Tag Archives: vacation

Last Friday…

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thumbsdown-gladiator It occurred to me driving in this morning that if everything goes as planned, this will be my last Friday at the office for the rest of fiscal year 2013. Next week, I’ll be celebrating Independence Day by taking Friday off and making a 4-day weekend, but from there on out I am a part time employee of our dear old Uncle Sam.

We all know I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to live in the land of the perpetual three-day weekend, but it’s living in the land of the 80% pay check that seems like something of a problem. I’ve found that most things are never as good or as bad as I anticipate them being, but in this one little case, I’m not holding my breath for it to magically transform into a fantastic opportunity.

Thank God I like to read and write. Those are at least low budget entertainment options I can indulge in to excess in this new found free time. Have I mentioned I’m glad I didn’t get around to buying a boat?

185 emails…

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There’s nothing quite as effective as 185 emails in your inbox to drag you back to reality. Three hours later, at least it’s a relief to know that 10% of them were discussing printer and network-related outages, 80% of them were crap you have no actual interest in, 5% were email from friends, and the remaining 5% are issues you actually need to do something about. It’s possible that I might have sat down and cried if there were actually 185 issues that needed my attention this morning. Even though I was physically present today, clearly my brain is still dragging in from somewhere on the Eastern Shore. Unless something ridiculous happens, it should be a day or two yet before the post-vacation afterglow wears off. I’d like to think that it could last until the 4-day Independence Day weekend, but I think we all know that’s more of a pipe dream than a plan.

Aside from the usual complaints about being back in the saddle, the routine is the routine. That’s probably good and bad. It’s comforting because it’s normal, but it still leaves me with a slightly sick feeling that it’s not what I really want to be doing with the day. Reality. 185 emails. Being a responsible adult is a real bitch.

The worst part…

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The worst part of vacations is that they inevitably come to an end. Maybe if you sat on the beach for a few hours every day it wouldn’t feel like a vacation after 30 years, but I’d be happy to be the test bunny for just such an experiment if anyone out there wants to fund the study. If I thought for a second I could scratch a living out of a combination of writing and being the guy on 27th street who set up beach umbrellas at 9AM and took them down at 5PM, I’d be there in a hot second. Unfortunately, I’m almost positive that I couldn’t manage to get by on a starving college student budget again. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that there isn’t a completely irresponsible voice in the back of my head telling me to say fuck it, sell everything, load up the dogs, the laptop, and whatever else fits into the truck, and head for the coast.

I know everyone has a daydream, but hell, life has got to be about more than sitting in a cube five days a week creating brilliant PowerPoint charts, right? Yeah. So now all I have to do is sell a million books or find someone who wants to pay me $25 an hour plus benefits for setting up umbrellas. Let me know if you’d like to see a resume.

Sunday habits…

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Because you know I’m nothing if not a creature of habit, the very first thing I did this Sunday after getting home from vacation was fire up the laptop, find the five next posts from the archive and load them up here on WordPress. I feel like I owe everyone at least that much given the distinct lack of posts over the last few days. As much as I’d like to say I’m sorry about that I think it’s obvious that I’m not sorry in any way for taking a bit of a break. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy my peace offering… the latest from October 2007.

It’s good stuff… and includes my initial reaction to being an iPhone owner. I’ll bet it’s not the reaction you were expecting.

Sea Fever…

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I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way, where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

– John Masefield © 1902

Out of practice…

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Once upon a time, I could pack a bag and be out the door in half an hour. That probably has as much to do with spending three out of every four weeks on the road as it did with having any actual skills worth mentioning. When you pack, unpack, repack, keep the bag under 30 pounds, narrow enough to fit in the overhead, wash, rinse, and repeat six times a month, you get proficient if only through the force of habit. It’s apparently one of those skills that atrophy when it’s not in regular use.

The reason I know this is because I had to swap out the bag that use to work for a week on the road for what use to be the “two week” bag. Then I added a backpack for good measure. And then I thought, “Eh, I’ll just throw in a cooler in case I need it at some point.” I’m pretty sure the planner in me died a little bit with that decision. It strikes me that a normal person would be able to know up front if they were going to need a cooler, but apparently now, I just stock one for “just in case” moments. One of the great drawbacks of traveling by truck instead of airliner is that it doesn’t actually force you to make decisions. You’ve got a nearly limitless maw of emptiness just waiting to take on all the junk you might, but probably won’t, use at some point in your journey.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go rent a pallet jack to get my luggage outside.

Road miles…

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I’ll be logging some miles over the next week. The baseline mileage between now and about this time next week is 664 plus random driving around and at least two days of regular commuting. It would be harder to plan an agenda that would put me in three more far flung parts of the state Travelover a period of a few days. I’m holding my breath because it only seems appropriate that the universe would conspire to have me make some kind of emergency trip to St. Mary’s County and complete the tour of the extreme ends of the State of Maryland.

For a state as dense with highways as Maryland, one of the fun thing you learn when you spend time on the road here is that that there really isn’t a good way to get from one end of the state to the other without first driving around Baltimore. Still, every mile under the wheels this week is 5,280 feet closer to the beach… and that makes a whole lot of road dogging it seem worthwhile.

OCMD…

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In about a month, I’ll be recovering from my first trip to Ocean City since sometime around 2002. If I’m remembering history correctly, that trip involved a one-night layover and an excessive amount of drinking at Seacrets… and I seem to recall that it was March, so not exactly beach weather. That didn’t prevent NAME REDACTED from dragging his Ocean City Postcardhungover self across the beach to jump in the water on a dare… ah, the dumb shit 20-something guys do when they don’t have any adult supervision. Of course, that’s not really the point.

If you grew up in Western Maryland in the 1970s and 80s, Ocean City was the place to be in the summer. That was before the mass exodus to Myrtle Beach for a more “family friendly” beach experience. OCMD was grittier to be sure, but it’s where my impressions of what a beach vacation is were built. I’ve spent time on beaches up and down the East Coast from the Jersey Shore through the Carolinas. I’ve enjoyed beach time on the Adriatic and on the worn smooth stones in the shadow of the Brighton Pier. I’ve sucked down rum drinks in the protected coves of St. Thomas and had three months of weekends parked on the sand at Waikiki, but Ocean City is still where I think of whenever I think of “going to the beach.”

It’s not fancy. It’s not built for old money… but It’s where Maryland goes when it goes to the beach. Salt air, liquid refreshment, Thrasher’s fries, and good company… Yeah, it’s hard to believe it’s taken me 730-odd days to make the trip.

Sunday travel…

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It’s Sunday morning again, and you know what to expect by this point. We’re clearing the backlog of old posts and I’m happy to say that we’ve made it all the way up to April 2007. There’s a particularly meaningful set of posts for me because they’re the ones I wrote the last time I was in Italy. If I wasn’t born an American, I think I could have done ok as an Italian. Then again that may mostly be due to the ready access to good reds, so we may never know the actual truth. At any rate, this week’s Sunday archive posts come all the way to you not just from the past, but also from northern Italy. Oh, and since these are kind of in order, it might be helpful to scroll down and read up the page from the end. Just a thought. Enjoy.

Liberal leave…

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Vast swaths of the federal government operated with a “liberal leave” policy in place today. Loosely translated, this policy says “Travel conditions may or may not be dangerous this morning so instead of us actually making a decision to be open or closed, we’re going to let every individual go ahead and flip a coin to decide whether they want to work today or not.” I don’t have any particular heartburn with them using this approach on days when the weather is decidedly questionable in the early morning hours.

Rest assured, if at any time I realistically thought my life was endangered by the commute, I’d be the first to throw in the towel and head back to the house. As much as I would have enjoyed a Monday spent hanging around the house drinking coffee, I just wasn’t so in love with the idea that I wanted to use up a day of my own annual leave to make it happen. What I really wanted was for Uncle Sugar to go ahead and give me another day free of charge. Let’s be honest, it’s going to have to be a blizzard of epic proportions before I’m willing to say it’s so bad out there that I want to burn off a day of precious, precious vacation time… and usually that’s when Uncle ends up making the “right” call anyway and letting everyone stay home.

As nice as cooling my heels for an impromptu four-day weekend would have been, I’m too much of a leave hoarder to make it happen today… but don’t think for a second that I didn’t regret that decision when I was sitting at my desk looking at a metric ton of new emails that had been piling up since Thursday afternoon, the flashing “voicemail” light on my phone, and a line of people that had things that needed discussing. In retrospect, maybe I should have been a little more liberal with my leave after all, but that’s just another day of putting off the inevitable.