It's Christmas Eve once again. The year has come and gone, and I'm now 88 days away from OH-RAR-DEE. It's been so quick, over 700 days, gone just like that, in a flash, and I'm standing on the brink of a new frontier, about to begin life anew, to meet new challenges, to move to a new land where I'll be a minority for the first time.

These are such exciting times.

But even amidst the apparent oncoming excitement, I'm feeling drained. Perhaps it's the people, after excessive attempts at trying to build an over-sized people network around myself, leaving me feeling kind of disappointed in people in the end, because I overrated both the kindly nature of people, as well as my own propensity for tolerance and accomodation of others--if there's anything I've learnt, it's that I need to learn to look out more for myself, to stop people from abusing me, to stop me from abusing myself.

Or perhaps it's the work--excessively prolonged periods of work without any real proper breaks in sight, so unlike school when the longest anything would last is 10 weeks and breaks are mandatory and regulated--but, anyhow, at least there's redemption in the fact that I'm feeling that I'm doing REAL work, providing real value, that my work is worth it--my colleague asked me, "Why do you work so hard? It's just two-and-a-half years what..."--I could only shrug my shoulders and reply, "Because I like it." Haha.

But, anyhow, this period of cooling off--first from people, burying myself in work, and then from work, smothering myself in non-stop slacking at home with lots of Tee-Vee-ing and gaming and just doing nothing at all--has helped immensely, and I'm feeling much more relaxed these days. :)

Of course, a minimal dose of company from the regular old good/good old friends has helped too. So life hasn't been that bad after all--just nice, stable, and quiet. Even my photography has been muted. Haha.

And finally, here comes, looming up ahead, when the push on the reset button turns to shove--with my 6-day getaway up north in the land of our favourite neighbour, completely unplanned, unregulated, and just a bunch of us, everything booked over the Internet--cool, huh? Hehe.

So, don't miss me as I go off! (",) You can always SMS me although I won't reply. Haha. Meanwhile, it's time for more photographs, more nice memories, and hopefully a great time. See you guys next year! Watch out for the fireworks photos!

Merry Christmas, everyone!