Lemme see, what did we have today? A little road rage on the way home from work. A little twit (sorry kids, that’s as polite as I can get) cut in front of me as I was *patiently* (REALLY!) waiting way back in the left turn lane at the Jackson/Maple light leaving room for other vee-hickles to exit and enter various driveways. I was NOT sitting there waiting for, oh well. What’s the point? I honked and acted like a 2-year-old and she gestured and acted like a 2-year-old back. I am not at all proud of my behavior. Really. What *was* my problem?

The truth is, it has been a hard summer in some ways and I am really, really, really road-weary. And at the same time I really, really, really did not want to work today because I wanted to get on the road early today. Yes, the road again. Because we are now once again in the Great White North, albeit this time we have only gone as far as Houghton Lake. Yes, we were in the Great White North last weekend too, at Fin Family Moominbeach. And I am tired. And road weary.

It is really, really, really hard to be going through the first year of a new job and not having any vacation time, etc., especially when your blasted husband lives on the edge of use-or-lose. That means he has so much vacation time built up that if he doesn’t use it by the end of the year or whenever, he loses it. And that’s okay with me, he has definitely earned every scrap of it. The problem is that he is always kind of expecting me to just up and leave work whenever he wants to go north or wherever, just like I used to be able to do during all the years I was a volunteer or theatre guild administrator or student. Get up and leave Friday morning? Okay. Not any more. To be perfectly honest, thanks to my more than generous employer, I have a better than adequate number of vacation hours available to me right now. But my work ethic gets in my way sometimes. I like this job. It is a wonderful opportunity and one that I really didn’t expect to find at this somewhat late date in life. I had stuff to finish up today and I took a day off last week. I didn’t feel right about asking for more time for the Labor Day weekend. I knew that if I had to deal with driving home through rush hour traffic, then driving up to HL, I would be a frazzled mess. I just wanted to go home and relax crash out on the couch at eight PM, get up at 0-dark-30 tomorrow and drive up then.

We kind of argued about it this afternoon. “Can’t you leave early?” “No.” I felt guilty and defeated. Then I heard a little bird of the corporate sort coming around whispering some good news to all of us: it’s a holiday weekend, take off an hour early. That made all the difference in the world. Suddenly it seemed possible to go home, throw a few things *back* into my old LL Bean duffle bag and pack my electronical crap and get on the road. The GG (who was off work already) could grab a gyro or something to eat in the car. It worked, we’re here, the traffic wasn’t that bad. Cool off, Buzz Saw Woman.

Dogmomster will probably comment about how awful it is to be a contractor and have to start over on vacation every time your contract house is bought out or whatever (I probably don’t have the details right). I agree. It is horrible and it is a practice that needs to change. I have worked for a contractor. The difference is that I worked for the same contractor for 15 years. I didn’t ever have to start over at zero on that stuff, it just took about 100 years to get to, oh, about what I get right now…

And, yes! That is a self-portrait! I remember making it! Dooya like my square nose? And that is a *bow* on top of my head. What were you thinking?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.