Out Of Office Reply...

I'll have use or lose leave (& a lot of it) for the very first time in my professional working career. 

It's about 100 or so hours (roughly 2 & a half weeks) of annual leave to burn, so I've been racking my brain trying to strategically pick the best days to stay home over the next 2 months. 

Now I know to plan/spread-out my annual leave, as best I can anyway, over the course of a year - that way I won't end up taking chunks of leave at the end of the year to avoid losing it. We're allowed to carry-over 240 hours of annual leave (pretty standard, I think), but clearly a staycation, at minimum, is now mandatory for me - noted.

In the past I've always made very good use (some supervisors might say too good use) of my accrued annual leave. Aside from taking a summer vacation, I took leave quite often during the other parts of the year & often times, for no reason at all. This year I used more 'slick' leave than usual, didn't take a vacation & now I earn more leave each pay period than I used to.

Granted, it's a good problem to have, especially for folks with kids & such, but not a super-huge benefit for me at the moment. I've taken additional leave for the obvious Thanksgiving & Christmas holidays, but the majority of days were selected arbitrarily. Looks like I'll have some extra me time, watching wonderful daytime television this fall, lol.