So I’m on vacation this week. Despite Heather’s urgings, I never really had any concrete plans for this week; my entire purpose for this vacation was to (a) use up my remaining vacation time from last year before it expired at the end of June, and (b) to not have to go to work for a week.
Which, aside from my wedding and honeymoon, is what 90% of my vacations have been like since I started living somewhere other than my parents’ house. I don’t really need to go to another city (or state, country, etc) to have a good time: I’ve been working full-time since I was sixteen; just not having to be somewhere between certain hours, not having specific tasks that are expected to be completed by me, is enough. I like sleeping late (although I haven’t been able to do that yet this week, but it’s still just Monday), I like deciding what to do for myself for the entire day, not just fror the time period between 7 to 10 at night (between the end of dinner and bed time). If I want to sleep late, have an early lunch, and then work on my ren faire outfit from noon until 6 or 7 in the evening (something I may very well do tomorrow), I can. Not having to wake up before 7 AM, not having to be in the office until 5:00, not having to scrape through my email to track down people violating our company’s network TOS: that in and of itself is a vacation.
Now, truth be told, I’m not averse to going other places and having fun somewhere that isn’t my usual stomping ground. Far from it: I’ve been to two other continents, and close to 25% of the states in this country. I just have to kinda build up to it. To steal a (para)phrase from one of my favorite webcomic artists, I’m like a starving man, and having too much vacation too fast would result in me dying from the shock. Now, I don’t think there’s a product called “intravenous vacation”, so I’ll just have to take it slowly, work up from “not go to work for a week” right now, to eventually “go to Hawaii and relax on the beach for 2 weeks.”
More about the ren faire costume later this week, if I remember.