What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

Every year the residents of this St. Catharines, Ontario road go all-out with the Christmas decorations. The street’s actual name is Rio Lane but it will always be Griswald Avenue to me.

I know what you must be thinking… “We’re into June and HoaiPhai is just getting around to doing his Christmas post-game show. He must have had one hell of a vacation!” The short answer to that question, which if you were paying attention you would have realized wasn’t even a question in the first place, is “yes and no”.

Gone are the days when I’d go to a New Year’s Eve party and sometime around the middle of February wake up in a ditch penniless and hungover with a new crop of cold sores and my pants on backwards. This Christmas wasn’t one for the record books in that sense but, hey, I only got two extra days off work this year.

What I Did on My Staycation: Part II

I stuck pretty close to home during the last leg of my 2012 Staycation.

For those of you just joining us, this is the third part (even though the title says “Part II” — the real first part was “The Prologue”) of my nine-day staycation tale! It’s the last one, I promise.

This instalment deals with what I did after Mrs. HoaiPhai’s family got on a plane and headed to California to begin Phase III of their own vacation.

What I Did on My Staycation: Part I

Ahh… it’s so nice to get a little time off work!

For those of you just joining us, this is the second part (even though the title says “Part I” — the real first part was “The Prologue”) of my nine-day staycation tale! Don’t worry, what I mean to say is that the staycation was nine days in duration and not that it will take you nine days to read this post. It is, however, a fairly lengthy post so you might want to take a sick day off work on Monday if you don’t make it all the way through this weekend.

In a nutshell, my wife’s sister, her sister’s husband, and their granddaughter came from Korea and stay with us for five days. There… you’re pretty much up to speed but should you want to get completely up-to-date, check out “What I Did on My Staycation: The Prologue“, a fairly quick read.

What I Did on My Staycation: The Prologue

This weekend will mark the beginning of my nine-day staycation! Just in case you’ve never heard this word before, “staycation” is a portmanteau of “stay” and “vacation”… you stay at home for your vacation. Get it?

I’m really looking forward to this for two reasons. First, this will be the first time off from work I’ve taken since 2009 — no vacations, no sick days, no statutory holidays (except I had four days off last Christmas, two of which were my regular weekend days off anyway), and lots of overtime. Some weeks in addition to my regular 40 hours I’ve filled in for others who went on vacation or left the company before management found someone to replace them. I also work weird hours so my staycation will mean that for nine glorious days I’ll be able to eat and sleep at regular times with my wife, who is also taking a little staycation time off from her job.