Time Off
One of the odd side-effects of having my spouse work at the University is that I haven't been taking as many days off from work. She doesn't (yet) have a lot of time to take off, and as she has to go to work every day, I tend to go to work every day. The "problem," if one can call it that, is that I get 24 vacation days a year, and can only carry over 48 total from year to year or I "lose" them.
I've taken 6 vacation days this year, and our "year" ends August 15th. I ended last year with 45.5 days, so I stand to lose about 16 days if I don't take them this year. So I talked to the boss and it looks like I'm going to take Mondays and Fridays off for the next eight weeks.
Needless to say, a few closets, as well as the crawlspace and the pool house, are going to be purged over the next two months. I mean, I'm going to be throwing away all sorts of stuff. As I said over the weekend, I don't care if there are bags of gold bars in the crawlspace, we haven't missed them for the last ten years, so they're out of here. (Not that I think there is any actual gold under the house, of course).
I start tomorrow (today?) with the pool house. I just had to replace the throttle cable (or whatever it is) on the mower because when it sits outside in the rain water goes down the "sheath" and had puddled where the cable dipped down by the motor and the metal cable itself eventually rusted and snapped. It was easy to replace, but that's twenty bucks down the drain. Let's get all the garbage in the pool house thrown out and make some room for the mower (which actually hasn't really been sitting out in the rain much--now that we're a one-car family it is usually in the other half of the garage--another area that is going to get purged of crap....).
I watched the NBA draft with my brother-in-law Cole tonight. It's amazing how much he knows about all of the different college basketball players. I knew who John Wall and Evan Turner were, but beyond that, I was pretty clueless. We were getting into the end of the first round and he would still spout off about whoever the next guy was that was going to get picked for whatever reason, and he was usually right, and always had all sorts of "side information" about the player in question.
Grad school is going well this summer. We have Java-based labs each week so I've been leaning on Tod somewhat to help me out with the coding. He's a good friend, and is very patient--I have made it clear that I don't want him just doing the code for me, so he sort of leads me along and gets me to arrive at the solution sort of on my own. I think I'd be able to wrap my head around the Java stuff more if I used it every day. Then again, I don't know that I want to be a Java programmer that has to do this stuff every day.
My boss has two job interviews at other universities in the upcoming month. While I think she's putting the cart ahead of the horse somewhat, she's made it clear that at the very worst there will be money around for me until at least September 2012. And that's if all of my other part-time funding sources go away (which they likely won't). Even I can't bring myself to worry about what will happen over two years from now. Grad school will finish up in May of 2011--I'll re-take stock in the situation at that point and see where I need to go.
Okay, I guess I should go to bed and rest up for my day of actual "work" tomorrow.
Posted: Friday, June 25, 2010, 2:40 am
Mood: Tired