I'm in the somewhat unfortunate position of having to burn some vacation time before the end of the year, because I can't carry all of it over. In this case, it's three days, but I'll take four because of the placement of the holidays so I can have the holidays plus weekends for 11 straight days off. I thought I planned better than that, but I guess not.
The thing that kind of sucks about taking time off the last week of the year is that it's pretty much the worst time to travel. Here in Orlando, all of our touristy stuff gets swamped as well, so it isn't a good idea to go to those venues either. (When Disney hotel rates start at $200, and go up to $4k for one night, you know it's bad news.) In short, traveling is crappy, and typical vacation stuff that's local is crappy, so you have to be creative.
For me, this largely means an opportunity to switch off from work and do stuff that I want to do. I suppose that being selfish isn't exactly what I mean, Christmas season and all, but with 56-ish hours not interrupting my agenda, there's a whole lot of time to do whatever I want. It's been so long since I've done this that it seems like I need to remember what I like to do. So in no particular order...
- Hang out with Simon J and Red Delicious. That isn't selfish at all, but with more time, being on my stomach on the floor doing kindergarten things doesn't mean I'm thinking, "This is time I could be doing something else." Although maybe I can convince someone to watch him so Diana and I can have some us time.
- Play video games. I may end up finishing it before then, but I'm really digging Rise Of The Tomb Raider. Maybe there are other things to play too, but I don't really know what's out right now.
- See a movie or three. I can't wait to see Star Wars, but I hate crowds. Our closest movie theater is at Disney Springs, and you can be sure there's no way in hell we're going over there during the holiday break. I wonder if Claremont has a theater. We may take Simon to see The Good Dinosaur, if it lasts that long. Sounds like it might be Pixar's first bomb.
- Write some code. Yeah, I know that sounds like work, but there's a lot of new shiny stuff I enjoy learning about. I scored a free Xamarin subscription, which is tooling to build mobile apps using the tools I already know, so I want to port the CoasterBuzz database app to Android and iOS, just to say that I have. The new versions of ASP.NET and MVC are in RC status too, and I'm doing a talk about them in February. Porting the forums are a logical way to get up to speed.
- Read stuff. I'm a third of the way into Bill Nye's recent book, and there is some fiction I can borrow for free on Kindle, so I'd like to do that. I don't do a lot of pleasure reading.
- Write stuff. I don't even know what this means, but it could be blog posts, technical blog posts, some screenplay pages... I dunno. I enjoy it and I don't do it enough.
- Photograph Simon. I wanna bust out the cameras and photograph the kid. We haven't done a photo shoot in awhile, and Facebook keeps reminding me how gigantic he is now by showing how small he was. I gotta do this before we get him another hair cut, and hopefully before his front baby teeth are gone, as that dramatically changes how a kid looks.
- Build something with Lego. The ferris wheel is fun to build, and Simon loves it. There is something calming and wonderful about following those instructions and making a model.
Those are the big things I can think of. I'll have to revisit this list and see how I did.