Archive for June, 2009

The Simple Joy of a Day Off

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Well, yesterday I had the day off.  I took the Memorial Day holiday on my birthday.  What did I do?  I did nothing, and it was everything I though it could be.  OK, it could have been significantly more interesting but I did enjoy not doing anything.  I managed to sleep until 9AM and then I mostly flipped channels all day.  Given a whopping 10 channels, this was obviously not as entertaining as one might hope.  I kept intending to read some more in my book, but never quite got around to it.  I chose not to sit at the computer, because that’s what I already do all day, every day.  It did get a bit warm in the container during the afternoon — one window A/C unit is simply not enough during the heat of summer here — but it cooled things down quickly once the sun stopped turning it’s attention to it.  Later we walked down to the coffee place and had a drink — tea for Guli, vanilla smoothie for me.  It was a nice enough little treat.

I did get interested enough to do a little math.  I figured that most people wouldn’t really appreciate what a day off is here.  People in real life ordinary jobs tend to work only 5 days out of 7 in the week.  That gives you 104 days off a year, right there.  Throw in 11 Federal holidays or generic holidays of choice and the total goes up.  Of course, we get those, too.  That said, sometimes people take them, sometimes don’t.  It just depends because we go from a 12 hour day to 8 hours paid when you take a day off.  On my first iteration out here in just over 2 years I only took 1 holiday.  I think we’ve taken most since then, excepting those occurring while we are on R&R.  Then I added in vacation time, assuming 2 weeks a year for normal people.  We get 2 weeks every 4 months, though the year end is 3 weeks.  All 3 of those are only 10 paid days off, not 14 and 21.  I assumed the normal people vacation is taken in one lump instead of being split up, and didn’t count the weekend days that wrap them because it’s already covered in the 104 days.  It doesn’t work that way for us, of course, as there are no weekends to deduct.

These totals come up to 129 days for normal jobs, and 60 for us, or being off from work roughly 35% of the time for you, and only 16% for us.  It’s kind of funny how the numbers can present odd views though, because while the average time you need to make it through for a day off is only 5 days, whereas for us it’s closer to 7-8 weeks or so.  I’m awful tired of it all, but we’re going to stay out here for just a little while longer to build up the coffers and enable us some flexibility.

BTW, I’m not being whiny about it, just wanted to point out why I did not ambitiously pursue anything on my day off.  Of course, there really isn’t anything to do anyway. :)

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