Wednesday, 12/21

It’s a miracle, I tell you...a real holiday miracle--

It looks like I have a 3 and a half day weekend coming up this weekend!

I just figured that little fact out, and I have to admit I’m both happy and stunned. Because of the way the calendar (or the stars) line up this year, I have to work until 2 on Friday. There’s the “half” part of the three and a half day weekend. I have Saturday and Sunday off, like a normal person. Then I get Monday off as my “holiday” day. You put it all together, and I have myself that legendary and occasionally mythical three and a half day weekend. Of course, that in no way measures up to the 2-week break my friends who work at NMU get, but then I don’t have one of those legendary and mythical cushy state jobs like they do, right?

8-)

My extended weekend’s actually kind of a nice thing, too. After all, I’ll be doing the usual weekend stuff like shopping & laundry when I get done Friday, and then doing the usual holiday stuff Saturday and Sunday. But then there’s Monday, a day to which no one ever looks forward but all of a sudden looms like an extra gift found under the tree hours after everyone thought they had opened all of their presents.

Hmm...now that I think about it, you know how I always ask Santa for a 25^th hour in the day? Well, maybe this was the best he could do, the gift of an “added’ day in one particular year, a day on which I have no plans, no responsibilities, no...nothing. If that’s the case, I think I owe the jolly fat guy in the red suit quite the thank you card!

Yay!!!

****

Speaking of things about which to yell out “Yay!”, consider this—starting today, a certain thing starts getting better each and every day. Today is the shortest day of the year, a day when get to experience a whole eight hours and 32 minutes of “sun” (or, more likely, gloom that’s not totally dark). But tomorrow, we get an extra minute of “sun” (or gloom), and it does nothing but up go a little bit each and every day from now on, until we hit June 20^th and get to bask in something like 17 hours and 40-some minutes of actually sun (and usually, thankfully, not much gloom). Sure, we’ve not yet reached the coldest time of the year, and sure, we’ve not yet reached the snowiest time of the year (believe it or not), but at least in one very small way, winter’s over, and things are starting to look up.

So like I said before, “Yay!”

(jim@wmqt.com)