Shift key plus semicolon, plus shift key plus 0 key = :)

Whoa, I am glad Christmas is over again! This may seem a bit weird, but hear me out.
The whole point of Christmas as far as I can see is

a) commercial sales profit

b) religion (note that I put this as the second aim of modern Christmas)

c) Family

a) was ruined for me, because I spent the lead-up to today working in retail, selling the stuff that you all bought for "low low prices", and spent the rest of the time stressing about what to get everyone.
b) was never really in the picture for me to begin with.
And c) was messed up this year because Mum, my li'l sis, and Mum's partner are away in New Zealand. Dad lives 60km out of Town and we didn't drive out to see him this Christmas (he comes into town frequently, but we usually go and see him on chrissy day). and the remaining three of us (me, my big bro Fred and big sis Flo) tried to hang out today but let's just say it didn't really work out.

So Christmas = Bust.

I know that's fairly negative, but I'm just saying that it wasn't such a good christmas when compared to some of my previous years.
Although in saying that, I did go around to Leonie's place to have lunch with her parents and Grandmother, and that was actually pretty nice :). They can cook I tell ya what! I love Leonie's family's cooking.
And the other good bit about today was the cleaning I got done around the house. I say I did, but it was actually Leonie and I who toiled on this momentous holiday. It's interesting, but while in my back yard this arvo, I heard several next door neighbours mowing their lawn, so it mustn't have been just me doing some overtime labour.

I have tomorrow off thank goodness, time for more cleaning, a bit in the house and alot in the yard. I've been slack to say the least with the chores.

Fred and I have surpassed our download limit for the monthly internet. Bugger. It won't get reset until the 6th of next month :'(. Now I can't watch Youtube videos without having to wait about fifteen minutes for them to buffer... wahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....haahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!

On the camera front, I've finally been able to pay for my Samsung s1050 (Paypal is such a pain with it's waiting periods), but the guy I bought it off (in the U.K) is on holiday until the 5th of January, so I probably won't have it until mid to late next month... frowney face!

And to top it all off, I have lent my 500gb external hard-drive to a chick from work so she can get mass amounts of my anime off of it. So now I don't even have anime to comfort me in my late-night boredom. I have resorted to something I used to do years ago; Listen to audiobooks while I play solitaire :S sound nerdy/ultra boring? Well, it is both those things lol, but meh.

Tomorrow, Leonie is taking us to the Boxing Day shop sales. I don't know about anywhere else (other countries I mean) but here in Aus, Boxing Day is when everything goes on sale, when shops mark down their stock, sometimes to a ridiculous extent.
I saw on the news today that in America, due to recession, shops had their lowest pre-christmas sales in fifty years this year. Lol the way the reporter was casting this story made it sounds like the end of the Earth. "Code red, code red, Americans can not, I repeat CANNOT afford as many christmas presents as they could before".....yep, I'm a nasty Pastie for making fun of them, but they make fun of the rest of the world so it's a taste of Americas own medicine (in saying "they" I'm making some extreme generalisations, most likely wrongly so, I know many nice and uncrazy Americans, and at the same time know many not-nice and very crazy Australians, so yeah it all evens out).

Meh, I'm tired, time for some Terry Pratchett Audiobook plus solitaire, then bed.

Oh yeah, P.S: if any of you non-existant readers out there are interested in what the life of an assistant Language Teacher in Japan is like, go to www.jasoninjapan.blogspot.com or www.joshuazimmerman.com/blog for some insight. Both bloggers write descriptively and are very entertaining in their recounts of their daily activities over there in Jap :)