If those employees had the option of donating their PTO to other employees (even those who normally are not eligible for PTO) how often you you suppose people would do this?

My mom's school district does this with leave. She may have availed herself of it when she had pneumonia, but I'm not sure of that. I do know she puts hours into the pool when there were others with major medical crises.

Walking around New York this week, I was thinking, they couldn't have held off on all the big Christmas decorations until next week?

I was gonna say, my PR station is having an overscheduling crisis tonight: Choral Arts Annual Xmas concert tonight, the first night of Hanukkah (they normally air special Hanukkah programming through the duration, and are still. Just later) AND the NPR democrat debates repeats (even later.)

I kinda would have preferred they run the Hanukkah programming earlier. It's more interesting to me (learn new things! Traditions and stories I haven't already heard my whole life!)

It's dark, snowing and twenty degrees out. Why did my husband think it a good idea to drag us all out to buy wood? Like seriosly far from our house. In the middle of nowhere.

Awesome photo of happy dog catching snowball: [link]

I am maxed out at 960 hrs sick leave. Can't do a damn thing with 'em. Except call in sick more often.

I don't know if we have a cap on sick leave. Regular vacation, yep, but I'm pretty good at using that up. Main contract gets 5 wks/year (ptui!) and some of those folk end up doing all sorts of weird schedules to avoid losing accrual (you can't cash in vaca for $ to burn it while an employee. But if you quit/leave, you do get the $. So it makes sense to avoid losing accrual. It's losing $$!)

I could *totally* find a way to use up 5 weeks/year vacation!

Yeah, we have people who hit the 320 hr vacation max accrual. I'm never close.

I get three weeks vacation, and I think we can carry over our annual amount (i.e., three weeks for me), so that shouldn't be a problem unless I stay for ten years. Which I won't.

I just made peanut butter cookies, but instead of doing the fork cross-hatch thing I mashed a miniature Reece's peanut butter cup into the center of each one.

Analysis: yum

We can go over 320, I think. I used to know this when I was more bitter about the differentials between contracts. Now I'm just resigned.

I don't know how much vacation we can accumulate. We can carry over 5 days to the next year, but we can put more in an accumulative account.

Okay, dig this. Those aren't scale models. Those are real, taken from helicopters. Makes me think further about the flaws when scale models are used to fake real size.

There's a technique for taking normal pictures to make them like scale models (or manipulating them in photoshop.) If I can find a link, I will.

Microbrew prices are about to go up like WHOA due to the hop shortage and malt/grain price increases- I fear that spending $10+ for a sixpack will soon be the norm. More than that, I fear that the insane ingredient price increases will put a lot of small breweries out of business.

Our microbrew six packs is already there, thanks to all our taxes.