it's far too hot. I was woken up at midday by the heat, could be worse I suppose, I could have been woken up at 8am by the heat.

New Years Eve 2003/2004 looks like it's going to be really exciting this year. So far I've read my email, listened to a few Pink FLoyd albums, played with my pet spider from yesterday (I think he's dead now), and eaten breakfast (at 2pm). I also tried to ring the place I bought my motherboard from 3 years ago, since it's still under warranty, but there's no answer, not really surprising, it is NYE.

Now I have run out of things to do, and it's only 2.30pm.

I should ring around and find out what people are doing tonight. I'm really not interested in heading down to Sydney tonight. Spend hours getting there, and out to Circular Quay through all the people, watching 10 minutes of fireworks, that you get a better view of on tv, and spending hours getting home again because every pub is full, all the while trying to make sure people aren't trying to steal stuff out of my pockets.

There must be something else going on tonight somewhere worth going to. I really think I will end up just sitting at home getting pissed in front of the tv. I should probably go to the shops and get some alcohol before they close, if they are even open today.

Oh, and BTW, my arm is nearly healed now, only a couple of little scabs and some discolouration left now, got better a bit quicker than I thought.

Actually, I know what I'll do.. try and get this Cisco ADSL router configured properly. I hate IOS.

I was woken up by the phone ringing at 9.30am this morning (and to think I got an alarm clock for Christmas, like I need one), I decided I could not be bothered getting out of bed, because by the time I got across the room to the phone it would have stopped ringing. I rolled over and tried to sleep more, but it was too hot, so I just lay there half asleep and annoyed.

My mobile phone rang at 10.30, it was my mate wanting to know where I was (since I didn't answer the land line) and what I was up to. He'd just finished at the doctors and wanted to know if I wanted to go to the club (where I was the other night) for a couple of games of snooker and lunch, yeah, why not, I'm not doing anything else, excecpt going to spend the day looking at this broken computer.

So I crawled out of bed, starting getting dressed, as I pulled my shirt on, I could feel something scratchy in the sleeve, I pulled it away a bit.. holy shit! there's a spider in my shirt, no, wait, there's 2 spiders in my shirt, no, it's only one, and a skin it has discarded, how long has this bloody spider been living in my shirt? actually, I didn't think that, at the time I was mainly thinking "shit!" as I pulled it out, the thing fell on the floor, I had web all over me, I then pulled the skin out, and checked to see there was nothing else in the sleeve.

Grabbed an empty tiny jam jar I had hanging around, and trapped the bugger in it. I was going to put it in the sun to cook it, but I'm not that mean, I'll let him die a slow death of starvation or suffocation instead.

Finished getting dressed, jumped on the bike, and headed down to the club (I've already broken my rule of always wearing my jacket, oh well, I'm only going 'round the corner.. ). Parked up the bike, wandered in. I thought I would have a go at the pokie that gave me $20 the other night, but I found it was turned off, hmm.

Went upstairs to the snooker/pool room, found my mate, had a couple of games of snooker, got whipped, wandered down had a free lunch (well, there's no such thing as a free lunch, you have to be a club member, and that costs $4.40/year), put a dollar in the pokies on my way to lunch, won nothing, after lunch went back up, had another game, and I won, first time ever.

During one of the snooker games, my mate asked me if another mate, who I was planning to start an ISP with, had told me about his world trip, yeah, I knew about it, he also asked me if I knew that the plans of starting the ISP were on hold until the guy comes back from his world trip in 9 months, hmm, no, I didn't know this bit, and didn't really appreciate hearing it second hand. Oh well, I guess this just means I'll have to get a job this year then, instead of starting a business.

After this, we both decided to head up to Wyong, where he lives, and where the Internet Cafe I used to work in is. I popped in to the shop where people can pay for their Internet accounts, and collected a payment, I thought for a second "gee, I could keep this $60, and no one would be the wiser", but I had no intention of keeping it, which was lucky, because sometime between me leaving the shop, and popping in to home to collect my cd player (and the spare batteries) the shop called the cafe to find out why someone who didn't work there anymore had come to collect money.

I put my cd player on, jumped back on the bike, and headed for Wyong. about 1/3 of the way there the batteries ran out. D'oh. I couldn't be bothered to pull over and change them, so I just kept going. Got to the Internet Cafe, as I was about to go in, my phone rang, my precision driving mate had received a phone call to tell him his ADSL was setup, could I come around with some cat5 and set it up, yeah, sure, when I finish up here, which will probably be about 10pm. I wandered in, and was immediately told that I was about to be rung to find out why I was collecting money. Far out, try to do something nice for someone. So I threw the money on the desk.

I then had a chat to find out what was going on, and what the best price I could get on and ADSL plan was. I can get it for cost, as long as I watch the download, fine, I don't download much anymore, I mainly want it for the upload anyway. Now I need to have a discussion, and arrange for disconnection/removal of this crappy ISDN service.

I grabbed an ADSL router too, a Cisco 675, I need to fiddle and see if I can get it working in Aus, apparently these ones only work in the US because of the VCI/VPI settings or something.

I left from the Cafe, went to my mates place, had a look at a computer he was having problems with.. 5 pin ps/2 header on the motherboard, but only 4 pin connectors.. I had a look around on the internet, found both the pinout details of the header, and the port, pulled all the pins out of the plug, reaaranged them to match, plugged it in.. hooray, a working mouse. Also, the USB doesn't seem to work. Tried the other connector.. fine, one dead USB connector, hmm.

At this point the phone rang, another mate was at my precision driving mate's place, trying to get his ADSL working, apparently the sync light is just flashing, hmm, that sounds like the service is not connected. Can I come and have a look, yeah, I'm already coming there later, oh and "we" are travelling down to Sydney for New Years, (whoever the royal "we" is).

I then tuned in my mates new dvd/vcr combo, so he can watch Foxtel in the bedroom, that took a couple of minutes, by this time his wife had arrived at the train station, so he took off to pick her up. I finished tuning it just as he got back a few minutes later.

We then travelled to the Tennis Club for dinner, he shouted me dinner for fixing the mouse for him, and working out the USB problem, that was cool, so far today I've spent all of 1 dollar. I decided to shout the drinks. While in there, I bumped into an old mate I went to TAFE with years ago, apparently they're looking for some new employees where he's working, I think he wanted me to push for more details, but I don't really want to do tech support, and I think I would have difficulty working with him.

The other people I usually go to dinner with at the Tennis Club turned up while we were halfway through our meal, we finished our meals, and had a chat to them before we left, as we headed out, I decided I wanted to put a dollar in the pokies, since I had forgotten that I already did at the club this morning, won it up a couple of dollars, but then just played it back to my dollar, took it and went.

Headed back, had a chat for a while, my mate told his wife how the guy I was planning to start an ISP with is planning to head overseas, so we got to talking about visiting China etc. I was getting tired, and knew I still had to go look at this ADSL rubbish, so I changed the batteries in my cd player, and took off, about 3 seconds later the spare batteries I had just put in went flat. D'oh.

So I rode to my precison driving mate's place, had a look at the ADSL router, yep, sync light flashing, no service, maybe this stupidly long phone cord is causing it. tried putting it really close to the phone port, no diff. Got the Cisco router out of my bike, plugged it in, no WAN light. He called up the provider to complain, they asked to talk to me, told them the details, no phones on the line, no cordless phones, no alarm system, nothing that will muck with the line. "Oh, well I'll log a call with the telco then".

Fat chance of getting them out to sort this out before next year. So I plugged everything back, and left the router with it's sync light flashing, told my mate to just check every now and then, when it stops flashing, I'll come 'round with some cat5 and set it up. Watched him play Rainbow Six 3 on the suXbox for a while, then went outside, had a chat and a beer for a while, then came home.

Just gone through all my spam/email for today, there was a reply from Abit about my motherboard, apparently it's still in warranty, groovy, now I just need to chase up the people I bought it from 3 years ago.

I've got a shocking headache, and I'm sick of looking at this monitor. I'm going to bed. No idea what I'm going to do for New Years, I'll call a few people tomorrow, but I think I'll end up sitting at home, getting pissed, and watching the fireworks on the telly, it's a lot easier and cheaper, and there'll be more alcohol involved.

After fixing this machine, and opening Opera, besides it giving me a rough date of when this machine went wobbly, it also still had a page open that I found hilarous.

Read this: http://www.andtheylivedhappilyeverafter.com/91.htm

OK, the driver finished downloading, I ran the setup, seemed to work.

No "PCI Multimedia Device" in Unknown Devices anymore.

Try playing again.. hooray. Didn't even need a reboot.

I suppose I should put the side back on the computer now. I could leave it off with the excuse that I'm going to vacuum in there (where did all that fluff and dust come from??) but I won't get around to it.

I've got a Coldplay song stuck in my head, "let's go back to the start", I google, it's "The Scientist".

I start Winamp, find the mp3, plop it in the playlist, play.

"Error: You don't have a soundcard. If you think you do, try installing some drivers".

D'oh. System Properties | Hardware | Device Mangler

Ooh look "PCI Multimedia Device" under "Unknown Devices".

It's ok, I'll just look in the drivers directory on my other machine, that will jog my memory, and the driver will be there, on my other machine.. the other machine with the motherboard that blew up. D'OH!

D'oh. I don't know what this card is, I think it's an ESS 1868 PCI. hmm, I can't find drivers for such a card, maybe it's not.

I give in, pull the side of the computer, get a torch, and a mirror "CT4810" it looks like it says here, but I'm trying to work it out from it being backwards and upside down.

Ok, drivers.. here we go. 5MB?! This'll take hours.

I think I might have to get ADSL installed.

I figure it's costing around $40/month to have this ISDN, between the line rental and the calls of dialling in:

$22/month line rental +
~62 calls/month @ .25/call ($15.50) =
$37.50/month

and quite often the line will drop out more often resulting in more calls.

I've seen unlimited 256k ISDN for around $55/month.

I'll have to see if I can have a chat with the guy I used to do work with, and see if I can get a cheap account out of him. It'll save him money.. I won't be hogging a port on the Tigris all month, and he can have the NetJet card to sell to someone for around $200, that has to be enough to get some discount.

Right now I'm waiting a long long time for the 5mb sound driver to download at 6k/sec over this 64k connection. It should have been finished minutes ago.

I really want to get rid of the bloody unreliable ISDN service, and this crappy NetJet card that refuses to work in linux for some reason. I hate having a windows PC as my Internet gateway, it's slow and annoying and I have to spend so much time mucking around with firewall software and nonsense to stop the machine from getting r00ted over the Internet.

Hurry up and finish driver.

Still haven't heard anything about going to see LotR, doesn't worry me, I'm not really all that interested anyway, it's just a 4 hour long bum numbing saga.

Screw it. I decided to fix someone elses computer I've got sitting around here, "it's got a virus on it". I shoved in a network card, installed a newer virus scanner, and sat down to watch tv while I waited for the update to download, kicked off a full scan, and went back to watching tv.

I was just getting towards the end of an episode of One Foot in the Grave when my phone rang, thank god for TiVo. Pause. It's a guy from the motorbike place, the replacement brake part I ordered is in.

By this time the virus scan finished, no viruses found, whatever. Now I don't know what to do, I suppose I'll just charge $20 for updating the scanner and checking the machine.

I'm sick of bloody computers.

I loaded my bike up with the tools I needed, took off, picked up the part, went to my precision driving mate's place (where my other bike lives, the one the part was for), and went about fitting it.

I decided I would go for a test ride, since I couldn't get in his garage to get the brake cable I took off. Oops.. I forgot about the fact that I broke the terminals from the key switch, and that the the fuse blew, and that I have to hotwire the bike by taking the seat off.

I rode my good bike home again, picked up the fuse holder and wirestrippers, went down to the auto place, bought a couple of new fuses and a fuse holder, and some new terminals to replace the crusty broken ones. Went back to the bike, replaced the fuse and the crusty terminals, rode the bike around a little bit. Seems to be ok.

I rode down to get some fuel, I've no idea how much is in here, it's probably got almost none.. wrong.. almost full. I managed to fit $3 worth of fuel in, maybe the new fuel will mix with the old fuel, since the thing has been sitting around so long.

I decided to clean the bike, it's filthy and covered with spider webs. I ride to the car wash. Bloody hell, people just taking their time here, I had to wait about 20 minutes to get into one of the booths, I went an changed my last $5 while I waited. Spent $3 cleaning the bike, looked pretty spiffy after that, rode it back again.

By this time my mate was back, so I got in the garage, got the brake cable, oiled it, put it back on the bike (burning myself several times on the exhaust), and what do you know.. it does absolutely nothing. d'oh. adjusted it, oops, now I think it works too well, really easy to lock up the back wheel, oh well, it'll pass rego so I don't care.

Ok, now it really should pass, back brake works, it's clean, the guards are all back on, all the electrical is fixed.

I popped around to the bike place, on the way over I noticed my rear right blinker bulb had gone. Rode past some cops, lucky they didn't notice the blown bulb or the fact my rego has expired.

Got to the bike place, had a quick chat to find out when they are open over the next few days to inspect it, and they offer to do it then, cool. I grabbed a replacement blinker bulb, $2, lucky, I've only got $3.20 left. Oops.. no rego papers.. so I pop home, grab them, and go back again.

The bike passes rego. good, "What's that oil leak there?" d'oh, thought I would get away with that, "a little bit of oil leaks out the screw that holds the clutch rod in" "oh, ok", phew. Bought some chain lube while I was there. Don't know why, I'll never get around to putting it on, and my other bike is shaft drive.

Rode it back again, parked it up, all done. Now I just need to pay for the insurance, and renew the rego. And then decide if I want to sell the bloody thing.

My mate complained that he was having issues with the sound in the machine I built for him recently, I'm not surprised, crappy onboard sound. I stuck in the sound card from the old machine, no issues whatsoever. Fixed, good.

On my way out the door, he mentioned he was thinking about going to see Lord of the Rings around 7pm, and would give me a call or send me a message, this was just after 6pm.

I popped into McDonalds on the way home, that was uneventful, just basically trying to avoid coming home to have to deal with computers again.

OK, I can't handle it anymore, I need to see if I can fix this machine. Find my Windows 2000 CD, fiddle around with the install trying to repair my old install, what a surprise, none of the repair tools work. why do they even bother putting them on the CD?

So I installed all over again, on the same drive, in a different directory. Let's see what happens if I add myself as a user, login to that user to create the profile, log out again, rename my old profile directory, and log in again.. what do you know! it works! wow!

So now I'm back with my old profile all working again. This machine broke on about the 4th of October, I work that out because Opera opened with a webpage of the Rage playlist from October 4th. So this machine stayed broken and running off a bootable CD for nearly 3 months because I couldn't be bothered to fix Windows. I'd still not have, but the CDrom drive is on its way out, and my Linux bootable CD keeps crashing.

OK, well now I have a working machine again. I'm off to check when the next computer fair is, and how much money I've got, to see if I can afford to replace the busted motherboard, or just buy a new one with cpu/mem and build a new machine.

My TiVo network card will be on it's way soon, I wanted to spend my money on a DVDR drive, bugger. I think I need to get a job.

Hmm, I'm having a great day so far.

I got up a bit after 11, went to turn on the noisy ass computer to check my email.. it won't boot up. no beeps, no video, nothing.

Hmm, it's done this before.

I pulled all the cards out, unplugged the drives, pulled out all except 1 memory stick.. this should work. Nope. reseated the CPU, tried 2 different video cards, tried different memory in different slots.

Nothing. Dead as. Great.

The motherboard must have failed, I can't think of anything else, if the CPU had failed, the machine wouldn't turn on when I try to boot it.

I just found the receipt for this board (and the CPU) I bought them on the 9th December 2000. $248 for this board, and $335 for the CPU. I got a bit over 3 years out of it I suppose, and somehow I think it'll be out of warranty. I've just sent an email to Abit to check though, I would hate to think I missed out on getting the board replaced.

Ok, I guess I'll have to fix my other PC with the dodgy CDrom in it, which normally would not matter, but because I'm so lazy, I never bothered to fix it when Windows corrupted its registry, and I've been running off a Knoppix bootable linux CD for ages.

So much for getting the bits for those season interfaces, I haven't got a machine to attach it to, can't get to the software I need, and now haven't got the money to spend.

Ugh. I can't sleep. I've been lying in bed since I turned the tv off at 3am.

I think I'll watch this History Channel documentary about clocks.

Maybe if I turn this noisy ass computer off I might be able to sleep.

I was woken up at 4.35am this morning, by my phone ringing for the third time. I didn't realise it was the third time, it was only after I answered it, a call back from my voicemail, with a message that sounded like someone had sat on their phone and called me, and deleted that message, that I noticed I had 2 missed calls previously, my voicemail had tried to call me 5 minutes before, and my precision driving mate had tried to call a couple of minutes before that, so he'd sat on his phone.

I went back to sleep, slept through until 12:30pm.

Got up, had a pretty lazy day, read some forums on the internet, watched my Pink Floyd DVD I bought several weeks ago, just basically bummed around.

Around 9.30pm I decided I was hungry, so I put some fish and chips in the oven, while I waited for that I boiled the kettle so I could do the washing up (I'll have to get this hot water fixed I think), put out the rubbish.

Had dinner about 10pm, watched some more TV, and read some more forums.

I've just spent a fair bit of time mucking around with some card sharing software. Seems to work over my LAN, "can I get it to work over the Internet?" I thought. This was a real kerfuffle, I've only got access to 2 windows PCs over the Internet, one of them is off, and the other one I can't remember the login for. Eventually managed to remember the login, then getting the files I needed was another greatly more difficult task than it needed to be. Broken ftp servers everywhere, missing OCX files. Argh.

But in the end, I got the files, got the software running, and after not being able to get the stupid firewall to port forward the traffic, put my card programmer on the firewall machine, and saw everything working.

I think I'll get the bits and pieces to make a couple of season interfaces tomorrow.

I'm off to bed to watch some more telly.

Today I got woken up by a mate complaining he couldn't get on the internet, was I having problems, and could I fix it since no one who worked there would answer a phone, and I used to work there.

I staggered over to the computer, attempted to remember the commands I needed to check what was going on, identified the problem, then realised I had no recollection of how to fix it. I just reset the password and that fixed it. Buggered if I know what it was.

Oh, I was supposed to be going to look at a RAS with him today too, but he couldn't be bothered, which suited me. I didn't really see the point of going all that way to look at a RAS, "ooh, look, a RAS. Can we go now?" basically.

A short while later I recieved an sms from my precision driving mate, "can you bring your xp cd around, and I need to go to the shops" which roughly translates to "come around and spend hours installing xp on my machine, and then follow me to the shops and carry the stuff I buy back, because I'm too cool to wear a backpack when I ride my bike, and I don't have a bag rack".

So I went, spent hours installing xp and getting it working. We didn't end up going to the shops, or to see Lord of the Rings like was planned, too many people are seeing it and it keeps selling out. might go tomorrow.

After that I left, and went to the barbeque I had been invited to, that was good, good food, a couple of beers, and a bit of entertainment watching Men In Black 2.

I left from there, back to see my other mate at the club. I refused to pay $11 to go into the nightclub, and listen to crappy top 40 music, so I entertained myself downstairs playing the pokies, won $20, so that wasn't too bad. Went for a wander around, and bumped into a few other mates, sat and had a few drinks and laughs with them, they all decided to go up to the nightclub, and I came home.

They might have been able to talk me into going into the nightclub normally (especially since I won that $20), every now and then I don't mind getting up and making a dick of myself on the dancefloor, but I'm feeling really seedy after my drinking effort yesterday, and I knew any really strenous activity like dancing would just push me over the edge and leave me spewing.

So now I'm home, planning to watch a few hours of telly before sleeping until someone wakes me up again.

Turns out I was mistaken..

My mate (the precision driving one) just called, "are you at home, can I pop round?", "yeah, whatever". Turns out all the stupid driving earlier was to get to the video shop to return dvds or something, and after I took off thinking he was trying to lose me, he went looking for me.

When I went out to the beach looking for him, he was at a different beach, one where a family get together was going on that he wanted me to go to. Oh, and he sent me a text message, but the network did not attempt to send it to me for hours,and when it did send it, my phone was full. I cleared space for the message at 2am, but it still hasn't come through.

He brought a bottle of wine around, I've polished off half of it, it went down nicely after the end of a bottle of rum, and a fair bit of whiskey.

it's 3am, my back teeth are floating, I've been drinking since 4pm yesterday. I'm going back to my National Lampoons Marathon, I've just watched Vacation, and almost all of European Vacation, just got Christmas Vacation to go.

I think I'm supposed to be doing something tomorrow. I think I'll be sleeping or hungover.

Well, that was almost a complete waste of 2 1/4 hours.

I thought I would be nice, pop around and visit a few people, wish them a Merry Christmas and all that crap.

First stop, my mate's not home, his parents think he's gone out to the movies. Thanks for the invite. Anyway, dropped off a card and collected $50, not too bad.

Next stop, I go and see another mate, he's just on his way out to the beach, ok, I'll go for the ride out there with you, and we'll have a chat there. About a minute into the travel towards the beach, he starts doing all this stupid driving, nearly makes me stack trying to follow him through a roundabout. Screw you.

I decide to pop in on another mate, he's not home, I continue from there to another mate's place, since it's reasonably close, no one there either. I head out to the beach my mate was going to, his car's not there, he must have gone to another beach.

I give up. I go to the shopping centre that is on the way back towards my place (where the movies are my mate probably went to) it is at this point I realise I don't have my phone, I'm hoping I left it at home, I've developed a habit of doing that, I wonder why. I think about seeing a movie, decide it's a waste of money, I've got a bunch of movies on my TiVo, and at least I can get pissed while I watch them. So I get some food, and head for home.

I stop in at a big electronics shop to see if there are any bargains. Nope. I just got home, here's my phone, no missed calls, no messages. Good to see I am loved. OK, now I'm going to watch some movies and get pissed.

Are we there yet?

As predicted, at 9:30am, my door gets knocked on "get up, we want to open presents". I crawl out of bed, get dressed, and drag myself in for the start of what's going to be a long day.

My 7 yo brother starts handing out the presents, with somewhat of a bias towards his own of course, but since he's got more than the rest of us, that probably works out in the end.

Surprisingly, I did actually get some good stuff this year, mainly a drill (only 'cause dad wants his back), a tool box and tools (cheesy, but I'll just replace the bits that break with proper bits, so it's a good start), a tool bag (might find a way to use it to carry my tools on the bike), Analyze This DVD, a clock, and chocolate, pretty useful all round, maybe Christmas isn't as useless as I thought (at least I didn't get a sombrero or a cooking book this year).

I wouldn't have minded the day, except that my parent's place is full of muck associated with animals (cats and a rabbit), to the air and all the furniture is loaded with fur/hair etc. After sitting in there for a few hours, my head started pounding, my eyes and nose would not stop running, and I got a sore throat. I hung in for as long as I could, eventually gave up and returned to my living area. I don't know what I looked like at this stage, bloodshot running eyes, running nose, must have been charming.

Oh, and the other small point, is that it was about 40C outside, I grabbed a cloth and lay down for a while, after an hour or so, I could feel that I was dehydrated, I was delirious, I thought I was going to die.

I got in my shower to cool down (which is still only cold, so that worked fairly well), after that, I felt ok for a few minutes, until the heat evaporated me dry and I was back to square one.

Shortly after escaping allergy central, 7 yo brother came to find what I was up to, and I told him I couldn't handle the allergens, so he went about evicting the cats and vaccuuming the furniture.

Shortly after my shower, he came to check on me again, I returned to allergy central, after consuming several antihistamines and paracetamol, here we go for round 2.

I sat in the slightly cooler air, which helped, but I could still feel the air attacking me. A short time into this, one of my mates popped round to wish Merry Christmas, and I had a chat to him, that was nice. I managed to handle a few more hours in allergy central, by this time, it was habitable outside, so I left again, to write this post, before watching some TiVo of the stuff I missed while suffering through my parent's taste in tv earlier in the day.

I'll be out and about tomorrow, wishing Merry Christmas' and Cr, er, happy New Years everywhere, that should be more fun than today, it couldn't be hard, I think even the other day when I stacked my bike was more enjoyable than today, on the whole.

I've got about 47 hours of video on my TiVo at the moment, but to be honest, I don't feel like watching any of it. I get more enjoyment out of the TiVo as something to hack around with, rather than using it to watch tv. At least I can fast forward the ads and those bloody annoying Foxtel card update announcements they feel they need to give us every 5 minutes. I am so sick of seeing that guy's stupid head, I think I will have to go back to using the 30 second skip button rather than fast forwarding.

I'm going to finish watching the unfunny episode of The Simpsons I started watching about an hour ago, before reading about blogging, and starting a blog, and ranting in it. I think I might watch a couple of episodes of Whose Line is it Anyway? after that, it's usually reasonably funny.

It is Christmas Eve, only an hour and a bit until Christmas Day.

I wonder what pointless gifts I will receive. I have tried on several occasions (the last 2 Christmas' at least) to make it clear that I am not interested in the commercial holiday that is Christmas.

It used to mean something to me, it used to mean the end of the torture that was school, it was also mean 6 weeks away from the torture of school (although that last week, knowing what was to come, was never very enjoyable). It also meant receiving items I had lusted after for several months, which just made it all that more dissappointing when I actually got the plastic crap I'd been begging for for months.

Anyway, since I left school, Christmas lost some meaning, I was in college, which was not torture, I still had no income, but I didn't need any, I had my free bus travel :-) I would scrape together the money I did have, and buy what I thought people would want.

Then, I went into another phase of my life, I started working full time, getting good pay, and when I wanted something, I bought it, so I no longer had any commercial use for Christmas, it was just a few days off work, in fact, the only days/year I would take off, since I had no reason for any other days off.

I quit my full time job/life back in 2001, a few days before Christmas, mainly because my employer wanted me to work the few days between Christmas and New Year, I'd already put in for leave, and had it confirmed, but they changed their mind. I was new, I was cheap, I could run the office for those few days. Wrong, here's my resignation, bye. Christmas that year was just a bit of a relief from a year of crap, changing job roles twice, relocating a job, and resigning from 2 jobs.

Last year, I went back to college, earned another useless qualification (a whole other story, maybe I'll tell it one day), then worked casually for a mate's father's business. Christmas last year didn't mean much at all.

This year, Christmas means absolutely nothing to me. Allow me to waffle.. I have been nonemployed (not unemployed, nonemployed, I haven't been sacked or quit, I choose not to work) for the last 3 months, with a few days of casual work in there every now and then, and I'm loving it. I'm sick of "having" to do things, I do what I want, when I want, and it's great, I've never felt this good. I'm not getting much money, but that's not the point, if I wanted or needed money, I would get a job, or at least "look for one" and claim benefits, but again, I'm nonemployed, I don't want to work.

So anyway, back to the point. Christmas now has none for me. I don't know what you lot want, I don't even know what I want! But if I did, I would just buy it. Christmas is just an annoyance now. Today I got to battle my way around the shopping centre trying to find things I think my family will want, that's fine, but I can't handle it when people are seemingly purposely getting in my way to annoy me.

Yes, I'm talking to you you stupid woman. You look right at me as you walk towards me, then you decide to walk to your right, across my path, planning your speed and trajectory to be in my way for as long as humanly possible. It was all I could do to refrain from punching you out of my way.

Fair enough, it's my own fault for waiting until Christmas Eve to start and finish my Christmas shopping, but I would have thought I could have a 5 minute period of time without something annoying me.

The roads to the shops, and the carpark when I got there, were, of course, attrocious. "What do you expect?" I hear you say. Yeah, I should expect that, because the roads are full of people who DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DRIVE. Try looking once in a while, or using your indicator, it's really not that hard.

Wow, that was a bit of a rant, I feel much better now.

I managed to get through all that hideousness, I get home, and I start wrapping the presents. On the first one, I managed to move my arm so as to catch it on my keys in my pocket, I injured my arm in an accident the other day, I have some nasty road rash, this resulted in blood exiting my arm. Nice. I continue wrapping the present, the tape runs out half way through. In trying to remove the empty tape roll, I snapped the tape dispenser, and I cut my thumb open. The rest of the presents are wrapped uneventfully, with the odd spot of blood here and there.

So now, I wait anxiously for tomorrow to arrive, if only for the whole nonsense to be over for another year. I wait to see the looks on peoples faces as they recieve the gifts I have chosen for them, as they realise it is something they do not want, or already have. I wait to see the craptastic things people have got for me (I really hope it is either nothing, or alcohol to get through the rest of this madness that is Christmas/New Year).

I think lunch tomorrow will be the time I announce that I am resigning from Christmas.

"Do not, repeat do not, buy me anything next year. I have no intention of getting you anything. If you get me something, I might say thankyou, but that will be all you will get from me".

I am not interested in this useless commercial holiday. I am not religious, and the only meaning it had to me before, as explained above, is no longer there. Christmas served it's purpose, but now, as far as I am concerned, it can go the way of Bobunk.

The point of this blog..
This blog is really for my own purposes. I am fascinated by statistics, I like to know the exact date things happened, so I can work out lengths of time between things occuring etc. as a result of this, I spend a fair bit of time trying to work out or remember when things happened (finding receipts from around the time etc), and I thought this would make my life a bit easier, so I wouldn't have to remember when things happened.

Take, for example, the fact that my hot water heater broke several days ago, it's probably close to 2 weeks ago now, and I can only work this out from the number of days I have gone avoiding taking a cold shower (usually 3 before my own stink nearly forces me outside). I don't know when this happened, or exactly how long I have been too lazy to fix it, but if I was blogging, I would know exactly how long it has been.

The blog will also be a place to keep my random ramblings, which I usually try to force on people who are really not interested. This gives me a place to put all that nonsense.

And hey, if you're stalking me (I wish) you just hit the jackpot. More than you ever wanted to know, right here.