Steamed Puddings

About the author

I’m Kelly Atkinson (née Kelly LeFevre). I’m a woman between the ages of 25 and 35 who values her privacy on the Internet. As a woman of this age, I regularly go through periods of hating my hair. I try to be a compulsive gym-goer and have been known to eat and enjoy protein bars, of all things.

I’m married to a Kiwi (whom I call Kiwiman in my blog to preserve his privacy). He’s swell. We were married in March 2006.

I live in New Zealand, the land of the long white cloud. I emigrated here from the USA in 2002. Before that, I lived in Tucson and Flagstaff, Arizona. I’m enjoying it here, and I’ll probably live in New Zealand for the forseeable future. Although I still consider myself an American, I recently gained dual citizenship in NZ and can now go through the short lines no matter where I might travel. Generally I try to blend in with New Zealanders; I don’t go around waving the American flag.

I’ve always intended to make a separate page discussing my vocation, but I’ve never gotten around to making that page. I work as a protein biochemist and I’ve just finished my PhD. I also tinker with computers on the side and I have a number of certifications in IT.

About this site (in general)

This site has come a long way from its humble beginnings in 2002. I originally started it to get away from emailing updates about my fantastic life in New Zealand to my family and friends. For the most part, that’s still its purpose. I also like to maintain a web presence to reconnect with old friends from school and beyond.

Why the name “Steamed Puddings,” you might ask? Well, they’re really tasty. I enjoy eating them. I’d never had them before I moved to New Zealand, and this domain hadn’t been registered at the time that I built the site. It might be too gauche for a business card, and it gets giggles from Kiwis, but it’s certainly a memorable (and yummy) name for a site.

About this site (Colophon)

I originally built this site using Blogger in late 2003. I quickly outgrew Blogger and switched to Movable Type, which was gaining a lot of popularity. I developed the rather brown look of the site at that time mostly by hand-coding XHTML and CSS. It took me forever. In mid-2007 I “rebooted” the site in conjunction with the release of the Movable Type 4 beta, and returned to the default MT style. Throughout this period, the site was hosted by the excellent guys at Whack.

In January 2008 I realized I was never going to have enough time to continually tweak MT to be *just* what I wanted. I ditched self-hosting (and Whack – sorry, guys) and moved the blog to hosted WordPress. It is now much easier for me to manage and runs faster. Yay!

Currently the site runs courtesy of WordPress.