Day Off

The company that I am working for has an interesting set-up when it comes to Holidays and Days Off.  The normal work rotation is 9 hour days every Monday-Thursday, then work every other Friday, which adds up to 80 hours, and gives every other Friday off. It's a pretty good deal, since 95% of the time I was spending 9 hours at the Shipyard anyways. 

Then to make time keeping interesting at Hanford, they have special rules for when Holidays fall on the scheduled Friday off, they have to give you an equivalent day off.  Plus, they recognized early on the NO ONE wanted to be at work the Friday after Thanksgiving, so they cannibalised Presidents Day in February to treat the Friday after Thanksgiving as a Holiday, also.  The end result is that, this year at least, the week of Thanksgiving and Christmas we were off Wednesday-Sunday without having to burn any leave.  Not bad.

Our plan is to use my moms apartment in Kirkland as our base of operations for Christmas activity.  At one point we had thought we would head over Wednesday morning, and spend 4 nights there visiting.  After talking it over with SWMBO, we decided to use Wednesday to make more apartment progress, and pack in an orderly manner for the trip, and then get an early start on the drive at 10ish Thursday.

The apartment is looking...okay.  The girls room is squared away, the living room is a living room, the kitchen is usable, and I can poop in the bathroom.  There are still 3 boxes remaining to be unpacked in the living room, and several in our bedroom.  90% of what remains to be organized can fall into 1 of 3 categories that start with the letter 'B': Blankets, Books, and Baskets. 

We have a lot of blankets.  My wife is very into quilts, and my mother-in-law makes amazing afghans, and in our house, I always really enjoyed the fact that I knew no matter HOW cold it got, we would never freeze to death.  It made it much easier for me to be a hard-ass and draw the line in the sand that the house temperature didn't need to be set over 64 degrees.  Problem with all those blankets though is that they are bulky.  Even using the big space saver vacuum bags, they take up a LOT of space. 

As for books..what can I say...my wife and I are fairly voracious readers.  I am quite certain between the two of us, we own in the area of 350 books.  In our bedroom right now there are 8 liquor boxes full of books we haven't even dreamed of unpacking yet, in addition to the 120 that were used as spacing and padding in other boxes, which are living on our dresser now waiting for a good home. 

The baskets belong entirely to my wife.  She is a woman of few obsessions, but the ones she does have, she indulges in.  When our children were younger, baby carriers were one of her obsessions...wicker baskets is one of the other ones.  Luckily, her passion for baskets has not overcome her desire for frugality, so most of the baskets are no-name things she got at goodwill, or other stores, and not fancy things from Longaburger or Peterboro.  But, like the blankets, baskets, when not holding stuff in them, take up a LOT of space.  Until we figure out ways to properly use them all, they are just land mines for me to dance around in our bedroom.

Oh well...the place is getting better, and it will be a much cleaner less stressful place to come home to after Christmas than it would have been if we had headed out this morning.