Hello all. Merry Christmas. I hope you all have a wonderful day. <3

As for how this year went in general, well, it's a mixed bag of both good and bad, though it certainly piled up on the bad stuff for this month. >.|.>

For the good part, as you can see, I'm back in the writing game! Technically, I've been writing for quite a while since the last story I posted before The Pokémon Prometheus, but it was infrequent writing for the classes I've been taking and repeating because the THIRD PART OF THAT TRILOGY OF CLASSES HASN'T BEEN OPENED FOR WHO THE HELL KNOWS HOW LONG!! It was the novel I mentioned in the last journal, though when I completed it I'll restart from the beginning so it'll be more consistent. As for why I've been writing more recently, it was because of the below point since, surprisingly, Safeway is a good nondistracting environment to write in.

Another good part is that I have another job since March. I now work at Safeway as a deli working and, while it has its ups and downs, after Amazon it's not so bad. Despite the occasional customers at times calling me an idiot since a) it's a loud environment and they didn't correct me when I repeat the order (it's why I do it, not because I'm so forgetful but because I want to make sure that I heard it right) and b) they expected me to know everything about all the deli products and relay what they wanted in an incomplete fashion (I have Autism and, whenever I'm told of something in a way I don't fully understand, my mind 'translates' it as 'blah blah blah'). Fortunately, my deli manager is very supportive of me and helps me deal with them. It helps that she doesn't take crap from anyone and she knows far more about the deli than I do. ^.|.^

Now for the bad parts and it'll be pretty lengthy.

For starters, the car I've been using since I started at Amazon has been retired from use. To explain, it was a used car that my parents brought over a decade ago and one of the problems it has is that it has a leak in the oil and it has recently gotten so bad that I was getting to the point that I was spending more on oil than gas. And before you tell me, 'well, why don't you have the oil pipe be repaired', the reason is that it'll involve removing the engine and disassembling it just to put a seal on the line. We don't have the tools to do that level of procedure and it'll cost thousands of dollars for the professional to do that level of work. So, would you rather spend thousands for repairs or spend (what was before recently) $20 for oil? Besides, because of my grandmother's death (which happened last year, BTW, so it's doesn't count as a bad thing for this year), I was allowed to use the van, which, because it was used for my grandfather in long travels (he used a wheelchair and the van itself was custom redesigned so it can have him as a passenger), it only has 60K miles on it despite being just as old as the car (both are the year 2000 models).

Kinda ironic since I have to send the van in for repairs a few weeks ago and, if you haven't checked out my Twitter post about it, it cost me $1,600 for it to repair. .-.

Another tragic thing that happened was that a couple of our pets had passed away, one of which was Winky our white cat with the mismatched eyes who's been with the family since I think 1999 or 1998. He may have been a pest at times, but he does have a golden heart when he was alive. Another was our dog Mellow who we 'inherited' when grandmother passed away not too long before that year's Megaplex. It was especially sudden for Mellow to die since, while he was panting a fair amount that day, he showed no other indication that he was dying. He just laid down and died.

This one is connected with work since, while it may not have been that rough on me (working at Amazon hardened me for hard work), a fair amount of co-workers either left, quit, resigned, or were fired since I started working there. The most surprising one and the one I was salty about happened just last week ago when a co-worker of mine, while I was taking a break, decided to quit and disappeared without telling anyone, not even the store manager nor the deli manager. He just left a note saying that he can't do this anymore when I came back to an empty deli.

Finally (and this is petty of me, I admit), the bad part about this year is that my dad and sister went to take a vacation at California to our relatives there and I'm left home alone. Of course, the reason why is because the two times they schedule for a vacation are the times where I'm required for work during those days (4th of July and Christmas Eve). It still bothers me that, while they're off having fun, I'm at home with only my thoughts. I'm hoping that the next time they do this, it'll be for Easter.

Whew. As you can see, it's been one hell of a year. I'm hoping that next year will be better. Take care, everyone!