on top gear and my impending vacation
T minus 55:32 hours and counting.
That's when my mandatory vacation starts. I've got a 2 weeks of vacation and a week of unused comp time from last year that rolled over into this one. Counting weekends, that puts me at 23 consecutive days off, at the end of which I either come back to work or pass go on my way to the unemployment line, where i'll probably collect about 200 dollars. Weekly.
As I've said previously, I'm not horribly concerned about the prospect of being unemployed. I've been laid off before when an almost identical crisis hit another production company for which I worked. I was able to survive a solid 3-4 months that time while looking for work. I don't imagine I'll be unemployed nearly that long this go 'round, as I'm in an area where there's more work, and I've got a much stronger resume than last time. The point, though, is that I've been there before, and I know I can weather the storm if I have to.
In the meantime, however, I still have to figure out how I'm going to spend my vacation. Considering the very likely unemployment that follows, I can't really justify taking a real holiday and traveling. It doesn't make sense to spend what little savings I've got. I've got short trips planned to see Tracy's family in Maine, and my family in North Central PA, and I'm going to try to do a 4-5 day hike somewhere in there as well. Spring is the perfect time to go get lost in the woods. The weather's nice but not sweaty hot, things are blooming and the woods are waking up, and the real kicker: the bugs aren't out yet.
Even so, all of this will only account for about twelve of my twenty-three days of vacation. What will I do with the remaining eleven? I'll probably spend a lot of it in Philadelphia, bumming around in the parks, writing resumes, relearning the banjo, and otherwise trying to spend my time without spending much money.
Fortunately, I've got an ace up my sleeve: Top Gear. My favorite television show of all time, and you've probably never heard of it. It's from the UK, and though we get watered-down, heavily edited versions of it on BBC America, you aren't really getting the full effect unless you can watch the original BBC2 broadcast version. That's not easily done here in the States, where the show was never released on DVD. If it had been, I'd currently own every last scrap of it. You can get seasons 10-12 on iTunes if you were patient enough to wait for them (I wasn't), but it seems nobody's made any attempt to get seasons 1-9 into the hands of the American public. The only real way to get your hands on them, then, without buying a region 2 encoded DVD player, a PAL television, and all the DVDs from Europe is to get the torrents. Which I've done. Am doing. I've had my computer on for the past week straight, downloading the each season separately via peer to peer sharing. It's taking forever because there aren't a lot of people sharing old television, but I'm finally starting to see results. I've got seasons 2, 7-9 currently, and should probably have seasons 1,3, and 5 by week's end. That leaves just seasons 4 and 6, which, ironically, are the two seasons that feature the Mazda MX-5 (my current car). But hey, even without seasons 4 and 6, I should have a good 60 hours of Top Gear to keep me entertained in the quiet evenings of my un-holiday.
Thank God for small miracles...
That's when my mandatory vacation starts. I've got a 2 weeks of vacation and a week of unused comp time from last year that rolled over into this one. Counting weekends, that puts me at 23 consecutive days off, at the end of which I either come back to work or pass go on my way to the unemployment line, where i'll probably collect about 200 dollars. Weekly.
As I've said previously, I'm not horribly concerned about the prospect of being unemployed. I've been laid off before when an almost identical crisis hit another production company for which I worked. I was able to survive a solid 3-4 months that time while looking for work. I don't imagine I'll be unemployed nearly that long this go 'round, as I'm in an area where there's more work, and I've got a much stronger resume than last time. The point, though, is that I've been there before, and I know I can weather the storm if I have to.
In the meantime, however, I still have to figure out how I'm going to spend my vacation. Considering the very likely unemployment that follows, I can't really justify taking a real holiday and traveling. It doesn't make sense to spend what little savings I've got. I've got short trips planned to see Tracy's family in Maine, and my family in North Central PA, and I'm going to try to do a 4-5 day hike somewhere in there as well. Spring is the perfect time to go get lost in the woods. The weather's nice but not sweaty hot, things are blooming and the woods are waking up, and the real kicker: the bugs aren't out yet.
Even so, all of this will only account for about twelve of my twenty-three days of vacation. What will I do with the remaining eleven? I'll probably spend a lot of it in Philadelphia, bumming around in the parks, writing resumes, relearning the banjo, and otherwise trying to spend my time without spending much money.
Fortunately, I've got an ace up my sleeve: Top Gear. My favorite television show of all time, and you've probably never heard of it. It's from the UK, and though we get watered-down, heavily edited versions of it on BBC America, you aren't really getting the full effect unless you can watch the original BBC2 broadcast version. That's not easily done here in the States, where the show was never released on DVD. If it had been, I'd currently own every last scrap of it. You can get seasons 10-12 on iTunes if you were patient enough to wait for them (I wasn't), but it seems nobody's made any attempt to get seasons 1-9 into the hands of the American public. The only real way to get your hands on them, then, without buying a region 2 encoded DVD player, a PAL television, and all the DVDs from Europe is to get the torrents. Which I've done. Am doing. I've had my computer on for the past week straight, downloading the each season separately via peer to peer sharing. It's taking forever because there aren't a lot of people sharing old television, but I'm finally starting to see results. I've got seasons 2, 7-9 currently, and should probably have seasons 1,3, and 5 by week's end. That leaves just seasons 4 and 6, which, ironically, are the two seasons that feature the Mazda MX-5 (my current car). But hey, even without seasons 4 and 6, I should have a good 60 hours of Top Gear to keep me entertained in the quiet evenings of my un-holiday.
Thank God for small miracles...