Vacations, Sick Time, Recharge

As I pass through the end of February I realize that I haven’t requested any time off. Everyone here was supposed to request time off between the 12th of February and the 1st of March. From the 1st to the 4th of March there would be a “freeze period” where no one could request vacation and bids would be processed (in order of seniority). After the 4th it is a “free for all” type of deal where you can request any sort of vacation you’d like.

This whole time I’ve been shopping for a place to get married. A place to have a reception. Somewhere inexpensive enough that I could still enjoy my honeymoon…which by the way will be driving down to San Diego and back up through Las Vegas. Thank god for air conditioning in my car! And I hope my car can make it. Should be a nice little jaunt down the coast (especially with the late summer weather) and I expect San Diego and Vegas to be as great as they always have been. This is why I am freaking out about vacation...we haven't planned this wedding yet.

The reason I am talking about vacation…is because I am dying to request some. I realized on the way home late one night the weekend before last, that this is the first time, ever, in the history of my life, that I worked on President’s day. Seem odd? I don’t think so. Most of my life has been dedicated to school. When I started working, I worked for financial institutions that recognized stupid holidays like that, and I was able to take the holiday, free and clear while getting paid my normal wages. Not true with this insurance company.

In realizing this, I freaked out…and have freaked out even more knowing that we are almost a quarter in to this new year…and I haven’t had a 3 day weekend…since Christmas? And even then…people all around me were getting 2 weeks off…people in school, people that work for Boeing…it has been rough. I am worried about the dreaded “burn out”. And it’s not so much my job as it is the traffic. Wasting 2 hours of my life every day in a car for a job that I could do from my boxers at home…is very frustrating. I would even work an extra hour every day if I could stay at home, answer calls on my cell phone and get on ICQ and send/receive emails. But, it probably won’t happen. In fact, they plan on moving us downtown. To the U-district. Microsoft bought our campus, so we should be out of here in 34 months…33 in 2 days. Should be interesting. Supposedly MSFT will be adding 1,500 new employees to work on this campus. Maybe I won’t have to leave and I can get a job with MSFT? I hope so. I hope they have some career fair for this campus. I’d definitely want to show up for that. But…I don’t want to be a programmer. I don’t want to work 70 hours a week (unless it’s worth it financially). Michelle was telling me on Friday night that I should go get a teaching degree. How awesome would it be to have that 3 months off every summer? The 3 weeks at Christmas and New Years? The weeks here and there for spring break and mid-winter break? And snow days! HAH!

But what kind of self-made millionaire would I be then? Am I not cut out to be rich? Growing up I always thought I would be. No matter how I would get there…I always knew I would be “rich”. In 2nd grade when everyone was asked what they’d like to be I said “rich”. My parents would roll their eyes when at SEVEN YEARS OLD I was telling them about how I was going to be driving a convertible Ferrari…”just you wait and see” I said to them. At the time, I had very little understanding of money…bills…life…but still, it was my dream, and for some reason I honestly think a feasible dream. It’s going to take a lot longer than I thought…as I sat there in college and drooled over all the 24 year old “on-paper” multi millionaires in Silicon Valley…suddenly thinking to myself…Oh my gosh…is it going to happen for me too? And we all know what happened to those kids…I’m pretty sure about 1% made it out of there with their money.

Hmmm, that was quite a boring piece of writing. Maybe because I am boring right now. Let’s try to make it interesting. Things I am freaking out about: Having 90% of my paycheck go to a combined account. All my life I’ve had the ability to take all the cash in my account and do whatever I want with it. And of course, all of my life, I’ve never done that. There’s definitely been times that I’ve splurged, but I’ve never been flat broke. From the first $250 I deposited on my 13th birthday in to my savings account from the money I had leftover from my birthday…all the way up until now. I’m going to keep a few grand separate from our joint account…but the rest…and I mean a lot of the rest…is going to the joint account. For some reason I am more scared about this then I was about getting engaged…getting married…buying a house. Can you tell I’m financially minded? Maybe…is this all I really care about in this world?

I think my coworker was annoyed with me this morning because I was talking about my bills with him and I told him that I try my best to spend money on things I find “relevant”. He then poignantly asked me (as the uber-gamer-nerd/I spent $2400 on my gaming system and I was at a gaming convention last week and I read sci-fi books on my breaks) what I thought was relevant. I could only seriously come up with two things: My bills (for the house and transportation) and food. I hate having clothes. If someone could say, ok…Monday through Friday, here are your five outfits. Wear them until they rip, fall apart, or get burned and you’ll be good to go. Here are your Saturday and Sunday clothes. If someone could say that to me, that would just be great. And for everyone’s knowledge, I do have two pairs of jeans still from early high school (8 years old) that have just ripped due to the fabric being so thin. I have had Michelle sow them up and on our latest “painting extravaganza” the arse ripped out of them once again, thus requiring another patch. I also still have my D.A.R.E. shirt from my “6th grade graduation” that I wear regularly…both as a joke and at the same time as a point of my utter cheapness to buy new clothes.

I am also taking pills. 4 pills in the morning, 4 at night. They are for my ulcer. I hate them. They make my mouth taste like crap because they are antibiotics. The pill popping will stop in 3 days. It has been a crappy 14 days of taking pills.

Patty Liu comes home from China in about 2 weeks. I am stoked. Hopefully I can run in to her at some party or something. She is my 2nd favorite asian girl (non-dateable) after Tien, a girl from the business school. Who definitely was dateable but I think WAY out of my league (as many women who I admire are). It is a rare occasion to find an Asian girl with my sort of mentality…laid back, NOT obsessed with brands and what kind of car I drive, overall laid back and obviously proud of their heritage. Going to UW really helped my mentality with different races, although it definitely skewed them horribly towards a few in particular…we won’t delve in to that here.
5 minutes left to my shift and I think I’ve bored myself enough with this. I promise I’ll include more exciting writing in the next post. Maybe a burglar will break in to my house and we will have a fist fight? That would be a pretty awesome story. Until then…