the last (shopping) post of 2011

You know, I'm not really too fond of this "Important Holiday Eve falling on a Saturday" thing.

It's all kinda disorientating.

But today is both Saturday and New Years Eve, so it's been a different day than previous NYE's...

I woke up around 6am to discover that outside was blessedly cool so I cranked the fan up in the doorway to try and at least pump a little cooler air into the apartment before the sun came up over the house next door.

While that was chugging away, I changed my bedding (while managing to tweak a muscle in my back... a sure sign I'm getting old), rotated my mattress (seemed like a good day to do it), took out the trash and washed the dishes in the sink. All this because my grandmother essentially lives in my brain and everything has to be "just so" at midnight.

I was pretty much done with everything by about 7am, which is pretty damn good, so I played around on the laptop until Ma messaged me to tell me she was on her way down.

Now of the five Saturdays in December, we actually didn't go shopping together for three of those, so it felt a little odd and I think we both ended up buying more stuff than usual (even though my fridge is kinda full already).

Then we wandered around Target to see if they had anything decent on sale (not really... or at least nothing that I want/need)... and marvelled (no, wait, the other thing... horrified) that they already had the start of their Easter egg display out. Really? Really really?

Since today is very, very hot (36°C as we speak), we decided to head down to Marion where it would at least be cooler, there's pretty much all the shops we would want to have a look in and we could leave the car undercover. My car obviously, since it has aircon.

As always when it's hot it was a little bit of a chore finding a carpark underneath the building, but we managed it eventually. Marion actually wasn't as busy as I thought it was going to be... and lots of guys in shorts and singlets or just shorts that kept falling down... and lots of exposed tattoos (some good, some not so much). Tasty.

We did our usual big circuit (all along the bottom, then upstairs and all along the top, then back along the top and back along the bottom), lets us see everything.

There were a few bits and pieces worth getting in the sales... I picked up a new chain for my watch pendant (the other one had that "fingers on a blackboard" effect on me every time the pendant moved on the chain), Ma bought three big bottles of the Harajuku Lovers Wicked Style perfume for $57 (that's less than one bottle normally retails for... meaning she saved about $140). We also poked around the left over Christmas decorations, but there really wasn't anything even remotely interesting left.

But we covered pretty much everything, so by the time we were done we were officially done with a capital everything.

Now all that remains to be done for the year is to a) watch the back of it disappear into the sunset (literally) in the next six and a half hours and b) do my regular "Yaniblog In Review"... the first sentence of the first blog post for each month of 2011...

I did kinda start this whole "Year That Was" thing yesterday with the Last Meme post, but here's Yaniblog11:

January: And here we are on the very first day of 2011!

February: I don't know if it's exactly yarn bombing if you tie a doily to a tree, but it's very cool... I'll refrain from trying to make a reference to the other image...

March: Philip Escoffey's previous show, "Six Impossible Things Before Dinner", was one of the shows that I wanted to see last year but missed out...

April: It hasn't been a particularly good week...

May: I got my 52 Suburbs book today... it's so pretty... I'm going to need to devote some time to going through it though... there's a lot of text and a lot of images to pour through...

June: Something blue for the Winter template...

July: Behold! The rare blue Mr Sloppy! I knew there was a blue one around, and a recent photo tipped me off to where I might find it.

August: I'll say this for you Brisbane, I may not be able to orient myself on your streets yet, but you have some mighty fine looking men wandering around...

September: Unsurprisingly, the Spring template is from our trip to Brisbane.

October: Today was brief... so much so that I think it can best be summed up in dot point form...

November: If Adelaide Zoo is a regular kind of zoo, then I have no idea what the hell Taronga Zoo is... it's like an animal city or something. We saw pretty much everything there was to see except the Kid's Zoo, and it took six and a half hours.

December: Some of that "painting with light" action for today's Random Hotness...

That's it... 2011 is officially done and dusted. See you all in 2012!

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