Weekend Plans Post: Three Day Weekends

My company, until very recently, did not cap our accrued vacation hours. I guess that there wasn’t much need to. In discussions with many of my co-workers, I found that they were more than happy enough to regularly keep their accrued hours in the single digits.

I wasn’t one of those. I have a lot of memories of tumultuous times in the late oughts and tweens and teens and I considered vacation to be something like additional severance. When I got under 100 hours, I started to freak out a bit. I only felt like I could really exhale when I had over 100. Well, 120. You know, 140 would let me take a week off and go to Canada or something without feeling like I needed to freak out a bit when I got back…

So working at a company that didn’t cap accrued vacation hours let me build up a small nest egg. It let me do stuff like “Need a mental health day? Take a mental health day!” thing where I would bestow a three day weekend upon myself when I needed one.

Well, work sent out a new policy that said “hey, we need your planned monthly schedule at the beginning of the month. We’ll approve your vacation! We just need to know when you’ll take it.”

So that sort of cut into the whole “at will three day weekend” thing and *THEN* we had a global pandemic where we just didn’t leave the house for months at a time. It eventually reached the point where having to go into work was like a mini-vacation all by itself. I get to get in the car! I get to drive! OOOH! I GET TO GO THROUGH A DRIVE-THRU! Masked, of course. Goodness knows if they coughed into the bag.

And so that resulted in vacation build-up as well.

As such, the company announced “okay guys, we’re capping vacation now. Get under the cap by the end of the year or else you’ll be at the cap on day 1 of the next one.” The cap is 200 hours. I looked at mine and I was over.

So I took last week off entirely. Whew.

Now I want to retire.

Sleeping without an alarm clock, going to the kitchen at leisure, playing a game, spending time with friends, taking hours to cook dinner… man. That is *NICE*.

So I want to figure out how I can do that.

Pity about the market crash. Maybe next year.

But this upcoming weekend is a minor taste of vacation again. A three day weekend from Friday through Sunday. Sleeping without an alarm clock, going to the kitchen at leisure, playing some games, spending time with friends, and taking hours to cook dinner. That’ll be nice.

So… what’s on your docket?

(Featured image is “Merlin”. Photo taken by Maribou as she is spending this week visiting friends who have a cat that has temporarily adopted her.)