Why Your Filipino VA Might Ask for a Week Off This April

The Philippines has four holidays this April. So in the last episode I talked about my family and we're having a holiday. We're going to Europe to ride our bikes. Kids are going to miss the last few days of school, and then we're taking our summer vacation and riding our bikes. On that note, the Philippines has four holidays this April. And I know that's a lot. That's why I'm talking about this early so you can be prepared for what's coming ahead. So the first holiday is the Day of Valor. And I'm gonna. I have no idea how to pronounce this, but I'm gonna read it to you. They call it Ara ng kagit kagetin. I don't speak Filipino, so I don't really know what I'm saying there. But Day of Valor Falls on April 9, which is Saturday. It's a regular holiday. So it's like a full. It's a normal day off of work where if someone's on salary, you still pay them for it. Holy Week then is in April this year. Maori Thursday is April 14, Good Friday, April 15. And those are also regular holidays. So that's holiday. I mean, as you're. When I release this episode, this is. There's one this week, there's two next week. And then Black Saturday, April 16th is a special holiday, which obviously that's still Saturday, which would normally be off, but. So the Philippines is easing up on Covid restrictions right now. Your OFS is likely to ask for a week off so they can go home and visit their families. Yeah, a lot of people in the Philippines haven't seen their families in like two years because of COVID They haven't, they haven't been able to travel. And so if, if they ask, I would really suggest you let them go, which could be that they want to take like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of next week off along with this Friday, Saturday, Sunday and next Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So that, you know, like a 10 day, 10 day thing for them so they can combine all this stuff into one. I will try and keep you updated on holidays as they come from the Philippines. We have a calendar that you can get access to@onlinejobs.ph holidays. It's a calendar you can subscribe to on your Google Calendar and it will just put these holidays into your calendar for you so that you know when there are holidays in the Philippines on my calendar, what I do is I have it light yellow so that they show up but they're not prominent for me. But then I know like okay, there's a holiday in the Philippines. Something's going on there. I can expect people to be off of work again. So that URL, if you want to go get it, is onlinejobs.ph holidays. Now, just to end. It's winter here, and all I want to do in the winter is ski. And in my newsletters, I usually. I often include something personal with it. And so today in my podcast, I'm gonna include something personal like. Like yesterday I did. My body has this weird connection to snow. I've always felt it. Even growing up in Los Angeles, where it didn't snow, I always, like, craved the snow. And I didn't. I didn't realize this until a couple years ago when I started skiing and realized, oh, my gosh, I just. I just need the snow. Like, when a storm comes, I'm so excited. When a storm leaves, I'm so disappointed when snow melts. It's so disappointing to me. Anyway, had a crazy ski experience the other day. We. I like to ski in the backcountry a lot, so we could ski outside of the resort, so we could. I could just see all kinds of mountains. We skied a forest that has been denuded by a forest fire, where you normally couldn't ski this because the branches would be too thick. But right now there's no branches on any of the trees, and so you can just ski in between the trees. It was eerie and amazing at the same time. So hopefully you can see this picture of this forest that's been denuded by trees that I got to ski, and it was a spectacular experience.