The Beach Slum

         I have a job that doesn't necessarily do the best with PTO. It's not their fault, really. They laid off four people from my department leaving us with three, so the three are overworked. Even more now because I broke my foot and there's no such thing as light duty at my job. PTO is difficult but when we travel for our job and come back, we get days off on the back end. There's been times where I've done two trips in a row, and have had two weeks off at the end of it.     The entire time I've been working with my company, I was under the impression this would be the way to travel. When I first interviewed, they told me each trip gets a day off. When I was hired, this policy was gone. So the day off was nixed. I go somewhere, do my job from sun up to sun down, fall asleep in a hotel room, and repeat that for 11 days.     My point is that with my job, I was using the weirdness of not getting PTO as an excuse to not travel. I had time wi...

      Okay, I'll admit it. I let this blog slide when I got in my car accident. And I stand by doing that, because that was super traumatic and I'll still cry about it when I think about it for too long, but it just reminded me that life is really for the living, and if I wait forever for the right moments to live, I'll find myself old and regretful.     Holy run-on sentence, Batman.     So this is going to change into what it always should've been. This is going to be a blog solely about the beaches and my time at them. My time traveling to them and what they're like, with ratings. I turned it into a car one because I happened to be going to beaches with my car, but really the heart of this blog is the beaches.     I'm in graduate school for my master's in creative nonfiction-- not that you'd know it from my very casual spelling and grammar here-- and part of what I'm learning is that I let my own internal insecurities hold myself back. I le...