After more than a month, I am finally getting back into the grove of the semester and have found some time for a nice blogging sesh 🙂 Thinking back, the winter break seems like it was forever ago! I was reminiscing about hanging out with friends and wearing summer clothes during the winter back home in SoCal when I decided to share it with you guys instead of hording it all! The last time I shared the story of a great Thanksgiving and my Amish beard. This time, it seems fitting to share about Christmas, my shenanigans over break, and the best day of the year: New Year’s Eve.
This year, for the first time, I did not want anything for Christmas. My parents kept bugging me and asking me over and over what I wanted, but I just did not have anything that I really needed. Of course, WANTING something is a different story, but my parents (like most parents of teenagers) just would not lighten up to the idea of buying me a Corvette. 🙁 Sad, I know, but life goes on. Due to my desire for gifts that are far out of the price range of gifts that any teenager should receive, my parents and I could not come to a conclusion on what I would get for Christmas until about a week before the 25th. I was looking at my old ski/snowboarding gear since I was going to be using it when we traveled up to Mammoth mountain later over break. When I tried it on, I found that it was far too small for my size. Apparently I have grown since freshman year of high school! Who would’ve guessed…
Anyways, I asked my parents if a whole new outfit would be within their price range for the holidays. When they said yes, I immediately got to work. I looked at all the deals at stores and online. I must have looked through at least 2000 jackets before I found a couple that I liked. After narrowing it down to two different sets of jacket/pants, I finally decided on a white and black colored outfit. However, no matter how hard I looked, my size was sold out. I told myself that the green outfit was just as good, and settled on getting that one.
Christmas day was a weird one for my family. I could not sleep the night before, and ended up sleeping in until around 3 pm, when my family told me we were going to dinner with my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents in half an hour. After spending almost 8 hours with family, my parents, sister and I arrived home. We started opening presents just before midnight.
When I opened my presents on Christmas night, I couldn’t help but smile as I pulled my new snowboarding outfit out of the boxes. However, my parents threw me for a loop. I had opened all of the boxes that had my outfit inside of them, but I still had a few more presents to open. When I opened the first one, I was shocked to see the pants of the other outfit that I had seen with my own eyes to be sold out. I ripped through the last two or so boxes and minutes later, I had the entire “sold out” outfit strewn out in front of me. I simply could not believe my eyes. I was speechless, and according to my parents I had a look on my face that was so priceless that it could only be called the look of “a kid on Christmas morning”. If I had to guess, my expression probably looked like this:
On a different note, my uncle asked me if I could help him with his work over break. He makes a living cleaning fish tanks, and a nice living at that. It is amazing how much people will pay for others to clean up after them (or their pets). Anyways, our job over the break was to remove all of the tanks in every Rubio’s grill in Southern California (except for one). By the time he asked if I would be interested in helping him, there were only 3 or 4 tanks left to remove. Each tank held about 100 gallons of water and it took us about 2 hours to disassemble all of the parts and get it on the truck to move. It was a fun job and it got me up out of bed most days, something I was much too lazy to do on my own. 🙂
Now I know you have had the question “Why is New Year’s Eve the best day of the year?” stuck in your minds for a while now. The answer: December 31 is my birthday, thats why! This year for my birthday, I decided to just have a few friends come over and we would go to an arcade called Nickel, Nickel! It is an arcade where you pay a small fee to get in, and all the games take nickels instead of tokens or quarters. After hanging out at the arcade for about 3 hours, my friends and I headed back to my house for some epic NES battles and rice crispy treats!
After we finished bringing in the New Year with huge smiles and joyous attitudes:
My friends and I decided to go sit in the jacquzzi for a while. It was so cool that night that the steam just made it nearly impossible to see us 🙂
The last part of my vacation was my trip to Mammoth Mountain. It is an 8 hour drive from the beach cities, so after the long trek, my family arrived at our temporary home. The snow was so-so, but it was still a ton of fun just to get out on the mountain and ride. I also got to try out my new gear, and it was extremely comfortable so the trip was a complete success! 😀
