slipping in a third week of vaycay

I've accumulated enough comp hours—66—to take eight business days off, so I talked with my boss about how I might handle my extra vacation. I floated the idea of taking the week between Christmas and New Year's Day off, and the boss is also letting me take this coming Friday off (alas, I'm doing a KMA gig on Saturday, but that's fine—more money for me*). So tentatively, my upcoming vacation is looking like this:

1. Friday, December 9 off. As McDonald's said: you deserve a break today.

2. December 23 off (Fri.), then December 26 to December 30 off (Mon.-Fri.), followed by January 2 (Mon.).

That's a total of eight business days off, i.e., 64 hours. That will leave me with 2 hours' comp time, which I'll likely build up again in January and February as I work on writing and editing Book 2B and Book 3B of our series. After that, there will be only Books 2C and 3C to do, and after that, we've got some other book projects in the pipe—one being a listening-skills companion to the series I'm working on, and another being a book that introduces philosophy to kids. That's a brave choice of topic, but I'm impatient to get to work on that.

The standard "corporate package" for most regular-Joe Korean jobs is two week's vacation (i.e., ten business days) plus national holidays. By earning myself eight days' comp time, I've basically given myself an extra week of vacation. Am looking forward to some rest.

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*I'd been paid W60,000/hour for my previous gig, at which only one person had shown up. This time around, I'm being paid W80,000/hour so that the two gigs average out to my usual W70,000. I thought it was very nice of KMA to take the hit, so to speak: they certainly didn't have to increase my hourly pay, but they did it, anyway. Another reason to love KMA.