First of all, let me just say that I’m most certainly not a morning person. During weekends or holidays, I usually always snooze until around 2 in the afternoon. I go to bed at 2-4AM so basically, I’ve been getting 12+ hours of sleep for these past two weeks. Oooh, so maybe that’s why I haven’t been getting any work done…

Even when I was young, my sleeping pattern was always screwed up like that and I was never able to voluntarily wake up early without someone slapping me across the face.

Since today is the very last day of 2009, I decided to break the cycle. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of sleeping through the whole celebration of New Years Eve, so I woke up early for once. How? By not sleeping at all. Sleeping = no chance of having a warm breakfast and no chance seeing the sun rise (not that the grey sky will let any rays peek out anyway)

But the point is, I woke up! By myself! Of my own free will! And so this is what I did…

Went down to the kitchen and saw this on the fridge:

Horrible picture and unclear writing, but it says, “Hey guys! Please clean up! It’s 2010! - Mom” Her daily fridge notes always have the same basic message: do your chores. 

Then went to the kitchen table and laughed at this:

You probably can’t tell, but that isn’t a real bowl of chicken! It’s actually a piggy coin bank given to my younger brother as an xmas gift. I suspect that it was all part of my brother’s evil scheme to put it beside the real food just to trick us. LOL

Next, I braved the cold and went outside! Leaving the house during wintertime to just breathe is another thing I don’t often do. I’m a ‘summer’ person, so I become such a scrooge during the colder months and just hide indoors.

But then I remembered how loooooong winter’s going to last, so I thought, why not at least try and make friends with it?

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I liked the format of Rachel’s end-of-the-year blog post, so I think I’ll do the same. My list will be much longer compared to hers; I’ll be listing down anything and everything that pops into my head, so I’m warning you, this’ll be one long post.

This year I…

• Turned 16 and started eleventh grade
• Learned to better control my hair (with lots and lots of conditioner)
• Drifted away from some friends
• Actually dressed up for Halloween and felt no shame in wearing said costume
• Fell in love with The Beatles
• Resolved to name my future kid Ringo
• Stood up to my mum and told her how I felt in a mature way (through a looong e-mail)
• Conquered my fear of the stove and baked lots of cakes + brownies with my mum and sister (carrot cake, rocky road cake, chiffon cake, etc.)
• Joined an extracurricular club/group in school (newspaper!)
• Learned how to take the subway from home to downtown and back—by myself
• Re-read the Harry Potter series during summer and actually cried in some parts
• Discovered some awesome new bands (Noisettes, Dragonette, etc.)
• Received my first ever Urban Outfitters item from a good friend
• Started thrifting and found some nice second-hand treasures
• Discovered that I have a deceased aunt & uncle who were secret, underground spies working against the government

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I was just wondering, for those who celebrate Christmas… when do you usually open your gifts?

I just finished reading a load of Christmas-related blog posts and from the looks of it, my family is one of the few who open gifts before midnight on Christmas Eve. Have we been doing it the wrong way all this time?!

But anyways… today is Christmas!! Our relatives came by last night to eat and open gifts, and my eldest sister who lives in Ottawa is staying for a couple of days. This meant that our house got pretty crowded yesterday with twelve people under one roof. Nope, it’s never a quiet Christmas in my family !

We took the traditional Christmas family pictures, saw that someone moved in one of the shots, took retakes, took some more pictures AND THEN we ate. There was a lot of food to go around like the carrot cake we made below, leche flan, roasted chicken, cheesecake, etc., but the main star of the show was the honey-glazed ham. It was so huge that, even now, we’ve still got leftovers in the fridge!

After that, we went and opened our gifts! I was really happy that I took pictures of my family’s reactions as they opened their presents. The happy look on their faces is just priceless. I’m glad everyone liked what I bought for them.

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