By your leave

ot that I’d ever complain, but we get a ridiculous amount of annual leave.  Five weeks a year, plus an extra four days at Christmas (on top of the statutory holidays), and another day at Easter.  So effectively six weeks of holiday a year.  Which is seriously cool, but also sometimes difficult to actually use up, especially when work is busy.  Which is why, despite having taken what I thought was quite a long break in April, I’ve still got nearly four weeks left, and more days accruing all the time.  And because of complicated accountanty things, that’s bad for the department’s budget, so I’m being encouraged to start using some of it up.
I had vaguely thought about popping over to Brisbane for a few days and visiting Jenny and Christian (and maybe catching up with Wombles and DancingStar as well), and still might if I spot any cheap flights, but it’s not quite as tempting now as it might have been, given that I just got my new rates assessment (that’s city taxes, for you American types), and it’s had a predictably huge increase (yay for the council being underinsured so we’re having to pay for all those earthquake repairs now), which has closely followed on the heels of the interest rate going up on my mortgage, so suddenly spending money on flights to Australia seems not such a sensible idea.
Anyway, I decided today that a good way to use up at least a few days of leave would be to take the odd random day off here and there, maybe give myself some long weekends to break up the long winter slog a bit – I’ll probably take more advantage of the time off that way than if I took it all in a big block.  And then I looked at my calendar and realised that tomorrow is the only day that was completely clear of meetings or other reasons I absolutely have to be at work… so, it looks like I’m having a holiday tomorrow.
Yay for unexpected holidays!