The place where I work is making me spend the week and a half of vacation I'd saved up now, because we're switching to a new vacation system for the next fiscal year (and I'm sure this helps their bookkeeping), so this is the first of many days off for me.

This doesn't actually disrupt much: even with the holidays over I hadn't yet settled into a winter routine.

Part of the problem has been balance. I like hanging out with my Lost buddies every Tuesday, but we haven't found a show that's engaging enough to get together for every single week. (Or rather we have, and it's Fringe, but they aren't caught up yet.) I like going to the bars maybe once a week for a cheap happy hour, but my usual drinking buddy Barry is only free on Fridays, the absolute worst day to go out to our local.

And I like playing boardgames — I love playing Last Night on Earth — but finding four other people who want to play can be pretty hard.

(Last weekend I was desperate to play some zombies again and so despite my (somewhat absurd) misgivings about being around so many randoms, I ended up going to a game night hosted by some of Rae's friends. Unfortunately I forgot to explain a key rule and my zombies beat the heroes narrowly and unfairly... so I may have ruined my chances of playing LNoE with that group in the future.)

I don't expect to fall into any reasonable pattern now, with so many lazy days stretching out before me, but one of things I really got into in 2010 was boardgames, particularly cooperative ones, and my experience so far has been that I'll need to spread that around between multiple social groups in order to play the amount I want to.

I mentioned in my last post that I actually met some new people last year and part of the reason why I decided to play Introvert About Town was my inability to coordinate enough people to do practically any of the stuff I love often enough, to balance everything out to my satisfaction.

Right now I want to be playing zombies every week, and in the spring I'll want to hit the patios, and weather permitting I'd like to have a fire every weekend this fall. You need people for that stuff and I need a variety so that I don't get burned out or try to strangle anyone. Once this year gets started in earnest and I have a more-or-less routine "Lost" Night and a "Girls" Night and a "Bros" Night like I did last year, I'll have to figure out where everything is going to go.

In the meantime though: I'm on vacation, everyone is at work during the day, and I have all the time in the world to try and get fun stuff organized. It looks like I'll escape my least favorite month relatively unscathed.