Well, I am off for the rest of the year – short as that may be. I normally don’t really care about Xmas vacations, but in about November 2004 I was urged to give a plan of all my vacations for the coming year. And I put in 2 weeks around Christmas.

As these vacations approached, I considered postponing them and taking the days into 2006. But I quickly decided that I really need a break anyway. So I said “screw it” and took the time off anyway.

So, I’ll have to do on call duty for the semi-weekly [Fliegenpreise](http://www.fliegenpreise.de) tomorrow, and finish setting up our new mail6 sometime early in the week, but I can do that from home at my own pacing now.

Yay for me.

Going to restart learning languages this fall. One thing is pretty certain: French. My boss agreed to pay for the courses, as we’re getting some Belgian and French customers. So I have to take the opportunity.

The other course I wish to take, if I can find the time and there is no conflict of schedules, is, of course, Japanese.

Let’s see how difficult that language really is.

These past weeks have been crazy. No, no details. I finally get to take part in a nice project – and it’s only a 30% job. Bah. I notice, however, that I am in serious need of vacation. This may sound dumb or something, but I feel very, very burnt-out. Doesn’t help that for the past 1.5 years I bought virtually nothing geeky with my hard-earned cash.

HR discovered there was a bug with my time track profile. In short, I didn’t have any of the normal limits set. I am not sure how many hours my boss will have to get me back after they’re done with it. For November alone it should be 7.5 hours. Right now I have 3 over the limit of 40. That means: December 2003 is the first month I got over 50 hours of accumulated overtime. I try to keep my overtime in check. Really, I try. But it’s simply impossible.

Got home past 9pm on two days; took pretty much no lunch break all week (yeah, yeah, I know, I know, that’s illegal. If anybody asks: I am spending my lunch break on my way home). Had two days of serious arguments with my boss and coworkers this week. This adds a lot to the burnout. I hate it. I guess in the end neither they nor I were completely right. As I said, I need a break.

Ah, what a joke. I arrived at work at 8:20 am yesterday (Friday) and got out of work at… you guessed it… 8:20 pm – That’s twelve hours later. A mail problem kept me occupied for the greater part of the day, and when 30000 users aren’t receiving their email, the pressure to put aside the things you really want to do on the same day is relatively high.

Still, my boss and I managed to fix the problem (hey, we’re a good team, hehe) and I think I got pretty much everything done that I had to get done before my vacations. Except buying tickets: When I left at 8:20 I really wanted to catch the bus; the alternatives were either to wait another hour (no way) or to talk to the nearest subway station (20 minutes on foot, no way either).

I wanted to check how much overtime I had put in this week, but the terminal we use to check our time balances was broken. I really don’t remember the exact times… but I think it was something like 10-12h for the week. I haven’t done that much overtime in quite a while. Not that I mind, it was necessary and at least I can feel really good about not working for two weeks now. Still, such long hours do have disadvantages. I didn’t manage to go shopping for food once this week, so I have absolutely nothing left at home. The stores open in about three and a half hours and I’ll probably be one of the first in line today. Also, when I work for 12h and then get home, I really do not have much energy left in me to do anything meaningful. On most nights, I just read some news and email, and dropped off to deep slumber. I did manage to test a few new computer games but not very thorough.

And don’t even think I had time for my website re-implementation project.