The usual excuse we hear from children about forgetting their homework would be “My dog ate it” but I didn’t really like that sentence applying to me. Though I wouldn’t be in such a big huff if it was only my homework that my dog ate. If only.

My dog ate my one and only japanese manga copy of Knock!

Cruelty to animals is a brutal crime, yes? *give my dog a furious glare*

I arrived home to find my brother in my room, doing a puzzle; the puzzle consisting of torn pieces of my manga. The culprit that had my brother looking for torn manga pieces for four straight hours? Our dog, Maru.

Oh, that little bugger! I completely ignored him that day, trying to keep from my mind that that copy of Knock! was the one and only copy in that store and that I’ll likely not get another copy of it.

Arrrg. So now I go off To apologize to some people who expected something of that manga. T_T

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!

I have a feeling that this will be my most used avatar yet, to denote my predicament within the next few days. ^^ As for today anyway, the ouran icon will be true to form. I am exhausted. Why? Because I had the stupid idea of thinking that making 16 new layout skins for Harusaki will be a great idea. So here I am with my muscles screaming in agony.

You can see that there are 16 different skins as part of the two-year anniversary of Harusaki, as a treat to our loyal visitors who’ve been with us since day one. The hardest part on those layouts will be trying to make it work across browsers, or even different browser versions. The first outtake looked good in Firefox, Opera and IE 7, but screwed in IE 6. I had to leave it alone for several days because I was too annoyed with it. >.<

I’m most proud of how I handled the changing of the different themes of the Google ads. The color of the ads and search results change in accordance to the color scheme of the skin you choose. *sigh* Allow me to gaze at my brilliant work for a moment.