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Location: Work.
Listening: "The Seahorse" by Over The Rhine.

So far, the new year has been pleasant, but the past few days have put me into something of a valley after several peaks. I'm trying to get unstuck, but without much success.

I think the fact that I worked through Christmas for the first time ever has a lot to do with it. Last year (and every year prior to that, really), I took at least a week off for Christmas and New Year's. This year, I was unable to do that (I hadn't received my grant of vacation time at that point). I ended up with a four-day weekend for Christmas and then New Year's Day off. It felt very strange--everything looked like, smelled like, tasted like Christmas, but I still had to get up every morning and trundle in to work (which has been almost completely deserted for the past two weeks, considering that everyone else is either temporary and can take as much time off as they can personally afford or has received their vacation time).

Perhaps I should explain the vacation grant issue. My company will grant a new employee eight hours of vacation/sick time (they're the same thing here) per month that they work for the first year that they work. One can only use that time as one "earns" it (ie. you literally receive one day per month that comes available as the months progress and must "bank" these days to be able to take multiple days off at any point). Once you've entered your second year of employ, you are granted a certain amount of vacation/sick time in one lump sum every four months. Under the old PTO (Paid Time Off) policy, this amounted to eighty hours granted in January of your second year, followed by forty in August. Under the new policy (reworked after the reductions), one is granted forty hours in January, April, and August. Not bad, when one considers that this is amounting to three weeks of vacation/sick time--but when one considers that forty hours is now being held away from the employees and parcelled out instead of being given up-front, it's somewhat annoying. I figure the changes were an effort to reduce the instances of people taking two weeks of vacation and then getting reduced or leaving the company as well as an effort to prevent PAS from having to "pay out" time for folks that they did reduce who had large amounts of vacation days banked. I can appreciate that, on a business level. On a personal level, I'd much rather have the two weeks in January. I very much envy my friends who don't have to think about these things.

But I digress...

So I used my last vacation/sick time to take Christmas Eve off and am now looking at forty hours of time to do with as I will until April when, if I'm still here, I get a "refill". I feel like I need a vacation that lasts longer than four days, but am hesitant because I need to reserve some time in case of sickness or emergencies. I also am not yet sure what I'd do with a vacation and am afraid that I might end up working through it, as I end up working through most of my weekends--doing laundry, cleaning the house, running errands, etc. I have a very hard time just sitting back and relaxing; there always seems to be something that I should be getting done instead. I think of my father waking my brother and I at 5 AM the day after Christmas last year to have us haul cast-iron bathtubs across a muddy construction site (his crew had taken the day off), and I wonder where I get this from.

So the trick is to find the best way to allot this vacation time and then actually use it for vacation. I'll let you know if I come up with anything.

There will be an actual update on what I've been doing since January 1 later. For the moment, I just felt like venting a little.