Notes on riding in the cold

I was paying attention to myself a little more this morning, probably in response to Moshe's frostbite discussion yesterday. I'm just making some notes because sometimes people ask about winter cycling clothing when it's 90*F out, and I find thinking about what 0*F temps even MEAN when it's 90*F out as difficult to fathom as the concept of July is right now.
( warning; supercritical mass of boredom inside )

Well that's a relief

Yesterday I spent an hour spelunking on our HR website, trying to figure out A) how much vacation I had accrued, and B) how much vacation I get per month.

You'd think I'd know the latter, but honestly, I've never run my vacation down low enough that I couldn't take a week if I wanted it (I want a buffer in case of emergencies/sickness), so I never paid much attention. It's just this box that has days dropped in it by someone else, and there's always enough in there, so I didn't bother finding out.

A few years back they converted us from vacation days + sick days (separated) to a unified "Paid Time Off" - this was to unify all Thomson operations and blah blah blah, whatever.

Well, as of Jan 1, they moved us from Paid Time Off to vacation days + sick days (separated). This is to unify all Thomson operations and whatever whatever, babble babble. Yeah, sometimes they really Dilbert things around here.

Anyway, around xmas I had about 100 hours in the bank. I looked yesterday and I had 42 hours of sick time and 13 hours of vacation time. Shit! I said. WTF? I said. Then "ah, whatever. They're always screwing with stuff."

Then a while later I remembered that the payroll people have not been terribly capable of keeping track of vacation hours for several months now; there have been notices seemingly every payday for about 2 months saying "Oops, we screwed up a bunch of people's vacation hours, we'll fix it shortly."

Today my boss confirmed that yes, they bungled it, and it should be fixed soon.

I think I have something on the order of 5 to 7 weeks of vacation to fry up this year, before October. We need to plan; I can't take it all at once.

I'll probably eat a week or more just taking days off to catch up on springtime stuff; I want a bigger pond, and I want to do a bunch of the landscaping I've been thinking about, and as I proved a couple of years ago, if you're going to dig a pond, dig it during spring thaw when the ground is muddy, before it sets into concrete.