{"id":945,"date":"2004-12-22T22:27:06","date_gmt":"2004-12-22T22:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/?p=945"},"modified":"2004-12-22T22:27:06","modified_gmt":"2004-12-22T22:27:06","slug":"boo-yah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/archives\/945","title":{"rendered":"Boo-yah!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, my friend Sara was horrified &#150; <i>horrified<\/i> &#150; that my Christmas shopping wasn&#8217;t finished.  In fact, I had barely even started it.  In <i>fact,<\/i> I hadn&#8217;t bought a single thing.  She was also appalled that I wasn&#8217;t that stressed out about it.<br \/>\nToday, I did my Christmas shopping.  All of it.  Granted, there was one thing which I could not find and will have to replace with something else, and there&#8217;s one thing I&#8217;ll need to pick up on my way home, but everything else was bought today.  Further, I&#8217;ve gotta say that Amazon.com <i>kicks some serious ass.<\/i>  One of my Christmas presents needed to be shipped to New York, which wasn&#8217;t a concern, but another needed to be shipped to <i>Japan.<\/i>  This, of course, gave me pause.  My attempts to browse <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.jp\">amazon.co.jp<\/a> were unsuccessful, and besides, what I wanted to send wasn&#8217;t something that I really wanted to be in Japanese.  I fretted about how much it would cost to ship, about what kinds of importation nightmares such a thing could suffer, etc.  But no &#150; I popped onto Amazon to see what would happen if I entered Japan as the receiving country, and it didn&#8217;t even blink.  Further, the shipping wasn&#8217;t even that expensive, and after the Amazon discount on the thing, the price came about to almost as much as if I&#8217;d bought it at the mall and handed it to the recipient myself.  I&#8217;m floored, and utterly tickled.<br \/>\nNow, before y&#8217;all start resenting my sorry butt for having such an easy time of my Christmas shopping, know that today wasn&#8217;t a paragon of organization by a long shot.  I hit one store twice, two different Best Buys three times, Target three times, and drove in and out of Evanston at least twice, and probably three times.  (I know I hit Skokie at least three times.)  Further, I am ashamed to admit that my Christmas cards will all have American flag stamps on &#8217;em, because the grocery store didn&#8217;t have Christmas stamps and the Post Office, in yet another staggering display of willful carelessness, doesn&#8217;t offer extended holiday hours.  Still, I&#8217;m now bunkered down in front of the TV with a pile of packages and a mountain of gift wrap, settling in for a long night of wrapping and packing so I can hit the highway for Ohio tomorrow.<br \/>\nOn the very sizeable chance that I don&#8217;t get a chance to post again before the big day, I wish each and every last one of you a very Merry Christmas, or a slightly belated Happy Hanukkah, and a truly Happy New Year.  It&#8217;s been a real tempest of a year, what with the moving and all the crazy projects and whatnot.  I&#8217;ll probably pop back online to post some kind of year-in-review wrap-up between Christmas and New Year&#8217;s, to highlight the lunacy that was 2004.  Until then, be  good, be happy, and most of all, be safe!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, my friend Sara was horrified &#150; horrified &#150; that my Christmas shopping wasn&#8217;t finished. In fact, I had barely even started it. In fact, I hadn&#8217;t bought a single thing. She was also appalled that I wasn&#8217;t that stressed out about it. Today, I did my Christmas shopping. All of it. Granted, there was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-voice-tip-of-the-quill"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4e5QR-ff","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}