It's been ages since I last updated, crap loads has happened and I really can't be bothered going into all the minute details but I will try to give you all some idea of what's been going on in my life lately. First of all my laptop arrived this morning, so I'm making the first (of many) entries in this page using my new computer. No more using university internet while also paying for internet at home - I'll be able to use this wherever I go. For most of the day Nats and myself have been installing programs and copying music from her computer onto this one which has been a bit of a mission, but is necessary as we are going away in a couple of days and we want to be able to take all our music with us. It has a DVD player too which means that while we're on holiday we'll be able to watch many of our impressive DVD collection which will be pretty cool.

I guess all my holiday talk gives away the next part of my news, which is that we're going on holiday from Friday morning for about a week to Mangawhai Heads which will be nice, as it'll be the first real holiday that I've had for quite some time. We went up to Mangawhai fairly recently, but that was only for the weekend so this time we'll have the chance to spend a decent length of time away from Auckland.

It has just clicked past midnight so now it's Christmas Day, Merry Christmas anyone who's reading this. I've got quite a busy day planned for tomorrow, but it will be fun hopefully as Christmas is always a nice chance for everyone to get together. Sure, the excitement that Christmas held when you were a little kid is not quite the same but it's still nice. I remeber that my parents would always put a pillow case on the end of the bed and when I went to sleep it was empty but when I awoke in the morning it would be magically filled. The best Christmases were always the ones we spent in Thames, with my Dad's family staying at my Nannie's place. The whole family would be crowded around the big dining table, passing stuff this way and that, with my Nannie sitting at the head of the table surveying over all the chaos. Present time would always be a hilight, as we would collect presents from underneath the Christmas tree and hand them around. My Nannie's birthday was the 31st of December so we would normally hang around in Thames for the whole week after Christmas, feasting on fruit mince pies and playing cricket in the backyard between visiting various beaches on the Coromandel Peninsula. The time between Christmas and New Years has always been my favourite part of the year, normally because I would have brand new presents to play with, lots of yummy food to eat, and cool beaches to go to. The last couple of years I have worked through this time, so it will be nice once again to have the time off and enjoy my holiday break. Nats has three weeks off work which is a nice long break for her after a pretty long year of working fulltime.

I saw my Nana today, (mother's mother) although not in the best of circumstances as we had to go to the hospital as she had a fall earlier in the week and needed a skin graft which sounded pretty nasty. It's so frustrating because less than a week earlier she was telling me that she felt her best in about four years and was able to walk around easily and even do a bit of gardening, sure enough some nasty twist of fate ended up with her having a huge gash in her leg and needing to spend Christmas in Middlemore Hospital which is not the nicest place in the world. But we did go out to see her today, which seemed to perk her up just a little. She liked the cookies Natalie's grandmother had baked her, and she seemed a lot better when we left than she had when we arrived so hopefully our visit helped just a little.

It has been an interesting day today; my mum came back from Europe after four weeks away so Nats, my Dad and I went out to the airport to pick her up. It sounds like she had a really good time in France, Italy and Switzerland. Fortunately the weather was reasonably good so they got to see the Alps in Switzerland and lots of other amazing things. Ella is still in France, having just begun her six week exchange programme staying with a family in La Rochelle on the west coast of France. I hope she has a really good time, as staying with a family and living in the same place for a few weeks will give her a much more different view of France than touring around it as a tourist does. The family that she is staying with sound really nice, and she’s getting along with them really well so it seems as though she’s going to have a really interesting next few weeks – it has only really begun to sink in that she’s on the other side of the world today as my mum came back but my sister’s still about as far away from Auckland as you can get without heading off into space.

This morning Nats went into university to find out how she did in her test last week and to sort out her courses for next year. She surprised herself by doing really well in the maths test, and is going extension maths next year which is going to be an interesting challenge. So now everything’s sussing itself out for next year, which seems as though it’s going to be really different from this year, with me working fulltime and Nats going to university, and also promises to be rather interesting. I’m still keeping an eye out for a better job than the one I have at McDonald’s at the moment, but as I would only be available to work fulltime for a year I don’t think that the chances I’m going to come across something amazingly better are that great.

I also went to the optometrist today to get my eyes checked for the first time in a year and a half. My glasses are slightly scratched on the left eye which makes it rather annoying when I’m looking through them as I have a rather subtle white streak in front of me all the time. I’m going to trial contact lenses for a month, although the optometrist wasn’t that optimistic about them being right for the exact problem I have. But it’ll be interesting not having to wear glasses and still being able to see properly. I still don’t like the idea of having to stick my fingers in my eyes all the time to remove them and then put them back in place every night, but hopefully I’ll eventually get used to it and it won’t be such a huge deal. It means that for the first time since I was ten I won’t be the guy with glasses and it’ll be interesting to see people’s reactions to the change.

Things have been weird lately, ever since university finished life seems to have been incredibly comfortable and almost surreal. Maybe it's not having the stress of university essays due, or looming exams, but something seems to have made my life seem really really different to how it was during university. Obviously this is a good thing in many ways, I mean who would miss the stress of having too many essays and not enough time? But it seems alien, and almost unlike how things should be and unlike how things normally are. And why now? This is hardly my first ever university Christmas holidays, in fact being my fourth if you count the holidays I had at the end of 7th form. I guess the previous holidays have had me focused on saving money, either for trips to Australia or for my next year's university fees. This time around I don't really have a savings goal, my laptop is all paid for and due to arrive in the next week or so (hopefully), so maybe I lack a little direction? I know where I probably should be directing my energies, towards my research project which has been terribly ignored in the past couple of weeks - I really do need to get stuck into it a lot more than I have been doing lately otherwise I'm going to leave it all to the last minute and have one hell of a busy February. But then I suppose that once I get my laptop it will be much easier to work on my research project as I'll be able to have all the information on me whenever I need to access it, as well as the necessary tools to do so.

Nats has got her university interview tomorrow, which will then lead on to her enrolment and follows her tests last week. So, if everything goes according to plan, next year Nats will be a student at Auckland Uni which is pretty damn exciting! What will also be pretty cool is that the year after next Nats, myself and my sister Ella will all be studying at Uni, with Ella and Nats probably both doing psychology and being in the same classes. At last, after all my bitching and moaning related to not having anyone to have lunch with, to talk to between lectures and to study with, I'll have both my girlfriend and my sister here at uni with me. The post-graduate geography courses for next year look really interesting, and are probably fairly similar to how they will be in 2004, so I know it's going to be a tough decision when deciding what not to do, as opposed to the sometimes difficult job of finding enough interesting courses to do at undergraduate level.

Lately I think that I've lost a bit of my writing touch - which is worrying. Maybe I'm thinking about things a little bit too much and wanting to write what I think other people want to hear. Surely instead I should be concentrating on writing about what I want to write about - the coolest thing about having this page (as far as I'm concerned) is how it gives me the opportunity to look back into the past and have a fairly good idea about what was going on in my life at that time. I sometimes wonder if this page is a journal, a diary, a blog, or none of the above. I don't really write about my inner thoughts that much and it is totally public, so maybe it's not really a journal or a diary. But on the other hand, a lot of the blogs I read comment on things going on in the world at the moment while my writing tend to be rather narrowly focused on what's happening in my life. I think that I used to be worried that my page was different, that it wasn't really a true blog, and at times I have commented more on what's going on in the wider world. But on the other hand why should I try to make this page anything but what I want it to be? I have found that in many ways the most difficult task I've undertaken in my life is figuring out who I really am, a task which is helped by having a page like this immeasurably, why should I make it into something else. I'm going to try to write more about my feelings, because I think that it will help me and that is where I want the page to go, hopefully more longer entries will be plausbile when I get my laptop so that in five years time I'll have a better understanding of where I was at this stage in my life, while also helping myself piece together some of these random thoughts that pass through my mind constantly.

I went to the gym for the first time in a while yesterday, I know that I really should be going there more often to make the most of the money I am spending. But at the end of the day I'm often so bloody tired from work that I really can't be bothered walking all the way up the hill, and then tiring myself out even more for the next hour or so. I do think that I'm making a bit of progress, I'm able to lift more than I could when I started and I can run further without feeling absolutely wasted. There's still lots I want to work on, so at least I don't lack motivation - it's just finding the time and energy to go there.

Nats had a really bad blood nose for most of today, which must have been incredibly difficult to work through. She's been to about a million doctors and they all say it's stress which is causing the nose-bleeds, but that doesn't really make sense since she seems to get them when she isn't even stressed.

Hopefully my laptop has been assembled and is now on its way to New Zealand for me. The money for it finally came out on Tuesday, which means that it's possible that it'll arrive before Christmas. I was thinking about it today, hoping like hell that I hadn't forgotten anything and that I made sure that the graphics card was upgraded, the CD-ROM changed to a DVD-ROM and the hard-drive upgraded.... but I remember the invoice they faxed through so I'm sure that I'll get exactly what I wanted and I didn't forget to ask for any changes.

I've been working at McDonald's now for almost three years, which is a rather scary thought. When I think about it, during my time I've worked at three restaurants, had four restaurant managers, and literally seen hundreds of fellow crew people pass through the system. There have been some really, really strange people - such as the guy who seemed to disappear on his first ever shift but was found by the mangers doing the most incredibly detailed cleaning job the restaurant had ever seen, or the strange guy at my current store who never says a thing to anyone and can always be found putting the tomatoes away in the fridge like they're his precious babies. I've seen fire alarms (had to evacuate the whole of St. Lukes shoppping mall for that one), floods (a few drips all of a sudden turned into a waterfall during one of our crew trainer meetings) and a whole heap of cheeseburgers! I one tried to figure out how many cheeseburgers I must have made during my entire time at McDonald's - I got lost after it hit 20,000 or something like that. When I first applied for my job I was warned that McDonald's work is extremely repetitive, but I guess after a while you don't really notice it anymore - you make something into a challenge (such as being the best on that particular station) and that can make it interesting. And, as I have already mentioned, you do get some rather interesting people at workmates.

One of the problems working in customer service is always the grumpy customers. I've had my fair share, such as the lady who threw a Bacon & Egg muffin at me one morning on Drive Thru because it had cheese in it and she had asked for no cheese (I wasn't actually the person who made the muffin, but hey, what can I do?) But I think one of Nats' customers at Starbucks the other day has to take the cake as the most psycho customer ever. I wasn't there at the time (lucky for the customer), but here's how I have been told the story went: Nats was on register, serving the customers coming through for coffee as per usual and a lady came up to order. Now as Nats was standing behind the register you would expect the lady to tell Nats her order, but interestingly this was not the case. The lady decided to go "hey... boy... I want a cappuccino" to the person who was making the drinks, Nats figured this was rather strange and rather rude, but decided that she would continue and ask the lady what size cappuccino she would like. After throwing a spazz about the cups and getting completely confused over whether it was take away (I want it in two takeaway cups, but I want it for here!) she then demanded a receipt and complained that she had paid too much. Finally, Nats finished the order and thought she had heard the last of this psycho person, and proceeded to tell her story (incredibly quietly) to another person she was working with. But no, apparentely this lady had rather more than a carrot stuck up her bumb, and started yelling at Nats for yelling at her (which she obviously hadn't done), told Nats that her father was the head of Starbucks in Taiwan (or something like that) and that she was going to complain to Nats' boss. Interestingly, Nats' manager was standing right there, and tried briefly to calm the situation down a little bit and the lady sat back down again, putting her feet on the tables and making a huge nuisance out of herself. She then started abusing other customers, asking them "where are you from???", before telling Nats' manager she needed to go to hospital because her soul was broken. Finally she left, probably to take her overdue pills or because the wardens at the psychiatric hospital had spotted her, and Nats was left rather shaken as you generally are when something like that happens because you can't respond in the way you would normally, which in my case would have been telling the lady she was a nutcase and should fuck off before we call the police.

I'm rather thankful that most of the time I'm working at McDonald's I'm hidden out the back away from customers who think that they're better than you, or think that they can take their bad day out on you just because you can't do anything about it. I always make sure when I order food or deal with someone in customer service in any way, that I'm polite and friendly, and I thank them for their help. Maybe everyone should do this, I'm sure it would make a lot of people's days a lot better - and the world would be a happier place.

It’s been quite some time since my last update, and a lot has happened in that time. For a start I have bought myself a laptop, a pretty cool Pentium 4 1.7 GHz computer from Dell, which gets paid for today (when they decide to remove the money from Nats’ credit card), and should hopefully be delivered by Christmas time so that I have a nice Christmas present for myself. I have been preoccupied thinking about what applications I’m going to install, what games I want and how I am going to organise the hard drives (I think that I’ll partition the 30GB hard drive into 2 15 GB drives so that I have a safe back-up drive).

I haven’t really done that much more on my research project, as I haven’t been to university since last Thursday, which has meant a pretty nice break though. I worked on Friday and Sunday, which were pretty quiet shifts as the CBD is going through a fairly slow time at the moment because university has finished and lots of language schools have also closed down for the summer. But the interesting thing is that Maccas is getting new registers, stylish touch-screens which are so much easier to use than the crappy early 1980s models we have at the moment. It will be a pain in the ass at first until everyone learns how to use the new registers properly – I can just see how lunch rush today would have been utter mayhem with people running backwards and forwards not knowing how to use EFTPOS or wondering where the button for chocolate sundae is. I don’t have work until Wednesday which is good, because by then hopefully most people would have figured out how to use the new registers (I learned on Friday during a training course for all Crew Trainers and some senior crew.)

Nats is going into university tomorrow for a test to determine what level she is at so that they can construct her next year’s courses at a good level. It’s the first real step towards university which is pretty exciting for both of us, as next year we will be basically swapping positions from how we were this year, with Nats being the student and me being the full-time worker.

Also, in today’s exciting news, Nats’ Uncle Peter arrived in New Zealand this morning from New York. He’s staying for about a month which is going to be pretty cool. At last another male in the house! Someone to talk to about sports and all that other stuff which guys talk about… I’m sure there’s something that guys are meant to talk about… maybe cars, but I’m not really a car person. Oh well, it’s going to be fun anyway – also makes Christmas seem that much closer as everyone’s now talking about Christmas presents and putting up Christmas trees everywhere.

I went out last night with Nats, to the Soul Bar in the Vidauct Basin, famous for their $14 cocktails. Three drinks each, and about $75, later we were both happily tipsy. The strange thing about when you're drunk is that (at least most of the time) you feel as though things are going along pretty normally in your head apart from the sort of pressing feeling you have, which I suppose feels like a nice headache. I always get really sleepy, and feel almost like I'm in a dream, which obviously means that my normal inhibitions seem to disappear because I have the subconscious feeling that even if I make an ass out of myself it will be OK because I'll wake up in the morning and it would have just been a dream. However, in a similar way to a dream, your body just doesn't seem to do everything that you tell it to do. I try to walk in a straight line, and after about three steps I'm either falling over or walking in a rather zig-zag manner. But I think that my link between being drunk and dreaming is something that really makes sense to me, it's like the fact that when you wake up in the morning you don't directly remember what happened in your dream, but someting can trigger off a single memory which then leads to another and another. When I woke up this morning I seemed to have completely forgotten large chunks of last night, but it's all still there, and when I asked Nats where my EFTPOS card was, she reminded me that I had got $100 cash out last night to pay my board, something which hadn't crossed my mind whatsoever before she mentioned it.

Maybe I did get a little more drunk than normal last night, which was probably because we didn't have anything to eat and had our drinks one after the other - which isn't recommended but had the desired effect somewhat quicker than usual. I think that my alcohol tolerance has decreased recently, which I personally think is a good thing because I generally don't like the taste of alcohol (it's bearable in $14 cocktails) and the less I have to drink to feel tipsy the better. The only worry is that sometime I'll drink a little bit too much and completely screw myself over, which I have done before but that's a whole different story...

Christmas is coming pretty soon, although you really would have to have been living under a rock not to know that. Christmas is a nice time of the year, seeing all the family and lots of presents and nice dinners all around. But watching TV puts me off it just a little, because of the way that advertisers just thrash the fact that Christmas is coming. Watch a commercial break and count the number of advertisements that mention Christmas in them, and I bet you'll find that more do than don't. I know that Christmas is boom time for retailers, but you just wonder whether someday the public is going to go "enough is enough" and start to ignore the massive fuss.

My money came through today (finally), so for the first time ever I have a pretty healthy bank balance. Nats and myself are going computer shopping this afternoon (which will consist of getting on the computer and going to Dell's website as I decided that it was a bit too risky to opt for a laptop with a desktop processor in it, and I'm going to stick with a pretty good brand name. Furthermore, in my searching for a computer I've found that Dell are very competitive, and there's no real need to get a P4 2.0 GHz processor when a 1.7 GHz will probably be just as good for everything I need it to do.

You could tell it was summer yesterday, with the intense heat for the first time in many months. I like summer, it's my favourite month of the year because it's the one time I don't get cold, as well as being the time of year which I'm able to play cricket because the ground isn't muddy as hell and it's nice to be outside. Also, summer is beach season, and I'm a beach person from way-back, probably because I was brought up on the beach playing beach cricket with my dad, building enormous sandcastles (and cities, and huge fortresses against the sea which always eventually got washed away by the incoming tide) with my sister, and going swimming in the one time of the year when the water isn't bloody freezing! This summer coming up is supposedly going to be warm and wet, which is a pain in the arse because of the humidity which can get incredibly stifling in Auckland at times.

OK OK, I live in Auckland where stifling heat is about 25 degrees celcius.... but it still felt really hot!!

I'm still thinking about changing jobs next year. I had a chat about it with Nats last night, and because she isn't going to be working that much next year (because she's going to university), it would be good to be getting paid more money than I am at the moment because obviously I will have to contribute a bit more financially than I was able to do this year. But my reasons for wanting a different job are not merely financial, as I have already stated, but also because of my feelings that maybe my job at McDonald's isn't really going anywhere. I've mentioned to the senior managers a few times that I'm interested in moving up, asking them what I should be doing if I want to become a shift manager. Getting the response of "just keep doing what you're doing at the moment" gives me pretty good faith in the fact that I am doing a good job, but when they keep on bringing in new managers from other stores it gives me the feeling that my chances of moving up aren't actually that high and it might be the middle of next year before I become a shift manager and get a decent pay rate and a more interesting job. Maybe I'm being a little bit impatient, as I have only been part-time over the past year, and will continue to be part-time until March next year due to my research scholarship, but I have been working at McDonald's for almost three years and seem to be doing a good job (as I did get a pretty good bonus recently).

The start of a new month, the start of summer even. It seems scary how quickly this year has disappeared, although a lot has changed since this time last year it still doesn't really seem that long ago. I was working at Pt. Chev McDonald's and desperately (and, at this stage, not very successfully) trying to save for my university fees. Christmas isn't that far away now, which is quite scary again as last year's Christmas doesn't seem that long ago, playing beach cricket with my Dad in the morning and then going to Nats' mother's place for lunch/dinner and opening all the presents there.

I've decided that I'm at least going to look for a better job than McDonald's, not simply because I don't like working at Maccas or that I really really need a change, but probably more along the lines that now I have a degree I might actually be able to get into something which is more interesting and, crucially, will probably pay me more. It's slightly sad that I've been working at Maccas for almost three years and still get paid less than $10 an hour, and as much as I like the work because it's comfortable and I can do it with my eyes closed - I think that I may be able to do better elsewhere.

We went out on Saturday night, to a rather classy establishment in the Viaduct which makes the best pizzas ever! I was surprised how many people were around, as just about every bar and restaurant in the area was absolutely packed. Nats had this really, really nice fruit drink from the Soul Bar (it damned well better have been good for $14!), which I then got one of myself and ended up slightly drunk (only in the way that makes you feel rather light-headed and dizzy as opposed to downright sick!) So it was a pretty fun evening, and we finished early enough to catch the bus home - a good money saver compared to a taxi.