This journal now spans six months. That's, like, half a year man!
So now it's November I've kind of realised how the last few days of last month sort of just... imploded. It's all so blurry and compact, even the parts (days) when I wasn't blind. I'm pretty sure even during it I was confused as to what day and time it was. Probably partly because everything was so ”go go” for those few days of assignments, shennanigans, and then back to assignments but i'm thinking it's mainly because Sam fucked with (non-summer) convention by having a big party on a friday night.
Anyway, it's a new month now, and even though Steve left work on Friday for the last time (I saluted him and he said ”yeah, you were alright”) the new nightfill manager doesn't start until next week.
In other work related news, the music has been restored and we have music again for the first time in two months. Just in time for Christmas. It's horrendous... I want to cry.
In other work related news, homebrand scourer sponges now have a yellow bit that is a far lighter and more opaque yellow than their previous design.
I can't wait until the Christmas Lights start appearing on every house, and when streets will go overboard in trying to become a tourist attraction and succeed. I'm going to go to one of those streets when they're in full swing, find children and tell them there's no Santa Claus. When their parents try and get in my way I'll tell them there's no God either.
I'm not really going to do that but boy does Christmas (before the 23rd of December) make me angry. I already have been told that I'm going to be attending a large, extended family gathering at this house on Christmas evening. And it will be boring and awkward for me, in my own house! On Christmas! Mum said the only way I'd get out of it is if I had a girlfriend that I had to go visit for Christmas or something.
Ladies, call me. We'll start going out on the 24th. We can go see some Christmas lights.
(I used brackets a bit in this entry).


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If you met yourself from the future, what would you ask your future self?
What if they wont tell you anything?


It's raining outside, it's very wintry weather, which is something that makes this decision so hard.
Everyone likes the simpsons, it's a good show. However the time where it was good came to an end, and it subtly yet surely disintegrated into the retarded adventures of Homer the chucklefuck. Sometimes creative, funny and sexy people just need to realise that it's time for a good thing to end.
This is the last update in Brad's Wintry Journal 2. I think it's been a rather successful adventure. I've also realised that there are some fundamental flaws that have been creeping into the journal process over the past 12 months and they need to be rectified. When I first began the HCT, the first incarnation of this website which had the original journal on it, it had two purposes. Firstly it was supposed to document all the events that occurred within our group. Because, back then, we spent pretty much every weekend on the internet with only occasional voyages to each other's houses. This was invariably an easy task to keep up with, and so occasional events were partnered by articles and amusing happenings at school were documented. No one read any of it and everything was good. Secondly it was supposed to have a horrible colour scheme and once-and-for-all top anything Ryan could possibly make in html. It achieved both these goals quite well.
Since then times have changed. Everyone goes out more, with different people, all the time, and nothing funny happens. When events do happen write ups are hard to do because you can't really remember much of what happened and you have a couple cuts on your hands that you don't know the origins of.
The flaws in my journal include: not ever documenting the interesting/important things that happen; not working in mozilla properly; and being almost a third of a megabyte. Right now it's sort of become my personal notebook for thoughts I have. Which is cool, chill, you know. But it's time for a change. And I have exams to study for now that the week of hell has, through a combination of hard work and good fortune, managed to become like a well played round of Tetris - all the pieces are coming together. I'll be going now, I'll be back at the start of summer (November 24th) to begin what should hopefully be a new era in the world of me writing stuff and putting it on the internet where no one will read it.

Holy Moly it's Summer Holidays.
God did I want to use that expression so badly. It's officially summer holidays. I had my last exam this morning, the third day of exams in a row. In all I did five exams in a week and a bit and I did pretty well in them all I'm guessing. I then drove home and spent a few hours trying to remember just exactly what it was I usually did when the first day of summer holidays came around.
See, the last 3 weeks have been fair intense. I suppose this is the kind of thing you expect when you try and cram 3/4's of a 5 subject semester of second year university into a 21 day period. Nevertheless it all did turn out to be quite succesful and did end up proving a low corellation betwenn "success" and "getting up before midday and going to lectures". Because pretty much all my waking time during this period has been devoted to last minute assignments, last minute learning the entire course before exams and procstinating about the first two, little time has been available to actually think about summer itself. I sort of had this definite pre-conception that summer would be good and that I would make it a lot better than last summer, which I basically just wittled away because for some reason I thought that sleeping for 12 hours a day and then making jokes about it would somehow make me have a bigger penis. This is like my Bryan Adam's summer of 1970, because the Summer of 69 is over, I've learnt from my mistakes and my record sold pretty well so I can now focus on developing myself rather than appeasing the public. Whether that anology has more/less relevance than the reference I made this evening about enjoying Eminems' new music ("It's like gay sex: On a foccused, concious level you're thinking 'this feels kinda good' but surrounding that is the subconcious mind just screaming at you 'What the fucking christ are you doing?'"). Yeah anyway more about analogies and anal sex in future entries I'm just trying to get the summer journal introduction done here and then I'll clarify my summer goals further on in the piece.
And this journal looks like crap. "lol, it's a blueprint for the design of the future journal, that Brad sure is a card!". You're not saying that, you're not even reading this. I have lots of goals this summer, but one of the most important ones is 'Develop a scripted online journal program to use for my online journal'. My current deadline/expectation is to get this completed before December 31st." This is basically just a simplified sub-goal of my main goal of summer: "acheive stuff". Things started off well this afternoon when, after trying to work out just why all those things I'd been distracted by during exam revision seemed so much less appealing, I played 14 games of Solitaire Showdown in a row.
However after that I did do some coding, obviously not on the actual scripted journal sheesh no instead I tried to put useless javascript into this thing. That will also develop more as the days progress. After that I walked to work, worked for four hours then met up with Cowan and we organised a night of poker and drinks in my living room with Ballard, Sam and Mark. An enjoyable time was shared by all. It was a good start to the holidays. It's probably the best start to the summer holidays in the last three summers. If the average summer day and night for the next 100 days averages out to be like today and tonight then I'll say it's been a pretty good time. More disclosure later.


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I'm going to the cricket tommorow. Then work, then probably going out again.
I actually really hate this journal design. I really hope that you're using firefox because in IE it looks retarded. It's serving as intense motivation to design the real site.
... That said and I didn't do any work on any code today. I suppose my brain's still "cooling down" from the workload of the last few weeks but I promised myself that I would acheive a lot of things these holidays and one of my main aims was to reduce the "cooling down" period from uni to a very short time (from, what was it last summer?... three months?). It's going to be really good. I feel like I've changed a lot since last summer. I don't know how or if it's noticeable to others but I pretty much don't enjoy how I was like when I read back over my wintry and summer journals from 2003. Not that much but I remember that towards the end of March this year I made all these decisions about getting some of my shit together and since then my shit has, indeed, been slightly more centralised. Good stuff.
So yeah, my holidays (and basically today) can be summarised by this list of my goals for summer:


  1. Procrastinate about writing my list of goals for summer

I went to the cricket today. It was a pretty entertaining experience and the cricket was also good to watch. I sat in direct sunlight for 9.5 hours, then worked, then had a spa at Craig's. I haven't slept for more than 6 hours in a night for over a week, so I'm going to try and do that now. Bonus points if I wake up and I'm not sunburnt.

Played basketball today in sweltering heat, and won. Then swam. Then after going to a house until midnight I fell asleep at 2:30am. So tired for some reason, possibly due to sweltering heat and swimming.
Today we also put up our Christmas tree. It's not even December yet, but the weiner kids are here this weekend for the last time until Christmas Eve and they wanted to decorate a tree. You know people would see this and say that it's bad. People say that Christmas is being overcommercialised and it's bad and that all these shiny things are taking away from the real meaning of Christmas. I don't think that at all, I don't think that mass commercialism has made us lose sight of the true spirit of Christmas. In fact, I love Christmas. I think it's the best six weeks of the year.

I worked a Sunday shift today for the first time, for 3.5 hours. I did very little work during it; I didn't do anything with any urgency the entire time. Tomorrow at work I'm going to wear the Santa hat I got from work last year. I'm doing it because on Friday night I was told I couldn't wear my cap at work, even after the store was closed. Apparently it's not part of the "uniform policy". I'm pretty sure that completely walling off the fire exit in the back dock may also be against one of those Woolworth policies too, except it seems that me wearing a hat is slightly more pressing than the prospect of a fire starting while we're all signing off and fifteen people burning to death.
However, as you might remember, last Christmas the non-nightfill staff were wearing Santa Hats, and on Christmas Eve I was told not to wear my hat and told that if I wanted to wear a hat I could wear a Santa Hat. BAM! Precedent! So now I'm going to wear a Santa Hat every shift I have. The best part is that last year the other staff didn't start wearing their Santa hats until December 10th. Assuming the same sort of schedule is in place I'm going to be representing Santa Hat two weeks before anyone else does. Think that's good? Wait until I keep wearing the hat after Christmas! Hah, my passive-aggressive crusade will break new boundaries.
After work tonight a fair whack of us went into town to see of Ballard before he heads to India this Friday morning. Unbeknownst to use, Adelaide is actually almost all closed on Sunday nights. Fortunately the Empire was open so 9 of us sat up there playing pool and listening to Ministry of Sound CDs that the Empire were playing in lieu of actually having a DJ. After that we went to Brighton Beach and watched bugs get killed in a bug zapper and then went home. I asked Ballard if he'd like to do a special guest journal chronicling his Indian Adventure but he seemed uninterested so he agreed to my suggestion that I just make up a journal about what I think he's doing in India. I'll start writing that this Saturday, it will be called "Ballard's Indian Journey of Self Discovery and Venereal Diseases".

Monday is now "Cleaning Day". Man was my room dusty. Now it's not. This knocks off one more thing on my list of things to acheive this summer. 'Dust my room'. I'm setting my goals high alright, and that reminds me, I should actually write out that list.
So the wearing the santa hat to work didn't cause any conflict, but it was festive. If wearing a Santa Hat is ok and deemed appropriate then by Friday I am probably going to step it up a notch and glue on a fake cotton-wool beard before work. I wonder if that's covered by the employee policy. Actually, I do wonder that... maybe I should have read and signed that policies booklet they gave me and told me to read and sign last year...
Now a list of things that bug me about summer but I always forget until the start of summer:


  • Mosquitos
  • Prickles that get in your socks
  • The itchiness of grass
  • Not being able to eat hot meals
  • So many tiny little moths

It's been a week of holidays, and now it's December. Time to start things happening.
I've got a brand new doona cover and pillow case set as of today. I hope it's not all crisp when I get into bed and watch the latest episode of Desperate Housewives in a few minutes. Meaningful Insight: After Mother and Father got divorced and Dad got his new house we all got to choose a new doona and doona cover for sleeping at Dad's house. I chose a Simpsons one. It was crisp and sharp and not soft like a well used doona cover is like. We only slept there 2 nights a fortnight so the doonas never became well used and also were infrequently washed. So they always remained unwelcoming. Then I stopped living at my Dad's house.
I had a day shift today and walked in with my Santa Hat on like yesterday. Yesterday Kylie Nightfill Manager didn't seem to have any problems with it. However as soon as I walked in today Dragan, Grocery Manager (aka a manager above Kylie) saw it and said "Brad take that hat off you sh...oush". I'm not exactly sure where he was going with that, maybe he was going to say 'shithead' and then pulled out of it. He does swear a lot. Eitherways I'd prefer shoush to 'The Bradster'. I kept the hat on though, to spite Dragan (who was the main reason I wasn't allowed to wear my normal hat to work anyway). I just walked away after the shoushing and started working. Later on I was filling off a flat-top in aisle three and he saw me again and he said "Brad take off that Hat!!" and I yelled "NO WAY GRINCH!" and I didn't take it off. Then while going through the flour capping a lot of flour fell on me.