Full plate

I should be happy, but I’m not.

I have the day off again. It is that time of year when I have vacation built up that I have to take. The company has a policy that you could only carry over a certain amount of hours/days at the end of the year. Since I have been here for 10+ years, I accrue a boatload of vacation each year and can only carry over 60 hours (7.5 days) by the end of December. They used to have a policy that, if you didn’t use the vacation, they would pay it out to you. That changed a few years back and now the policy is “use it or lose it”. I think it is a bit counterproductive. I am one of those who doesn’t take much vacation during the year. We used to take a lot of trips and with my Boy Scout involvement, I would normally burn up most of my days throughout the year. When junior was doing intern work out west, we took off a week or two to go out and visit/bug him. Since junior has graduated and lives only 3 hours away, we are not taking as much time off. Momma is spending a lot of time taking care of her parents and we cannot get away for long trips. This all leaves me with a plethora of vacation time to burn at the end of the year. I’ve taken off Fridays to go to college football games, I’ve done a bit of hunting, momma’s got me doing a whole bunch of “honey dos” (aka chores). I am pretty much taking off every Friday between now and the end of the year. Got a lot of work to do at the office and every time I take off, I seem to get further behind. On top of that, I just got signed up yesterday for a road trip to Belgium the week before Thanksgiving for another audit and to work with our European office. I know, I know - I really shouldn’t be whining and should be grateful for the time and opportunity, but this just messes with my plans. I always thought that, when junior was out of the house and it was just momma and I and the dogs, life would be calmer and less hectic. Silly rabbit.


In spite of my complaining, we have been busy. A couple of trips up to College Station for games. Helped my dad celebrate his 88th birthday last week. He and mom are still pretty darn spry for a bunch of octogenarians. You think, at that age, they’d be hanging out at home or in nursing home. Nah, they just left town on a short 4 day cruise to Cozumel with my brother. I can only hope I am that active/mobile when I get their age.

And the real reason I am not happy is that my PC picked up some virus last week and pretty much cratered the system. I was able to restore it to an older version, but all my settings are screwed up. None of my favorites are set up any more, most of my files and pictures are missing. I have a back up drive, but a lot of the information is not there as it should be. I have copies of the important stuff and a lot of my files are recoverable and I made a secondary back up of my pictures (being paranoid is sometimes a good thing), but this just pisses me off. I am not ignoring everyone, I am just trying to get back to where I was two weeks ago.