The Winter Break is nearly upon us. It's already got Lauren in its grasp; I'm just waiting for one last boy to leave the barrack and then I will surrender myself to vacation as well. Many people were asking me yesterday, in the midst of the storm before the calm, if I was "ready" for vacation.
And the answer is yes and no.
I mean, sure, I am absolutely ready to take a break from the hectic pace of life that we have while school is in session, to spend time with family, to do some reading, all that stuff.
But at the same time, as of Friday afternoon when I was answering these questions, I had nothing packed, even though we were planning to leave Saturday morning. Well, late morning. Maybe around lunchtime. Or early afternoon. Would you believe late afternoon?
We'll be there before Christmas--promise!
Because really, there is no "surrendering" to break--I've got to go out and grab this vacation by its horns and wrestle it to the ground like a recalcitrant reindeer.
Because it wasn't just packing that isn't done: oh no. We've also got a number of presents that we haven't got yet. Some we haven't even totally settled on. And the time we have to figure that out is...?
And the fridge smells, and I don't know what leftovers were overlooked and left to stink up the joint, but we should probably find them and expel them.
And then, just about as soon as we get back from our travels, we're having major work done on our basement, which means we need to do some serious work moving stuff out of the basement or at least moving it to the center of the basement. And we have to pull up a bunch of the boards from our deck.
So yeah: totally ready for break... and not even close to ready for break. At this rate, it could break us.
The thing about working from home is that we tend to forget to take breaks. We don't have kids, so there are no vacations to help us mark time - we have to schedule these things. Christmas, if we hadn't invited friends over, would be just another day to putter around the house. (Not that that's necessarily BAD.)
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, the part of me that once WAS a kid in the American school system still has latent conditioning to expect that the week from Christmas to New Years (at the very least) be as free from work as possible.
The trick is figuring out what work is. If I write something for fun, is that work? If I'm working on my writing and not writing I'm paid to do, am I on a break?
In February, we're going down to Baja Sur to visit my parents. THAT will be my real break.