Forcibly Vacating

It’s been a weird week. Due to the vacillations of our disconnected-from-reality market, The Day Job decided to make a big change to our current vacation scheme; as of 1/1, we can’t roll over our vacation days like we used to. We used to accrue time throughout the year, so you’d have to roll some over each year if you wanted to have New Year’s off or take a trip in the spring — now we get the full load of time right on January 1st, to do with as we wish the rest of the year.

Which is okay, really — honestly, that setup makes a lot more sense to me than the old accrual-based one — except that yours truly has a ton of vacation time banked. Me & the fam had planned to take a big, long vacation this year, but between selling one house, buying another, moving, & Ike, it just didn’t happen. So instead, we were thinking of a trip in the spring — Scotland, maybe, or Italy, or New Mexico. And then there’s the camping trip we keep threatening to take the Munchkin on…

Now, though, all those wonderful hours I’d accumulated will be going away, vanishing into the accounting ether, if I don’t take ’em ASAP. I can carry some over to the new year, still (until April, anyway), but not the whole pile. (As you might expect, there was near-panic in the office when the announcement went out.)

So, I had to sit down w/my boss earlier this week and figure out when I was going to take time off. After a quasi-serious lecture from her on learning to actually take vacation (I had the 2nd-highest total in our dept; woo, runner-up!), we worked out the numbers, the result of which is that I’ll be in vacation all of next week, and then again from Dec. 12th through Jan. 5th. Hoo-ah.

Because of the short notice-ness of this, sadly (and our general broke-ness), we’ll probably be staying here in H-town for most of that time. On the good side, though, that should mean that I’ll be able to focus a while on some stuff I’ve been meaning/needing to work on for a while now, site-wise.

I’ve got a pile of music to review that’s a mile tall, for one, and I’ve got a couple of “special projects” I’ve been messing with, some of which I’ll be posting about here soon. Keep yr fingers crossed that I don’t get swallowed whole by the honey-do list my wife’s kindly already populating…