UK. I get about 30 days plus bank holidays, pretty standard at my firm that people push it up to the max. Biggest perk I get is being able to work in between days off remotely, so I can be away for 3 weeks and work 5 days, so it would only cost me 10 days off. Its great for traveling.

Daughter is a teacher at a private school, she gets about 17 weeks or 85 days plus the 1 bank holiday that doesn’t fall inside school holidays. Thats after teacher training days, which are days the teachers have to be at school but the kids do not. I would kill for that allocation, but not the dealing with other peoples kids every day part.

Train Sim World, currently 5 but TSW updates are like FIFA or Madden so its not that different from previous versions. At least it was a free update.

Just driving a train around, especially if its somewhere I know is really relaxing. Really looking forward to the first Japanese route dropping sometime this year (hopefully).

I do like that you can chose to enable safety systems or not depending on if you want to play on easy mode or very easy mode. It has even less pressure than your average relaxed building game if you ignore the clock.

Downsides, steam engines are pretty bad in the game, I just don’t bother with them. Dovetail are pretty useless. Brand new routes are usually overpriced. Some of the routes are bad, really bad, or just plain boring. Very important to read reviews. Everything is DLC.

Upsides, there are frequent sales so if you stay away from the latest content it can be pretty cheap in comparison. If you get a route you like it has a fair amount of repeatability. Some of the DLC overlays nicely with other DLC.

Buying less and buying for life as a priority when choosing purchases. It’s had a knock on effect thst I try to buy bespoke from small artisans as they tend to be higher quality and it supports small businesses rather than megacorps.

This has influenced my entire idea of spending money:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”