Careful What You Wish For

Whenever I get too disappointed about something minor, I remember The Nacho Cheese Incident and think about karma.

The NCI occurred several years ago. I was on my way home and stopped at Taco Bell for a Nachos Supreme with no sour cream. And they gave me a Nachos Supreme with sour cream. This makes the dish inedible for me, so I asked them to fix it. I checked that the next one didn't have white and headed for home. When I pulled out the nachos, not only did it not have sour cream, they'd also left off the nacho cheese. By this point I was tired and hungry and cranky and didn't want to fight 8 minutes of traffic to go the 2 miles and fix a $1.59 food item, so I ate it, wallowing in misery, and complained bitterly. I wanted my nacho cheese, dammit!

The following day was my regular day to help out a local charity by driving leftover school cafeteria food to a homeless shelter. I'd been doing this for several months and felt pretty good about it. The cafeteria had added a taco bar that often had leftovers. Along with the student volunteer, I loaded up tubs of soup, taco fixings, leftover mashed potatoes and whatnot in the hatch of the '85 Nissan Stanza to make the trip of just a few blocks. When we arrived to unload the food, we found that the nacho cheese had tipped over, spilling roughly a gallon of it into the carpet of my car. Apparently my plea for nacho cheese went into the ether, and rebounded with a vengeance.

We had winter holiday shutdown at work. It was just shy of two weeks. I'd taken a couple days off the previous week to go to San Fran, came back and worked 2 days, then got 12 days off. On the rare occasions that I get 2 weeks off from work (Sept 2006 with a trip to Italy was the last), I come back feeling like I've had a month off. With the parents visiting and one thing and another, this was a nice vacation, but despite one long weekend and nearly two weeks, it felt like I'd only been out for a long weekend.

We found out today. I'll get another shot at feeling like I get a month off. I'll be off from March 14 - 28. Apparently the market is still playing it safe and orders are there, but they're all conservative. I'm not annoyed about having 2 weeks off. I can handle it. But I had been hoping to take a vacation in June - going to Alaska for the solstice or thereabouts. March in Alaska doesn't really hold the same appeal, I have to say. So while I'm still going to try and figure out how I can swing Alaska, it probably means unpaid vacation in March. And I need to figure out somewhere else to go. Boston in March is not so wicked awesome, weather wise. It's possible I could get to Hawaii, but I think this might coincide with spring break, driving prices up. Also available are driving tour of southwest and Grand Canyon, SCUBA trip to carribean, and Minnesota for mom's birthday. I'm not convinced that I want to drive all that by myself, the spring break thing could be an issue, and Minnesota is only marginally better than Alaska in March.

Also, very soon, I have to figure out when to get my nose and tosil surgery. I'm kind of feeling like I don't want to blow my shutdown time on recovery and I'm impatient to see if it helps. So I'm hoping to do that early february. Which would be about a week from now, eit!

It also occurs to me that if my vacation coincides with spring break, I could do some volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity somewhere that is not here. (I have no objection to helping my neighbors, I just need to vacation away from my condo. San Diego would work, as long as I find somewhere not-here to sleep.) After listening to the call for service from my new president, perhaps this volunteer vacation is the way to go.

So if you can help me figure out what to do with my time off (or want to travel somewhere with me), sing out. I'm looking for ideas. The crazier the better. Or vote for one or more of the above.