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Thursday, December 25, 2008

Merry Christmas

A few random Christmas observations (with photos, at the bottom):

1) The nice thing about having two jobs is that I have the "last day of work before Christmas" twice. Which meant being let off early, one day, and having a big staff Christmas barbeque the next day.

2) I had a strange e-mail a couple of days ago telling me not to come in to work because of the bad weather conditions in Portland, Oregon. Which would all have made perfect sense if I actually lived in Portland, Oregon. I don't think my boss would have appreciated me phoning up and saying "I can't come into work because it's snowing in Portland."

3) For last minute shopping I decided to avoid the malls and went into the centre of town, where it was surprisingly uncrowded. Although I'm told that the malls weren't as crowded as usual, either. I saw an item on TV on the recession in the US, where one "woman in the street" said she was only spending $2000 last year (as opposed to $7000 last year). Somehow I felt strangely unsympathetic. A spare $2000 would be very nice, thank you.

4) Having said that, apparently the spending in New Zealand is also down to about 75% of last year.

While I was in town I stopped to look at the Ballantynes Christmas windows. Some pictures for your enjoyment (mostly close up , because the only way I could avoid reflections was to put the camera right up to the glass)











2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I misread "The nice thing about having two jobs" as "The nice thing about having two boobs." Silly me.

Happy holidays!

Anonymous said...

$2000 instead of $7000? Kind of makes us Americans sound rather pathetic, doesn't it? I would say that a significant number of Americans were glad to have $200 to spend on Christmas.