Three Day Weekends, I Hardly Knew Thee

In the beginning of 2007, my company went through some changes, and determined that they needed to reevaluate the vacation policy.  Instead of being able to carryover five weeks from year to year, they would change it to one.  This meant that if you did not want to lose your vacation, you should start looking at ways to use it.  I rarely actually take vacation, so I had quite a bit saved up.  I managed to use some throughout the year, but not quite enough.  In September, I was faced with a whole lot of time left to take, and not many opportunities to take it.  Unfortunately, while taking off a month would have been nice, there is no logistical way that would work.  Instead, I decided that I would take off every Friday, and then a couple weeks around Thanksgiving and Christmas.  So for Oct-Dec I never worked more than four days a week.  The four day workweek, however, was not what I found to be so beneficial.  The extra day on the weekend was where I got my joy.  Instead of having one day to get things done, and one day to be lazy, I had two days of productivity and one day of relaxing.  I was able to get so much more accomplished, but still maintain a relaxing weekend.  Sadly, those times have come to an end.  I now have used my large backlog of vacation hours, and have to return to working on my Fridays.  It's not even the work that bugs me, it's not being able to get more done over the weekend, while still getting the same amount of rest.  I really need to work out some way of getting a three day weekend every week.  I was just getting used to it.