In my usual fashion, I have not been very good at regular blogging, so it has been almost six months since our notorious trip to Turkey, and boy how things have changed. At the very least, my body has changed quite a bit. Here I am at about 14 weeks pregnant:

And now here I am at about 24 weeks:

Please ignore the goofy expression. Chris had just told me to picture someone we know dancing, in an attempt to make me smile for the photo.

With only a couple of weeks left of my second trimester, I’m guessing there will be a lot of growth happening soon. I’m still not quite as bumpy as other friends who are at about the same stage.

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Chris and I have done a lot of travelling together over the years; Australia, Norway, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Hong Kong, Latvia, Germany, Switzerland… but we realised when we started talking about what to do for our summer holiday this year that we have never had a relaxing, warm beach holiday together. The closest we’d gotten to that was taking Chris’ mum to the Gold Coast back in 2002. Not always the most romantic trip when someone’s mum is along for the ride.

So this year we started looking at resort holidays in places like Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Croatia and all the other warm European destinations. There were so many to choose from we just didn’t know where to start. Overall, Turkey seemed to offer the most for our money, so we chose that as a destination almost right away. But there are just SO many resorts and hotels, how does one choose? So we took the scientific approach; we went to the Ving website (a Scandinavian charter tour company), clicked on Turkey and the dates we wanted, and clicked on… well basically the first thing that had a nice looking photo. What did we find? The Barut Hemera Spa and Resort in Side, in the Alanya region. We booked pretty much right then and there.

Oh how little we knew about how lucky we were! I had read a few positive reviews on the Ving site, and we were happy to go ahead and book, but it was only after our booking that I started reading TripAdvisor reviews. “Glowing” doesn’t begin to describe!

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When we found out we weren’t getting the apartment we wanted (see http://www.zoeselina.com/?p=174), we decided to book a weekend shopping trip to London to cheer ourselves up. We booked for the first weekend in August, which would mean when we got back it was only two weeks until our summer vacation in Turkey. How was I to know it would be a cursed weekend from hell!

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There exists in Norwegian real estate legislation a law that allows members of exclusive, private organisations to steal winning bids on homes. This seems very strange to me in what is essentially an egalitarian, socialist society.

A while back Chris and I decided that our current apartment, though very nice and in a great location, is just feeling a bit too small these days, especially since the arrival of Mojo and Sushi. I also had concerns that in such a small space the cats wouldn’t get enough exercise or stimulation. So we decided to casually keep our eye on the real estate market, but we were only going to actually go to viewings of places that were really special.

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Many of my regular visitors will already know that I work for Opera Software, though I don’t often post about anything that goes on at work. But last week Opera launched something so cool that I just had to blog about it. Opera Unite is a new web technology that lets you use your computer as a server via the Opera web browser.

On the day we launched Unite was one of the most talked-about topics on Twitter, right behind the situation in Iran.
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You know how sometimes you constantly hear about something on the Internet and you just keep forgetting to check it out for yourself? That was Google Maps Street View for me. I’d heard so many people talk about how they loved it, hated it, drove around for hours trying to get caught on camera… but I just kept forgetting to take a look for myself.

I actually think it’s pretty cool, despite people’s various privacy-related issues with it. I mean really, it’s no different than walking by a place yourself, except that you don’t have to leave your chair (no wonder we’re all getting so chubby, eh?) .

So yesterday I finally remembered to take a look when someone at work mentioned that the Google Maps crew had been spotted taking pictures in Oslo. Side note: I was quite surprised to find out that Mount Gambier, South Australia had already been done, but Oslo hadn’t. What’s that about? Read the rest of this entry »