Feast or famine. That’s how Ryan and I describe the popularity of the cardio equipment at our gym. There are either a ton of people running on the treadmills or peddling away on the ellipticals or absolutely no one is using the machines.
Today the gym was d-e-a-d.
I figured it must be some kind of a holiday weekend or something, so when I got home and looked at my calendar and saw that Monday is Columbus Day it all made sense again.
I’m assuming those who are lucky enough to have Monday off work are capitalizing on the situation and taking a four-day vacation. Or people were just sleepy today!
Speaking of holidays, I remember receiving my college’s academic calendar when I was a freshman at UCF. I went through my planner, marking off which days we had off from school. When I stumbled upon Casimir Pulaski Day, I was surprised to see that we didn’t have it off!
When I asked one of my professors about it, she looked at me like I was a total nut job. (I totally felt like Dupree from You, Me and Dupree asking about Columbus Day.)
Apparently the special day honoring this Polish commander is only recognized as a holiday in Illinois where I grew up! (Sadly, I’m not sure most Illinois students have Pulaski Day off from school any more, either.)
Speaking of holidays, this will be the first year that Ryan doesn’t have the best holiday vacation policy ever. At his previous job, his company gave the employees the week before Christmas through New Year’s Day off from work (two weeks!), and that was on top of their previously allotted vacation time. Unreal, right?
And that was officially the longest tangent ever.
Breakfast
What a yummy creation!
I made a delicious batch of Greek yogurt pancakes by blending the following ingredients with an immersion blender:
- 1 cup old fashioned oats
- One 6-ounce cup strawberry banana Chobani Greek yogurt
- 1 tablespoon coconut oil
- 1 egg white
The texture wasn’t fluffy like typical pancakes, but more doughy and thick.
As I was blending the ingredients, the batter was super thick, so I was unsure how the pancakes would turn out, but I was pleasantly surprised. I’m sure the texture of the pancakes isn’t for everyone since they’re not super fluffy, but both Ryan and I liked them a lot!
For those of you who have avoided making my pumpkin protein pancakes or banana bread protein pancakes because they include cottage cheese (which I promise you cannot taste), I’ve heard back from readers who have substituted Greek yogurt for the cottage cheese and said that it worked perfectly.
Time to be productive!
Question of the Afternoon
- What is the vacation policy like at your work? Good? Bad?
At my previous three jobs, it seemed standard to have around 12 days off every year. My last job gave employees 12 days off a year, but then you also had four sick days. You could not use sick days for “personal” reasons which I thought was silly. I felt like it encouraged employees to be dishonest about being sick since, if you never actually got sick during the year and didn’t use your four sick days, you would just lose four free days off from work at the end of the year.
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LOVE Casmir Pulaski! I work in a school district in the northern suburbs of Chicago and we still get it off. Thank you Pulaski for whatever it is you did!! =D
I could go for the holiday policy at Ryan’s old job! Right now, I get 15 days vacation, 5 sick days, and 1 personal day a year. Plus, this year, 9 paid holidays. It all adds up! That’s 30 days in all!
I moved to chicago last year and remember hearing about Pulaski day. I was so confused as to why the buses were so empty and I found out it was because a lot of public workers had the day off! My law school didn’t get the day off, but I think public schools may have. Either way, I’d definitely never heard of it before!
yeah for casimir pulaski! i grew up in IL, and always that off from school. I live in Seattle now and am sure ppl would look at me like a nut job if i mentioned pulaski day, haha.
I’m a teacher, so summers off– which mens spending all day in school, just not teaching, preparing for the next year….
My job isn’t very strict about holidays. I coach gymnastics so anytime there’s no school; there’s no work 🙂 & we get paid for it! I can only imagine how much teachers love that perk as well ha. During winter vacation we have like 3 weeks of paid vacation as long as you show up the day before break and the day after. That’s like every teenagers dream!
I get 15 vacation days + most of the holidays. At my last job, though I had 25 days off + the week between Christmas & New Year’s AND all the other holidays. It was glorious. Sometimes I think that can be a bigger benefit than a higher salary!
I’m curious about your choice of coconut oil. I keep coming across it more and more in the media. Does it make your food taste like coconut? Is it the same calorie count as canola?
I’m still in pharmacy school so we get all the holidays off, gotta love that month over christmas and new years!
When I will be working as a pharamacist soon, we will actually have to work holidays like thanksgiving, christmas eve, and christmas depending on how busy your store is. The hours are shorter so you can usually par take in most festivities, but it kills me to think that I might have to miss, or at least rearrange my kids opening presents from santa bc I have to go to work. Crazy right?
Yum! I actually made the Banana Bread Protein pancakes this morning and I was a little apprehensive since I have not had the best of luck with protein pancakes. I made the batter last night and then this morning just cooked them in the pan. They were soooooo good!!! I can’t get over how yummy they are for being so healthy and filling too!
I always thought America had a ‘work to live’ approach whereas here in England it is very much “live to work” – (so it seems any way!) – I hope you get the gist!
I’m entitled to 21 days paid holiday a year and you can have up to 7 days paid sick leave I think.
We also have paid time off for all the bank holidays (around 6 per year) and usually a week off for Christmas :o)
I am a stay at home mom/freelance writer/actress/comic. What’s a vacation again?
That’s funny that your work had that policy about sick days. Isn’t a sick day a personal reason anyways? : )
Those pancakes look great! Haha excellent creation 🙂
So there is a song by Sufjan Stevens called Casimir Pulaski day about a girl and I always thought the girl’s name was Casimir Pulaski, even though they totally mention the beginning of March and the album is called “Come On Feel the Illinoise!” So funny that I had it wrong this whole time 🙂
Those pancakes look so good!! I love your blog! Hope you guys have a great weekend:)
My company was recently acquired and the vacation policy is pretty standard for our area, but the ridiculous thing is that they don’t give you the day after Thanksgiving off. You have to use PTO for it. I’ve never worked at a company that didn’t just give it to you.
Those pancakes look so fluffy! 🙂
My work holiday policy is pretty good! We usually get the day before Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving off. We usually get the day before Christmas off.
I’m a teacher, so I get off for all of the holidays the kids have (not Columbus Day though; we have in-service). In addtion we get 3 personal days a year + 10 sick days a year. Of the 3 personal days, you can only carry over 1 to the next year, but you can carry over all 10 sick days. Then, you can use the sick time towards maternity leave. By the time I have a kid, I plan to have TONS of time saved up!
Can’t wait to try those pancakes!
I’m a NICU nurse so there are pros and cons of our vacation policy! We accrue PTO every paycheck so essentially you can have as much as 25 “PTO” days off. However, since we only work three-12 hour days a week, it’s easy to get time off for long periods of time and use minimal amounts of your PTO. For instance, I can schedule myself for Sun, Mon, Tues of one week, take 3 days of PTO the next week, schedule myself for Thurs, Fri, Sat of the following week and have 15 days off but only use 3 days of PTO. Kind of confusing, but nice.
Downside…we’re not allowed to take vacation from Thanksgiving Day all the way to New Years Day and we’re required to work at least one major holiday—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and the day before and after of one major.
Oh my gosh, I totally want pancakes for lunch now!! They’re my favorite food but I never have time to make them other than on the weekends.. I still want to try your protein pcakes recipe, but I usually jsut use my family’s top secret one. 😉
My old company (today’s my last day!!!) had a pretty good leave policy, and my new company’s is ever better- 16 days! I would love to have two wks for Xmas, too!
ps. FINALLY updated my blog address to go to my domain- thanks again for your help with all the bloggy questions!
kids in chicago definitely still get pulaski day off!! at least where i live 🙂
Yom Kippur starts tonight so people are probably preparing for the high holiday..unless your area isn’t very Jewish than it probably is because of Columbus Day
I have no vacation days at my job(I’m an independent contractor) so if I’m not at work, I’m not getting paid!
When I was in grad school in SC, we had Confederate Memorial Day as a holiday!!
Casimir Pulaski represent! Yeah we still totally have it off here. I go to Wisconsin now and was shocked that no one had heard of CP day! I’m pretty sure most IL schools still get it off 🙂
Regular employees at my job get 12 and 12. The 12 sick days roll over, and you can save those to pay towards retirement if you’re here for long enough. Awesome!
As for Pulaski day… Chicago-area kids do still get the day off. They just call it Institute day now! LAME. Clearly the same day, they just had to be politically correct.
I work at a University and gets lots of vacation time, 15 hours per month I get to accrue. Then we get off all the major holidays including 2 days at Thanksgiving, a day at spring break, christmas eve through new years day which is fabulous as Ryan can attest too. I think it is the next best vacation time to a teacher. I love it.
I get 15 days, plus 10 holidays (New Years Day, MLK Day, Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and that Friday, Christmas Eve and Day (depending on where they fall – if one or both are on a weekend, we get that Friday/Monday/Both, and if they’re in the middle of the week, we get that Monday or Friday off, whichever is closer), 1/2 day Fridays, and I get the stupid Boston-only holidays (Patriots Day, though not Bunker Hill Day…yet!). And, my boss doesn’t count sick days toward my vacation. AND, when he’s on vacation, I work 1/2 days.
I just realized that being the only employee is like being an only child. I’m so freakin’ spoiled!
I work for the federal government, and (lucky me!) we have a really generous leave policy. I earn four hours of annual leave and four hours of sick leave every two weeks, which is 13 days of each kind per year. We also get 10 federal holidays off each year. I can’t wait til I hit my 3 years of employment mark in a few months because I’ll start earning 6 hours of annual leave every two weeks, then when I finally hit 15 years of service, I’ll earn a whopping 8 hours per two weeks.
I know this is soooo fascinating (not), but hey, it is a really nice benefit to working in the public sector. My husband works in the private sector and gets less than half the leave I get. Boooo.
I also love how the cardio machines are completely swarmed right after Thanksgiving, Christmas, & then the first month of January. We always make sure to go to the gym in the mornings then since so many people go at night.
I love baking with greek yogurt, I always sub it for the sour cream in coffee cake, so I bet it’s great in pancakes.
At my office we earn 10% of hours worked as vacation time, with a max earn of 4 hrs a week. It sounds like a lot, but that counts as our sick time, holidays off and vacation days.
I have never heard of Pulaski Day! I’ve never even seen it on a calendar!
I get tons of vacation hours at my work, but I’ve only taken maybe a week of vacation this whole year. I just never think to put in the time off!
Ryan’s old vacation schedule sounds amazing! Last year I ended up working on every single major holiday. The holiday pay was great, but I guess one of the downsides to working at a hospital is that there has to be staff there every day, whether it’s Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Years or not!
Julie it’s the Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend! I live in Ottawa and am soooo excited to be home from school for some turkey time 🙂
ohh! happy thanksgiving! how fun!
The husband gets the week between Christmas and New Year’s off, I love it!! I’m a stay at home mom, I would give my right arm for a sick or personal day 😉
aww! maybe when your husband has some time off you can “call in sick” for the day!
Of course!!! He’s usually really good about me taking some me time to get away for a little bit 🙂
I think Pulaski day is just the Chicago area, because of its high Polish population. I miss it. Plus I grew up in a large Jewish community, so we had all those holidays off as well. I miss having all those days off.
I get 3 weeks but that is for everything except holiday. It’s ok but I do wish I had more!
The vacation policy for my department is pretty sweet, it helps that I work at a college. I am a 10 month employee so I get two months off in the summer, I typically work July. Right now I have 15 vacation days, next year I will have 20. This year the college has a three week December/January break because of how the holidays fall and we get the week in between Christmas and New Year Day and the Monday after as Holiday Days.
The one bad vacation policy about where I work is that you cannot use vacation days, except for really important reasons, any time other than finals week and break weeks.
I guess you would say that I survive!
Ohh those pancakes look good! And so easy to make! Yum! That’s so funny about the holiday! I’ve never heard of it! When I went to school in LA we used to get Cesar Chavez day off which was always a perk! But now in the working world I only get the major holidays off! That sounds amazing that Ryan’s job did that! Bummer he won’t have that policy anymore 🙁
Your place mat is SOCUTE. It’s cool that at my job you get a wk of PTO after 6 months with the company, and it goes up to 2 wks after 1 year. But then it takes another 5 years to get another week off!
Ah yes, that is true we do have the best vacation policy every. And I dont know about the site that Ryan was at, but we also have every other Friday off 🙂 Long weekends every other week and 2 weeks off for Christmas is pretty sweet. Tho they do make us work pretty damn hard in between to make up for it!
Also, I’m from Poland and I’m jealous that you had Pulaski day off!! Must be because Illinois has the largest Polish population outside of Poland! Very cool, I never knew that!
My husband and I work for ourselves so we can take off whatever days we want. I’m so happy and grateful for this! We usually end up taking a good 20+ vacation days off, as well as only working an hour or so when we have family/friends visiting from out of town! It’s such a relief not having to worry about scheduling vacation days and what not! I’m sure you will come to see working for yourself has some seriously amazing advantages! 🙂
My family owns our company so I kinda designed the policy myself 😉 We each have a week of vacation, plus an additional 4 days for sick days. Of course, this is on top of the Dec-Jan-Feb we are closed for winter (landscaping company!) I kinda like my schedule 🙂
I am both shocked and sad at this post. Shocked to see how the majority of businesses are giving their employees a generous amount of PTO, and sad that I definitely got the short end of the stick this time around.
I’ve been at an advertising agency for 9 months now and they don’t give any PTO in your first year. We the get standard 9 federal holidays and after a 90-day probation period we get 1/2 a day each month for sick/personal but they don’t accrue. There’s been talk we might have the week off between Christmas and New Years, but this would be considered my “bonus” for the year.
Luckily, I’ve been able to take some days here and there but they are all unpaid. I’ve taken 1 sick day this whole year which they did pay me, but I really do wish we had some more leeway.
BTW Julie, I’d love to see a post on your thoughts about starting up as a freelance writer. I’ve been considering this for a while and would love to see your take on this career shift! 🙂
oh my gosh, that’s awful! i hope your hours aren’t crazy! work/life balance is so important. i hope you get the week of christmas and new years off!
I have a pretty good vaca policy…10 days vacation, 4 personal days and three sicks days. I also get off from Christmas Eve until the day after New Years. It’s pretty sweet! I hate my job though, so I’m not sure it’s really worth it 🙂
Those strawberry banana chobani pancakes look delish! I’ll have to make those tomorrow. Our vaca policy is pretty standard – we get the basic offs (excluding Columbus Day). Speaking of that holiday, I saw the funniest pic on someecards.com about it ~ the card read: “Lets celebrate Columbus Day by walking into someone’s house and telling them we live there now”
Mine is pretty good. I get 2 weeks vacation & 1 week sick/personal and 10 holidays. I work in tax, so any overtime we work during tax season we can either take it as extra vacation time or we get paid for it on December 31. So basically I end up with about 9 or 10 weeks of vacation thanks to all those 70 hour work weeks 🙂 It’s October and I still have over 4 weeks left to use!
I think Jeff works for the same company Ryan used to — in fact, one of the big things in the pro column for changing programs and moving up here was getting that sweet 9/80 schedule (which we are thoroughly enjoying).
I also was VERY confused when we moved from Chicago to Oklahoma and I no longer had Pulaski day off. No one believed it was a legitimate holiday; I guess they just don’t care about Polish Revolutionary War heroes anywhere else.
My last company had a wonderful vacation policy (as they should have, considering it was a vacation ownership company), but now that I’m doing freelance and contract work I find it’s really hard to totally disconnect and actually take time off. We’re going on vacation soon and while I’ve got everything lined up and taken care of, there’s a part of my brain that knows there’s no such thing as paid vacation anymore and doesn’t like it much!
I used to have Columbus Day off, but I don’t anymore 🙁
Maybe the greek yogurt made them very thick?? If you add more liqued it might thin them out!
I think we have 15 vacation days, plus 4 sick days, and 3-4 “personal” days. I’m not really sure that it’s actually all kept track of, but we do work long days (although I work from home) so we sort of make up for it. This is by far the best vacation days package I’ve had at a company.
Hee I love your tangents 😉
I used to have an awesome work vacation policy…we had one like Ryan’s with the week between Xmas and New Year’s off, along with our other holidays. Now I just get the usual holidays off, but not Columbus Day! 🙁
I still live in Illinois. They started Casmir Pulaski day when I was in high school. Where my kids go to schoool they call it Casmir Pulaski day as a day off but if we’ve already had a snow day then we use that to make up a snow day to help not extend the end of the year anymore than they need.