Since I increasingly can never remember even what I did yesterday, this is a random collection of thoughts at a point in time. This Christmas I got a whopping eight days off thanks to the official university shutdown period - mandatory paid holidays that don't subtract from annual leave is a nice employment bonus. This is as much as I can recall.
- December 25
- Had a massive all-you-can-eat buffet lunch at Bayswater Hotel. The vegetarian options were a little limited - mostly I dined on vegetarian lasagne and chips, but that left plenty of room for desserts. I felt full for at least the next 24 hours.
- December 26
- Started off the day with a long 17km run to work off some of the calories hanging around from yesterday.
- Watched some of the bonanza NBA Christmas Day matches, but most of them were one-sided.
- Went to the outlet mall in the afternoon, specifically the Nike Store, where I purchased yet another pair of Lunar Glide 4's, I think I currently own six different pairs.
- The surf store had some good bargains too, $15 for shorts but I wasn't sure what size to get, I figured since I own a lot of size 34's that are quite loose (at my current weight) I'd risk a 32, only I got home and they were quite a bit too small. Oh well, still better than trying on clothes in the store.
- December 27
- All of the shops were back open today, so I cashed in my ABC Store voucher before it expired for a new cooking book. This one kind of sucks though because most of the pages _don't_ have pictures, but I couldn't tell that at the time because the book was wrapped in plastic - SHE'S DEAD, WRAPPED IN PLASTIC.
- I also picked up Bioshock Infinite for a bargain $34 new and spent an hour at the gym.
- December 28
- It was supposed to get to 38 degrees today, not sure if it quite got there but it was damn hot. We went down to Jells Park for a run in the middle of the day which was a bit of a challenge. The park doesn't really seem to have many good running tracks, so you end up going around in circles every few hundred metres, which is mentally draining as much as anything.
- December 29
- Spent an hour at the gym then off to Designing Bond 007 at the Melbourne Museum - not sure if that's the exact name but it was something like that.
- The Bond presentation was alright, they had about seven different rooms showing off Bond memorabilia and interesting information.
- Gold Room - Goldfinger and The Man With The Golden Gun (but not Golden Eye).
- M Room - The M commissioner man and woman in the films.
- Q Room - The Q guy and all of the Bond devices and gadgets.
- Casino - The casino scenes that appear in several movies.
- Location Rooms - Shows off many of the locations used in the movies, e.g. Africa, Asia and Europe.
- Ice Room - The movie, or movies, that have snow and ice scenes.
- Villains Room - All of the villains from the movies.
- Overall it was quite good and I spent about an hour and a half there reading the signs next to each of the exhibits and such. You could walk through in as little as half an hour if you didn't bother to read as much.
- December 30
- Pretty much spent the morning and afternoon watching the final weekend of NFL regular season games.
- I watched the Red Zone channel for the end of the 5:00am - 8:30am games, which switches around between each of the games whenever a team is about to score.
- I watched the Chicago vs. Green Bay game next, while switching over to Grand Theft Auto V during all of the breaks. The game was a little slow to begin with but actually quite exciting in the second half and at the end. Go Packers!
- The last game was Dallas vs. Philadelphia over lunch. This one was a bit boring but at least it was close and the Eagles won.
- I also had time to squeeze in a run before and after the lunch time game, 14km in total.
- December 31
- I figured I'd end the year by getting some stuff in order.
- I took my coin collection down to Croydon ANZ which took like an hour. First they had to empty the machine because it was full - somehow it was full within 10 minutes of the day! then when it was my turn the machine just stopped working. The woman had to open it up and clean it out, there was a loose screw, hair pin and other random metal pieces that had gone through it. The total was just over $500 which is almost enough for an Xbox One. Even at the branch the stupid ANZ policy seems to be to only give out $50 notes instead of crisp green $100 bills.
- Spent the afternoon doing boring house cleaning tasks that I'd been putting off for weeks, months or years in some cases - the kitchen venetian blinds had some really sticky crap all over them when we moved in, which is just painful to get off without wrecking the blinds - they are a soft metal, so if you bend them accidentally they will have a permanent crease. So that was good to finally get finished after three years...
