Approved

On my work schedule for this week are three documents, two of which are status reports and therefore very short and quick. The third is an edit to a previously-delivered document in which the customer asked us to change the project name slightly and add one table, so... probably not going to eat up a bunch of hours, either.

Next week is a little closer to normal, with three documents of varying sizes, plus a software delivery.

But the week after that -- the last week of the month -- I've got nothin'. Not a single delivery of any sort.

I went into the weekly manager's meeting yesterday with that rundown, and told them that we were looking for work, especially work that had a charge number attached, and then I told the guy in charge of all the charge numbers that the document person and I would likely be leaning pretty heavily on the "generic" charge number for the next several weeks.

He made a note of it, then said, "Vacations approved!" Which was sort of a joke, and sort of serious. The generic charge number has limited funds. So while they're not going to make us burn our vacation time while there's no work to do... they'll encourage it.

The document person was already planning to take a few days off -- her son's spring break is right through the dry spell, so she figured to take advantage of the serendipitous alignment. I hadn't planned on taking any time, honestly -- I'm saving time for Mexico in August and Chicago at Christmas and building my buffer to deal with unexpected days off due to illness or whatever.

But I spent a little time looking over my timesheets and vacation hours and came to the conclusion that I can, in fact, probably afford to take a couple of days off. (I forgot that in January I rolled over a new tenure bump, so I'm getting a few days of vacation more than I'd planned on, plus some other factors, so... Anyway, yeah. Time off. Now I just need to figure out how much, and when.

I'll definitely take at least half a day on the 29th -- Penny and I are leaving for diabetes camp that afternoon, and the drive down to the camp will be smoother, I suspect, if I can go home early to pack the car and then we can head out directly after school lets out.

And she's got a school holiday (teacher workday or somesuch) on the 25th, so I can take part or all of that, maybe.

And Matt's and my anniversary is the 18th, so maybe we can take that day to hang out together, but that one only makes sense if he can take the time, too.

And in the meantime, I'm sort of praying we get some work in here soon.