hell months

I come back to the office and get the bad news that the timeline I'd created for writing those two textbooks has to be thrown out. I won't be finishing by mid-March: according to the boss, that's when the books get distributed to our various schools. No: I must finish everything by the end of February. This two-week phase shift fucks my schedule completely, but it's not surprising. What bugs me is that, after rearranging my schedule to fit the new timeline, I see that I'm going to be spending the next two months doing back-to-back seven-day weeks. As I've told my boss, as I get older, I can't work faster: I can only work longer. By filling in my Saturdays and Sundays, I can make the new deadline, but just barely.

This is going to earn me an extra 120 comp-time hours; at this point, I still haven't used any of my actual vacation days. I doubt the boss will allow me three straight weeks of vacation (120 hours = three 40-hour weeks), but if I do get those three weeks, I want to try walking from Seoul to Busan along the Four Rivers Project trail (watch this slick video of a Canuck who biked that nearly 600-kilometer path in about three or four days*).

I expect to be thoroughly sick of the office come March 1. If the boss says no to giving me three weeks straight, I'll just take a long, long string of three-day weekends.

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*WARNING: the music track that the guy chose to accompany his adventure is obnoxious as hell, so hit "mute" while watching. You don't need to hear what he's saying; it's the visuals that he captured via GoPro helmet, bike mount, and drone mount that are important. As you'll see very clearly in the biker's video, Korea is surprisingly beautiful, especially to those of us who confine ourselves to Seoul.