Counting the hours

By any standard it is safe to say that my employer is generous with vacation time. There isn't a set number of days per year that we get to take off work, rather a set number of hours that earn each month for both vacation and sick leave. We are also closed on major holidays and all the days between Christmas and New Year's Day. In addition we get two personal days and one floating holiday. That should be plenty of time in which to fit in one's life around one's job, should it not?

It doesn't really feel like it to me right now.

The number of vacation hours I have at any one time dips dangerously close to low. The three bonus days we are granted (the floating holiday and personal days) each year are gone in one month of receiving them - I use them quickly to save up some vacation hours. When I do splurge and take a full day away from work, I still feel compelled to check e-mail, listen to voice mail, call to check in and/or stop by and see how things are going - if not to the main campus then to one of the outreach locations that I manage.

Life is full right now with the boys, teaching, keeping up with the all-powerful women friends and my very patient BGL husband. I continue to envision a day when the pace is slower, my time is less defined by the number of vacation hours accrued, and more directed by my loves and passions than obligations and external demands.

Sometimes before collapsing into sleep at night my Best Greatest Love and I talk about those future days when the boys are off doing their own thing, we are living in the country, growing food of some sort and the pace will be more our own. We fully understand and know that we will miss the chaos, the demands, the hurried pace of it all...it is like a race to get there, though. Right now the hours in each day, week, month to get the love and gratitude out to those in our hearts and, the to-do lists completed just don't seem plentiful enough.