Vacation!

Well, at least vacation from work. Back in early May, I got an email from HR pointing out that I have over 200 hours of unused vacation time! This was the occasion for some serious mocking by my boss and our office assistant, both of whom regularly use up every single hour of their leave. In my defense, Big University lets you carry over from one year to the next ad infinitum and as you work there longer you accumulate time faster. I’m currently earning 14 hours a month. Since my boss was getting ready to leave her job and I’d be taking on her role interim (with all the extra work that implies), she suggested I put in for some summer time vaca while she was still around to approve it. So I did a random day off in June and a long 5-day weekend. I saw a Mariners game and spent time with friends and their rugrats, so all-in-all pretty successful. Though the game itself sucked.

Now comes the biggy. I put in for two weeks in July. Now, the fact that I don’t do more vacation isn’t because I’m some kind of masochist. Granted, I do wonder whether certain projects will take a single step forward while I’m gone, but honestly the biggest reason is money. If I’m not at the office, I’m going to want to shop or eat at restaurants or go to the movies. All of these are fine and fun pursuits (in fact, I love them all) but they cost. Years of doing too much of all three, plus living on credit cards during grad school, have put me in a lot of debt. I’m trying to dig out, but I seem to do a two-steps forward, one-step back with my finances.

So I took these two weeks, but was kind of in denial about what I’d do with them. After weeks of asking about my plans and hearing nothing, my mother finally insisted that I should come visit for at least part of the time. So I’m leaving for the East Coast on Wednesday and back in a week. I had planned to take a couple of days before or after and rent a vacation cabin on the water and just sit and read. That hasn’t worked out too well. Most of the places I’d like to rent are minimum one-week stays in the summer (even those that say two-night minimum on their websites, grrr!) and I’ve just lost interest in finding one at this point.

The good news is, before and after the East Cost trip I’ll likely be putting in extra time here on the blog, getting back in the habit (wait, was I ever IN the habit?) of more regular posting. I’ve already eaten out twice and gone to see Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix. At which I bought both buttered popcorm and junior mints – who says I can’t break out and get wild?