymnastics? Tractor driving? Skimpy swimsuits? It’s all a bit of a crap shoot.

In any case, one thing is for sure: there are some really great sites in these categories and I’m delighted for Pat Phelan and Deb Hadley that theirs have made the short list. I’m also delighted (although, okay, slightly less so…) for everyone else who’s made the finals. The high calibre of the nominees adds, I think, a lot of credibility to the inaugural Web Awards, and is a credit to the efforts of Damien Mulley and all of the judges.

I’m excited to attend and looking forward to seeing loads of people (180 and counting!) on the night.  No matter who wins, it’s looking like it will be a fantastic night and a great event for the Irish web.

While it’s good to have a goal, I’ll be the first to admit that sending out invitations for a house warming party a month away when your walls have been ripped back to studs and bricks and the concrete on your floors has just been poured is either tremendously ambitious or just tremendously stupid.

And while the invitations did say “come hell or high water” I don’t think I really understood the hell that getting to last night would entail. I’m neither a delicate flower nor a tremendous crybaby, but this last week has been seriously, seriously hard going. We moved in on Monday to a house full of builders, paint cans, generators, concrete dust, plasterboard, trowels and mountains of boxes and furniture piled into the middle of various rooms. Every day John told me to cancel this party, but every day I’d just invite more people. I invited everyone, from internet strangers to the lovely man who delivered our dishwasher.

The kitchen (and thus running water) was installed on Friday, and I was so happy to have basic services and so overjoyed with the way the kitchen turned out that I actually cried. According to the kitchen installers, this is not a typical reaction to having a new kitchen put in to one’s home. But then, this was not a typical house purchase, renovation or move in, either. It all moved really quickly, although exactly how quickly wasn’t really clear to me until this past week.

By Saturday, I was wandering around the world with that dazed look you see on mothers after really fast labours, the ones who are standing there in the produce aisle looking more than a bit shell shocked, holding a baby they’re not quite clear on how they got.

Mercifully, Deb Hadley arrived at 2 PM to take over the party planning, and she was impressive and masterful in her sheer capability. She turned out scores of multi-layered dips, vegetables, hot crab cakes and empanadas, beautiful crostini and gorgeous brownies in the two hours it took me to stand there and barely make a salad in between hiding boxes and sorting out liquor deliveries. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend or a more talented cook to turn up and bail me out at a juncture where I honestly had ceased to be able to function.

The food was tremendous, the wine was glorious, the beer was plentiful, and John and I were tremendously chuffed by all the people who turned up. It really made our new house a home to have it warmed by so many visitors. And while I know I’m exhausted and a bit weepy, it truly did feel like a significant accomplishment to welcome 20 or 30 wonderful friends into our first purchased home on our fourth anniversary after three years in Ireland.

So thank you, to everyone who helped, everyone who came, everyone who brought the bottles of booze we’ll be drinking well into the new year, and everyone who raised a glass to toast our new house.

It really was grand.

This Saturday, himself and I were featured in the Examiner’s magazine as part of an article about non-traditional weddings. John, who normally hates this sort of thing, it secretly delighted – but only because he’s able to announce he’s officially a “non-conformist” because the Examiner has said so.

I’ve scanned the story and stuck it online because once I shove it into one of the many, many boxes we are still packing at 2 AM, the chances of me ever finding it again are zero. Click for the whole thing, though it’s a bit big:

Things I learned from our “non-conformist” wedding(s):

• Wedding roles should be filled by people, not by gender. It’s OK if your best man is a woman, and by all means, you may now kiss the maid of honour.
• Your wedding party dresses themselves every single day without your help. If you leave it to them to dress themselves for your wedding, too, they will probably do a very good job (and be forever grateful.)
• If you have a child-friendly wedding and invite a lot of short people, your first dance may very well turn into the hokey cokey because they all want to join in.
• It’s perfectly fine to fire your wedding photographer in the middle of your wedding. You don’t need photos to prove you’re married.

Next weekend we’ll have been married four years. I should probably get around to having some of these photos printed and hung, but I may just frame the article instead so I can show everyone I married a centrefold.

I have learned an important lesson in the past few days and that lesson is: you cannot properly manage a house renovation project and work 80 hours a week. Attempting to do this results in the following litany of small scale disasters:

• €5000 worth of the wrong wooden windows being installed in your house.
• Selecting paint directly from the Dulux catalogue instead of using test pots and then realising you have picked the most revolting colour on God’s green earth, but only after it’s already on your walls.
• Saying “yes” to the idea of jacking up the floors and pouring new concrete without realising that whilst concrete dries very quickly, it takes months to properly cure in wet Ireland.
• Needing to wait more than eight more weeks to lay the gorgeous hardwood floors you bought ages ago because they can’t be installed until the fucking concrete dries.
• Having to rush to B&Q at 10 am to pick emergency carpet and tiles because the flooring guys are arriving at noon to cover the concrete that is now the bane of your existence in something – anything – you can live with until the bloody stuff cures.

I officially hate, hate, hate concrete.

Despite the fact that this house is nowhere near complete (and now won’t be for months – did I mention that part?) we are moving in on Monday. Working 80 hours a week also means that of course, we have not even begun to pack yet, so this weekend will no doubt be tons of fun.

The move also means that I am taking next week off, so if you’re trying to reach me, your choices are: a) drop by the new abode, find the boxes with all the telephone and computer bits, and network the house so that you can call or email me, or b) wait a week, by which point I should be a much more pleasant person to talk to.

The first option would be more helpful, though.

Sunday night was the screamingly fun Girl Geek Dinner in Cork, and although our numbers dropped from twenty to a mere half dozen, we had a great time. It was more intimate than the (also fun) extravaganzas these meetups often are, and a wonderful chance not just to meet but to really talk and get to know one another.

Martha Rotter, Katherine Nolan, Ciara Crossan, GabrielaAvram, Alana James and I had a lovely meal at Proby’s around the corner from our new house; I brought my paint chips along because lately I have taken to accosting total strangers on the street and asking if they’d like to help me pick paint. We talked about everything from transatlantic moves to TiVo, and at one point during the telly phase of the discussion I confessed a shameful, shameful secret – I am in love with the recent ads from DFS:

I love this ad not because I am in the market for a new sofa (just bought mine, thanks!) but because I love the totally ordinary people rocking out in their livingrooms. Let’s face it: we have all totally done that. And hell, who doesn’t want a bathroom big enough to play baseball in? (Or a hot tub big enough for ten, for that matter…)

Of course, in the UK and Ireland, nobody who isn’t a rock star has a living room that is as spacious as any of the ones shown, let alone one that will fit most of these enormous sofas, but that’s neither here nor there.

In any case, I love the Nickleback tune used on the ad (full video) in the same way I secretly love Hello magazine and other trashy treats. It was a great choice for DFS, because home decorating is a transparently aspirational undertaking, and the Rockstar lyrics tell a transparently aspirational story.

I am, however, more than a bit mortified to discover that I am apparently DFS’s perfect demographic target. Except for the bit where I’d slit my wrists with a rusty nail before buying any of those hideous sofas, of course.

An updated look for my favourite client and the godfather of Irish telecoms, Pat Phelan. It was a nice surprise to see MAXroam launch their new website this morning. The site redesign coincides with MAXroam’s new mobile data roaming rates, which have already been called a “giant killer” so congrats to the MAXroam team.

It is entirely possible I have been waiting my entire life to do a website for a circus, because I can’t think of a site that’s been more fun to build or a site in my portfolio that I love more than Circus Vegas. The design was just enormously delightful to create, and even though the poor client had to wait a completely rediculous six months, we both think it was worth it. Features a CSS layout and a WordPress blog all about the facinating world of circus life.