Cherish friends who, though are far away, still let you linger in their thoughts. I thought that when I got a message from my former officemates inviting me to come and join them in their Christmas party last December 21st. It was humbling, that despite the fact that I now work in a different company, they still think and treat me as their colleague. With that thought, I couldn’t possibly turn them down.

It was as if I never left, even our Japanese supervisor. They were as much fun as when I was still with them. They were naughty; they were boisterous; they were them. And they still cared about me and that was a thought worth hugging.

As usual, there were food varieties galore, games-in which I won two prizes, by the way- and a lot of hearty talk because we had a lot of catching up to do with each other. It was a truly fun evening, and I didn’t regret that I got home in the wee hours of the morning already, even if I had to go to work in a few hours. It was a time of friends, and laughter.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

A lot of things seem to be happening on this blog within the last few weeks which, in truth, I knew nothing about. I haven’t really made any specific changes to it; I’ve been far too busy with other things. In fact, unlike the previous month, this is probably the only month where I didn’t post at least everyday.

• The site’s Alexa traffic rank has jumped 3,366,289 places to land at 1,670,154 which is amazing since I haven’t done much linking or affiliating with other sites. If any, at all. In fact, I’ve steering clear of those since the beginning. Amazing what organic search results can do.
• The unique visitor count has averaged 114 last week against the measly 69 of the week before that. For that increase I am completely baffled since I don’t see any new site linking me. I’d just assume it’s the search engines again since 70% of my traffic come from them.
• Popular forums are direct linking my Vampire Knight avatars. That would have irritated me to no end, but I already disabled direct-linking on my site before so that was covered. I just made a new image to announcing someone as a direct-linker.
• I got my very first hostee here in Swordian and it’s named Parody Quest XX by Wren and Rion which features their own comic!

Does these mean that this blog is becoming popular? I really hope so. Sometimes I really miss those Painted Wings days when I get a lot of comments regarding my updates. But then again, that was a very impersonal site, more focused on freeware graphics than my personal life. So it’s really makes me smile to know that at least my scattered thoughts in this blog are reaching others in some way.

I had a great time teasing my brother last night. It was during our dinner that my father and I had a good laugh over my brother’s comments.

An half an hour before dinner, though, I asked my father what was on the menu for dinner.

“Monkey,” he said.

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