A new tradition

It’s been a very tiring couple of months. The scorecard since September:

• One month with Mom in the hospital.
• One hellish week getting her situated in a new part of her assisted living facility.
• An average of three exhausting phone calls a day…every day…from my dad, most of them repetitions of earlier calls (or worse, repetitions within the same call.)
• One friend and coworker dead after a three-month illness.
• Three big HR issues.
• One two-month delay in a major aspect of my grant project.
• One fun but not very restful road trip.
• And, oh yeah. One reappointment package (the first baby step toward tenure) due in December, which is not quite as labor-intensive as a thesis but is pretty damned close.

So…

I’ve decided that if I can get all my paperwork done before Christmas (and if I still have my sanity) I’m going to do something terribly out of character the week after. I’m going to take an actual relaxing vacation. One where I sit in a nice oceanfront room by a freezing cold beach and just watch TV and read all those books I brought back from Canada. One where I feel no compulsion to cover lots of exciting new ground nor take lots of pictures of old supermarkets. And one where I will accept phone calls and email on my own terms.

I’ll probably hate it, but I will at least have tried it once.