So much for a holiday break.

It’s an annual tradition at the Place Where I Work That Does Not Pay Me: the two weeks around Christmas and the New Year are dead quiet. Employees who get tons of time off need to burn days, and it’s not unusual for people to announce around 12/15 that they’ll be out until 1/4. We contractors soldier on, and it’s usually a fairly quiet two weeks for catching up and slowing down, even if we don’t actually get to take off.

Not this year, baby. Today I was in 6 hours of meetings and 8+ new projects I have to review and deal with were unexpectedly shot into my in box. My relatively slow calendar is now packed with meetings and follow up stuff. We have a load of stuff launching in January, scheduled by employees who are unavailable for the next two weeks, because that’s how it works. No worries, we will take care of it. More than half the people in the meetings today were contractors.

So, yeah, the usual holiday slowdown isn’t happening this year, and it’s a good thing that Christmas is low-key: daughter and granddaughter for lunch/dinner/whenever, FaceTime with the Asheville crew, that’s about it.

I don’t even get informed about when the place where I work is closed for holidays, unless it’s something OBVIOUS like the 4th of July or something, so I found out yesterday that they are closed for Jan. 3.

We’ve already planned Jan 2 for a Magic Kingdom day, which is when our passes are active again, and we want to stay for fireworks. It has been years since we’ve done MK fireworks.

I promptly added an Animal Kingdom day for Jan 3, because all those damn annoying tourists (who pay Disney’s bills, just kidding about the damn annoying part) will be winging/driving their way homeward.

So, 2022 will be starting without any break from work, but will launch with Disney. Begin as you want to continue, right?