I'm going back to work tomorrow for the first time in 11 days (though I did have to go in to the office for a bit last week, but that scarcely counts). While I was off, I didn't leave town, so what did I do with all that time?
Not a damn thing.
Oh, I had plans a-plenty going into this long break. But then, I often have plans. And more often than not, those plans don't get carried out. You see, I'm a procrastinator. Not just your run-of-the-mill, "I'll get to that tomorrow" procrastinator, either. I'm so bad, I got a birthmark when I was 8 years old. (Profuse apologies to Steven Wright, no relation!)
So what was I going to do with those 11 days off? In no particular order, I was determined to:
- Clean the apartment
- Do all the laundry (not just a few days' worth)
- Get out to a few local scenic areas (such as Red Rock Canyon) and take some pictures
- Get the motorcycle fixed, if not actually insured and registered
- Finally move Outlook onto my laptop so that I can use it as my main "productivity" machine
- Check out some of the many casinos in town that I still have not yet visited
- Finish reading a couple of books that have been in the pipeline for a while
- Rework/update my personal web site to contain info more recent than circa early 2002
- Put in a fair amount of work on my family web site which has been dormant since 2004
- Catch up on some of my woefully late e-mail correspondence
- Blog about the many and varied interesting topics that have arisen over the past month or so
What did I actually accomplish during this time?
- Slept a fair amount (hey, with my normal work schedule that IS an accomplishment)
- Made a half-hearted attempt to clean (some of) the kitchen
- Did a few days' worth of laundry
- Lost a few days' worth of pay (over several days' play) at Sunset Station, without doubt my most-visited casino in Vegas
- Read a few chapters from one of those books in the pipeline
- Finally moved Outlook over to the laptop (started that at 7pm on the last day of vacation)
- Figured out how to post to the blog from my cell phone (started that around 9pm on the last day of vacation)
- Blogged about this single, not-especially-interesting topic (started that at about 1am on, technically, the first day back to work)
So I am not quite what you'd want to call, "goal-oriented". But I prefer to focus on the one goal I did meet, rather than those I did not...
And it was awfully nice to be away from the office for that long, while not really having to actually do anything or be anywhere during most of that time. Earlier I had intended to take a trip out to SoCal to visit Jason and his family for a few days, but as I alluded to at the top of this post, those plans had to be scrapped at the last minute. Which was a bummer, but actually it was remarkably refreshing to take a vacation and be almost entirely stress-free during the whole thing. The trouble with out-of-town vacations is that, while I do love to travel, they just aren't especially restful. And as much time and energy as I put into work, I do need the occasional rest.
So there's my essay on "What I did with my Winter Vacation". Happy New Year, everybody!
P.S. I plan to blog more regularly in 2007, too. Or sleep more regularly. It really could go either way at this point... ;-)
Comments