I had almost two months of leave time saved up when I took my vacation last Thanksgiving.  Because I worked in two Institute holidays (Thanksgiving and the day after) those two weeks only subtracted fifty-six hours out of my accrued leave.  This end-of-year holiday season has two more official Institute holidays, Christmas and New Year.  So I signed up to take the two weeks between them off too, for another fifty-six hours down.  With the leave I accrued since Thanksgiving added in, plus the three discretionary holidays we get at the beginning of every new year, that still leaves me with slightly over four weeks of leave still in the bank. 

Don’t hate me…this job is the first one I’ve ever had that came with any sort of paid vacation time at all.  I was never all that openly gay back in my twenties and thirties, but I never hid it either.  The consequence of that was getting either fired or laid off when the powers that be found out they had a faggot in the ranks, which they inevitably did when my co-workers wised up to the fact that Bruce never talked about dating girls.  I never had to openly aknowledge my sexual orientation to catch shit for it.  And every time I hear some knuckle dragging jackass complain that they’d have nothing against gays if we’d only stop shoving it in their faces all the time I want to laugh in their face.  I went through decades doing just that and still got canned for being gay.  You can’t just keep it to yourself, you have to pretend to be heterosexual. 

So for decades the only work I could get was temp work and one-off stuff from people who were fine with giving me work under the table or as a contractor, so long as they could keep their staff one-hundred percent heterosexual.  My entire career as an architectural model maker was built around the realization that I could get all the work I wanted so long as I didn’t apply for a staff position anywhere.  But it got me comfortable with being self-employed and that was, in a way, a plus after all.   But I’ve had no benefits of any sort for most of my working life.  Which is why I know how it is out there, not to have health care unless I paid for it out of pocket, or sick leave, let alone paid vacation.  That was me throughout my twenties and thirties, and much of my forties.  Until I got the job at space telescope.  It’s taken me years to really believe I can take a vacation and still get paid.  Even now I am always asking myself if I can afford it.  Which is why I have so much accrued.

So I’m off for the rest of the year.  I might take a few small trips here and there locally, but not far, particularly if the weather gets all snow and icy.   And after Disney, I don’t really have any spare money for motels.  But the price of gasoline makes travel a lot more affordable then it was this summer, so I’ll probably go somewhere, possibly to Ocean City New Jersey for an overnight maybe.  Maybe to see a friend or two here and there.  But mostly this vacation will be the stay-at-home I was planning on doing last Thanksgiving, before a co-worker invited me to meet him and his family down at Disney World.  I can still feel the childhood delight I found again there.  And I got to see a certain someone again after thirty-five years, which was…wonderful.  But I-95 is not a good place to be during the holidays.  It seems like everyone on the East Coast dogpiles on it to get south this time of year.  I reckon it’s ether to see the retired folks down in Florida retirement land or the theme parks in Orlando, or maybe Key West, which was what I did last year.  I’m not doing it this year because Key West is almost as expensive as Disney World this time of year.  I kid you not.

I have a bunch of projects around the house I want to take care of in a not hurried pace.  And…a spaceship model I want to build.  I haven’t built a model in years and I’m really looking forward to getting the old tools out and starting to work on it.  And I need to get started on Episode 12 of A Coming Out Story.  It’ll be really nice to have the time to do some this-and-that stuff without the clock always nagging me.  Two weeks just to myself.   Yes, I’d trade it all in an instant for a lover.  I’d wash dishes the whole holiday season for a lover.  But fate doesn’t give us those choices and I can endure being single during the holidays on the afterglow of Disney World.  Smirk if you like, but I still have that Dreams-Can-Come-True-After-All feeling inside of me.  I’ve been waiting for it to slough off, I’ve been expecting it to, really, and it still hasn’t.  But there will be no Christmas tree this year.  Again.  It’s really no fun decorating one alone anymore.  I keep telling myself the next time I take the decorations out, there will be someone beside me.