Wait a minute, what happened to January?!

Seriously, it was January just about a week ago...

Holy smokes, we're one month into 2011 already! That went awful fast.

Quick TL;DR summary of the past couple of months:

• Did the Christmas thing - went to work for a few hours; went to visit friends for Christmas dinner, and then; drove for two hours on an unfamiliar road in the dark so we could collect my nephew, and THEN had to drive two hours back. (I got someone else to do the second trip on my behalf - I was WAY too tired to manage it.)
• Did the New Years' thing - went to our friends' place nearby for a pool party, even though we only spent about 30 minutes in said pool because it wasn't warm enough to stay in it for long. (PS. we seem to have misplaced our summer - do you have it perhaps?)
• Had mysterious car troubles - something weird was happening with the electrics connected to the engine; most of the time the car was fine, but occasionally it would fail to start proplerly, blow a fuse, and on more than one occasion the dashboard smouldered. Eeep. My stepdad had a look, found a loose wire that was the probable cause, and now my car is behaving itself again. For now.
• Friends of mine got married, after having been together and raising a family for the past five years (and have been friends for even longer). It was really great to see all of the friends and family come together and help out the bride and groom; my mother even made the bridal gown!
• Oh, and parts of Australia got threatened by the elements, but not bushfire this time - rather, the opposite: Queensland got rained out and washed away in January, and then had visits from Cyclones Larry and Yasi in February... while New South Wales and Victoria copped the leftovers of these two in the form of huge storms and more flooding.

...A friend of mine had actually put this blog under the January spotlight of her Write Club, but silly me I totally forgot to update anything for the past month, despite actually having stuff to write about. Erm... oops?

What can I say? I apologise to the visitors who may or may not have come through, hoping to find something more recent than my Dad's car accident, and hope that if anyone else out there is still reading this, I'll be going up to Queensland to visit family next week - so this space will actually have something up-to-the-minute on it, if we're lucky!

Sigh. I know, I know. It's not that I didn't want to write to you all, it's just that sometimes the little ole motivation gland doesn't want to act. Sometimes, you just gotta pick up that little cattle prod and give it a jolt, you know?

Long story short, I'm not dead yet. Stay tuned!

New Years' Eve, 2008

Another post-event post...

A New Year has begun... and unfortunately, I had to work for NYE (again!), but it was only for about five hours, and it was pretty dead at work after everyone had got what they needed.

We had a good time for NYE this/last year.
We had some friends over for a few Wii-ing contests in the living room, and played a few rounds of SingStar on a friend's PS2. I think my sister really wants one of those, now that she realises how much fun the game is!

But, after the clock ticked over to midnight, we went outside to see if there were any fireworks happening. I think someone might have let off a flare... but that was it.

It was at this point, when everyone was standing around on the front lawn in the dark waiting for stuff to explode, that I remembered I had some glow stick party favours reserved for this occasion...
They were a bunch of glow-bracelets, which eventually got turned into mini-frisbees, and we flung them at each other on the front lawn! I took some photos, but they were all dark and minimalist... so I turned them all into a composite image. This is it:

I think this picture best sums up the bedlam that took place out the front of out house!
We played for about half an hour on the front lawn, then came back inside all sweaty and grotty from running around the garden. Hey, it was better than watching that stupid Village People movie on Channel Nine. O_o;
We then continued the video-gaming, along with consumption of a ludicrous amount of food and confectionery (I'd brought some old Xmas stock that was RTC at work). And then, eventually, to bed, though I was one of the last standing (mostly because I didn't have to work the next day)!

As for the glow sticks, they all wound up on the shrubbery just outside our front door (those that didn't end up on the roof or in the garden). Most of them were still there for about a week afterwards, and some of them still had a bit of "glow" left in them!

I hope everyone has a good New Year!