My mother is out of the city for Christmas through new years to spend time with her partner's family. They got drunk and boisterous on the first night, embarrassed themselves in front of teetotalers and it's just been a hellish series of arguments and quiet fuming resentment about paying for their fair share of food they have no interest in eating since then.
Non-drinkers spend the money they should spend on drinking on more food, or classier food each week. Which is almost another hundred dollars if you do it right. Non-smokers also spend money that they should spend on smoking each week, on even more food, or even classier food each week, which if you also do that right is also another hundred. Mum and her boyfriend are being put in the poor house by his sister's concept of amply budgeting a good diet, while being trapped in a completely different city they need an airplane to get out of, because they cannot quit it with the bourbon and cigarettes while simultaneously receiving a multi-hundred dollar bill every 3 to four days for just fruit and vegetables that are mostly decorative.
Point is, that I still have some totally legal wiggle room on delivering a completely on time Christmas present to my mummy because I haven't seen her since the 17th. I spent ALL of yesterday fulling up a brand new slim line 1TB hard drive (at dawdling USB2 speed) I'd bought on sale from Jb HiFi with hopefully 3 or four years of television and movies in there, because Mum has also irresponsibly let her cable bill lapse and probably doesn't currently have anywhere near the wit to summon the colossal re-connection fee, or stop drinking long enough to afford the regular monthly bill just yet, but then my opinions on cable is that it's a trick. A dirty, dirty no good heroin-like trick.
(The Rum Diary adventures of my parents are not as bad as I make out, but after firmly establishing how they wanted to live their lives, all blotto, and working hard/well enough to pay for that boozy life, the boyfriend had a workplace accident, and now minus an eyeball, isn't completely as capable of maintaining that same level of earning effortlessly as he used to be able to, to pay for their basement level decadence, and they refuse to adapt, because they're both obviously in the last quarter of their lives, and fuck it, y'know?)
[filter]Filling up a hard drive. I spent 20 hours filling up a hard drive yesterday.[/filter]
