Taking the day off today at the request of my boss.
Well, she didn’t actually request it. No. What really happened is that our president sent out a memo a couple of weeks ago telling us that we had to use all of our vacation before the end of the year. No carry-over to 2007.
At the time, I had about 10 days left. Therefore, I’m pretty much working short weeks for the rest of the year, plus taking off a week and a half around Christmas to see how cold it can get in Vermont. So I’ve got today off. And next Friday. And next Monday. And last Friday. And that week around Christmas. And I think some other time that I’m forgetting.
This does not mean that I can just RELAX: work gave me a Blackberry a couple of weeks ago, and it never stops going off. I was up at around 6:30 this morning talking to a guy at work because someone else had paged me about a server problem.
Gotta love technology.
After fixing the server, I spent some quality time taking about about 4 billion bags of trash, which were generated last Wednesday, Thursday (Thanksgiving) and Friday. Those were the days during which my roomate and I hosted her son, daugther, boyfriend, brother, friend and friend’s son at the house for two-and-a-half days of non-stop eating. We had turkey, ham, squash, apple pie, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, potatoes, stuffing, gravy, beer, wine, rum, cranberry sauce, broccoli, asparagus, salsa, chips, cheese, pickled okra, coke, and pizza. And seconds.
And that was just Thursday.
Friday, I took off to spend some long-overdue time in the woods where I hurt myself (more on that shortly), while the others – except for the son – prepared to make tamales; but they ended up making menudo (some sort of weird Mexican chitlins concoction that I have yet to try). The refrigerator is currently completely full, there are still about 4 bottles of wine and a case of beer on the deck; and, as I said, I got rid of LOTS of trash this morning.
I also said that I took off on Friday to go camping. Hooked up with a couple of friends of mine who work at the CDC (always a good thing to bring with you when you camp, right?) and we headed up to the Sylco wilderness area in the mountains of Tennessee.
More specifically, we hooked up when we all got there. I got there first and managed to set up my 800,000 square-foot tent by myself (always wondered if I could do that) before either of them showed up. Okay….in reality, the tent is just over 200 square feet. Since it was supposed to drop down into the 30s each night, the plan was to put a heater in the tent; and, since three or four guys would be sleeping in it, it would stay warm. Bad plan, as it turned out. One guy slept in his truck and I never did get the heater set up. But hey…MY sleeping bag was nice and toasty. I can’t help it if the other two guys don’t understand cold-weather camping and spent the whole weekend crying about how cold it was.
At any rate, after everyone had arrived Friday evening, we set about collecting firewood. While breaking a decent-sized stick in half by jumping on it, I managed to really screw up my left knee, which I believe houses a chronic bowling injury (no joke), so I spent the rest of the night supervising the other two guys and drinking bourbon.
Saturday, while limping around, I managed to fall over and wrench my right elbow and left wrist. So I spent most of the day drinking bourbon and supervising.
Oh – and occassionally playing with my chainsaw (maybe I should have used that instead of my knee on Friday night….).
The three of us ate pretty well, although an early attempt at chili never did pan out, in spite of our best efforts to “rescue” it over the course of the weekend by pouring more and more stuff into it, heating it, tasting it, and saying, “Nope. Still sucks.”
Yesterday morning, we packed up the cars, made sure the campsite was in better shape than when we’d found it, and made the two-hour trip back to Atlanta.
Back at my house, my roommate had scoured my kitchen floor, cleaned stuff that I didn’t realize could be cleaned, and successfully kept my cats alive; so I thanked her by taking a bunch of leftovers from my camping trip and from thanksgiving and making two FANTASTIC Shepherd’s Pies (made with ground beef and venison sausage if you’re interested – and what a great combination for a Shepherd’s Pie).
We demolished one of the two last night, and I fully intend to take care of at least half of the other one today. Also need to do some laundry. But it’s only noon. I don’t want to strain myself.
All in all, the Thanksgiving weekend was a real treat and I hope everyone reading this had as nice a time as I did.
You’ll be hard-pressed to top it at Christmas, Cy; but I’m sure you will somehow. 🙂
TWD