I saw the film "Tron" in a theatre back in the 80's because I had just started taking computer programming classes and it seemed a cute concept, the fellow trapped in a fantasy world within the CPU. Today, December 30, 2010, my place in whatever cyberspace ideas you care to have about the Los Angeles Unified School District, is being shifted to "retired" after my full time beginnings around Labor Day, 1972. Despite a cyptic mailing I received a few days ago, but that's a "local matter".

And speaking of holidays, I noticed the form for the vacation after which I worked for a short side of three weeks at a "purge" mandated location had this vacation ending at 12/29. Not to panic, today is the celebration of Presidents' Day for the year about to follow. Not to panic, but maybe to scratch the noggin.

My first few years in the District we non-teaching people worked the day after Thanksgiving, and with very little vacation to spend indeed I worked it then. Finally the unions got it for us, concessions forgotten by now. But in the turbulence of the public sector the Board has scrambled other holidays: We have mandatory vacation, now contaminated with furlough time, around these year enders and the aforementioned day to which to look forward in February before the long slog to Memorial Day, depending on how one handles Easter, was cleverly shoehorned in to where things are as of this posting.

So many of us wish the cleverness had extended to other things, but some of the tenses I used in the last paragraph have changed from "have" to "had", in retirement. You know, there may be a "Presidents' Day" in February for my, well, former employer's purposes and I forget what today is actually supposed to "be".

It doesn't matter as much now. It hardly matters at all.