So, what are all you Gov't emplyees going to do on Thursday?

Daniel Dorn

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I know not everyone gets off for the Holiday in the middle of the week, but I'm faced with the dilema of deciding whether to take Friday off as well. Probably not this time...

Veterans day has a special place in my life due to family members being in the military. I was hoping to maybe make it one last hurrah before winter, and have a Bar-B-Que with some friends.

So, how many of you actually get a paid holiday for it? What are you going to do?

DD
 
The wife gets it off...court employee.
I don't :grumpy: Even worse, I have to do a fancy Italian dinner for fifty that night.
 
I'll probably drink coffee and stay up late the night before(something I cannot do normally, due to having to get up at O Dark30 for work). Thursday, I might get to sleep in a couple of extra hours before the Wife hands me a Honey-do list. I took Friday off too.
 
I don't have school, so I'll probably sit in my room brooding over the fact that they didn't give us Friday off too :D

Actually, I may visit my grandparents, and then it's back to the same-old-same-old.
 
My agency has a compressed work schedule and I get every othe Friday off in exchange for working 9 hours a day for the other 9 days in a two-week cycle. Last year and the year before, it seemed as if the Fridays off all fell on the weeks that had no holidays in them, but this year is different. I will be off on Thursday and Friday.
 
I am not a government employee, and do not get a day off. I will raise a glass to those who didn't make it home, one for those who did, and yet another for those whom the outcome is still uncertain. May God bring you home safely--
and watch your six!!!!
 
I dunno what I'm going to do yet. I haven't even decided yet whether I'm taking annual leave on Friday.
 
On every 11/11, I take a moment to remember at 11:11AM.
In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army
IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915. Here is the story of the making of that poem:
Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the South African War, it was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood here, and Major John McCrae had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime.

As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient.

It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it:

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."

One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.

The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.

In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.

A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. "His face was very tired but calm as we wrote," Allinson recalled. "He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave."

When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:

"The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene."

In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915.

Thanks to Mack Welford for reminding me of this great poem.

Updated: 11 September 2004
From http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm
 
after work I am going to go sit somewhere by myself and think about my friends that aren't coming home and later call the ones I served with that did and catch up on old times. Sad day for me, especialy since my birthday is the day before. :(
 
braddy said:
Most veterans will probably be working, while the government unions are off.
I know I will. I work for a small company (13 people) and four of us are Veterans but we'll be working while bank tellers and anti-military academics are taking the day off. I brought it up at my last review, since we're the majority of technicians here maybe there could be some kind of recognition even if we have to work. Heck, buy us a pizza or something. I guess we'll see in a couple of days if I made any impression...
 
I have Thursday off and I'm taking Friday as a vacation day. My Wife and I will be painting at least one if not two rooms in our house on Thursday and maybe a little on Friday. Then it's off to the mountains for the weekend.
 
FullerH said:
My agency has a compressed work schedule and I get every othe Friday off in exchange for working 9 hours a day for the other 9 days in a two-week cycle.

We also do the 9/80 schedule at the VA. I take every other Monday (today, as it happens). So, this week it's: work two days, take one off, work one day, take two off. Now that's a schedule I can live with!
 
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