Only 363 days until next Christmas

Christmas ended too quickly, but I had such a nice day and I got a whole bunch of wonderful presents. My mom woke me up way too early so for the first half of the morning I was pretty much sleeping anyway. My family gathered around the light up palm trees and had a champagne breakfast, which made me even sleepier. As a family gift, the first present we opened was annual passes to Disneyland, which is a tradition for the last few years, but ours expired 7 months ago and my mom has been saving up ever since. They're incredibly expensive but my family doesn't really go on big vacations ever so it's kind of our treat to ourselves and we usually make good use of them by going a lot throughout the year. We actually decided to go yesterday for a few hours which was fun but it turned out to be one of the busiest days of the year and the park was actually closed to any more people except we already had passes so we got in. We were eating lunch in the tomorrowland cafe when we had to be evacuated because of a fire in the kitchen.

As for my other presents, I got the thing I had been wanting since I took photography last year and now I have! The Canon Rebel digital camera! It's incredible, really. It has all the features of a manual camera without having to go and develop the film, but you can set aperature and shutter speed and apply colored filters and toners to your shot and can play with the contrast, all in camera and then see the result in a matter of seconds on the screen. I also got some filters like UV protection and to cut out the fogginess in landscape shots.



It's not in yet, but as part of my gifts we ordered a large scale printer that can print 13 x 19 inch paper. Ok, I'm sure it sounds lame to most people, but for the last few years, if I've wanted to print any project that's larger than 8x10 I've had to run to kinkos and deal with hours of frustration at the hands of the incompetent and overcharging employees there. It's not fun. So now I can just do it in my room! It's really going to help with design this year.



My brother got me the 1st season Friends dvd and my parents got me a chia pet. I have no idea what was going through their mind with that one, but I suppose everyone has to get a chia at some point or other. I think everyone liked the gifts I got them and, all in all, it was another wonderful Christmas.