Behind Blue Eyes: Let the Rejoicing Begin!

My company has this lovely "extended leave" program where, after 6 years working at the company, you get a chunk of time for which you can take a big long break from working. Depending upon what level you are at the company, you get an additional four to six weeks of time off. They give you two years to take the time - which you can do all at once or spread out over the two years, as with vacation time - and at the end of the two years they cash out whatever time you have left.

I was eligible to take my leave last March and have spent some time pondering how best to use it. Do I hang onto it and then take a trip somewhere? Just use it as extra vacation and take it in chunks? What's the best plan? Well, due to my rather pathetic financial situation, saving for an expensive trek through Europe or some other kind of trip was just not something I could prioritize or justify. (Which is frightening, considering that in the past I could justify pretty much anything to excuse or explain my behavior!)

So what I finally decided was to take one day off a week for five (or so) months.

This plan was originally going to allow me to continue going to school and work part-time without losing any income, but after some soul-searching and financial assessment, I decided that taking on any more debt to go to school was a bad idea.

So, beginning tomorrow, my extended leave begins and for the next five months I'll be working Monday through Thursday and enjoying 3-day weekends!

My hope is to use this extra time to do something useful, however. I've been wanting to do some more programming and familiarize myself with Microsoft's application development platforms (i.e. .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Silverlight, etc.), so in addition to sleeping in on Friday mornings I'm going to be exploring those things and try to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. (And yeah, I know... it's Microsoft. But the reality is their development tools are used everywhere, and at my company in particular, so if I want to get a job in the field I'd better be at least somewhat familiar with these applications.)

Anyway, the web design stuff was a great starting place and I'm glad I have that background, but it's still not quite what I want to do. As my AA sponsor says, regardless of what I do I'll have more information afterwards. And that's exactly where I'm (still) at: I returned from Boston hoping to explore my interests, learn more about web design and other computer-centric careers and figure out what I liked, what I didn't and what I could happily (or at least, not miserably) spend 40+ hours per week doing.

And now I know that I like the geeky back-end coding stuff. I like figuring out how to make something work. I enjoy figuring out why something isn't working and what needs to happen to make it do what it should. My questions now are, in what capacity do I want to do these things, what opportunities are out there and what skills do I need to be successful in those jobs? That's what I'm hoping to think about over the next few months.

Now if I could only find some discipline!!