Fall, leaves, etc.

I know it's a cliche how time flies, but it certainly does, doesn't it? This summer especially had zipped by me. I wonder where it went. As the kids have gone back to school, which signals the end of summer, even tho' summer still has 3/4 of a month to go before it's officially Fall, I couldn't say that the cooler breeze is making a return. Because this was a cool summer in general around these parts. The past Friday and Saturday did give us a taste of real summer, hot and muggy. Insanely unbearable. It was a shame that bay area denizens do not have that much tolerance for hot and muggy. We get really grumpy in weather like that.

Friday wasn't really a problem as I was inside working all day with the temperature controlled to a pleasant level. But at night, the breeze was nowhere, it was in the 90s at 9 pm. Hot, hot, hot. And continued all thru Saturday, which really gave me a horrible headache and I had to run some errands in all that heat, yucky.

Thankfully, Sunday arrived with our usual cool weather, breezy at times, and manageable in the 70s.

So what was my point again? My brain doesn't work in hot weather; although my allergies disappear in hot weather.

Still, even with cool breeze all thru this summer, there is still something to look forward to with the arrival of Fall. The changing of the leaves, of course! I am a leaf peeper. Every year we drive some 200 miles to watch the leaves. Not much leaves can be seen around here so we have to drive far to see them. It's like a yearly pilgrimmage. If I don't make it to the pilgrimmage this year, no worries, I have plenty of shots from last year that didn't get posted yet.

On the drive to work today, I was listening to the radio as I always do. One thing got me thinking. The dj mentioned that the US is ranked almost in the bottom of the list on the number of paid time off (vacation time) per year. According to the news, the national average for US is 13 days (pathetic isn't it?). And the leader of the pack is France which gives its workers 38 days of paid time off annually.

I was really saddened by the data. So upon arriving on my desk I computed how much time I get each year. Of course I have been here in this place for 11 years, so my accrual is more than say a newly hired. I get a total of 299 point something hours, which translates to roughly about 30 days. Now we have PTO which combines our sick leaves and time off.

Oh I breathed a big sigh of relief upon learning how much time we truly accrue each year. Of course I don't take all of that each year. So far this year, I have had two 4-day trips outside of the state, which isn't really that much, but of course I also took a day here and a day there in between. Thankfully, what I haven't done much (can't remember one incident) this year was call in sick.

I was about to talk about September coming, but I'm quite tired now. Besides there's a whole month to talk about September. Plenty of time to do a post --- can you tell I'm a procrastinator?