Less Than Three Weeks to Vacation

We are down to 20 days and counting before we head off on vacation, and what has become a December tradition for us. I have been looking forward to this vacation for a long time. I need the break. The day job has been busy and stressful lately, with no sign of letting up. It will be nice to have some time away from that.

And it really will be time away. I learned a long time ago that vacations and work do not mix. When I go on vacation, I completely disconnect from work. I don’t check work email, I don’t log in. I don’t have a work mobile phone so I don’t have to worry about phone calls, but I also make it clear that I am on vacation and not answering calls anyway. To help mitigate this, I usually prepare a detailed set of notes that people can refer to in my absence. Around this time each year, I spend time bringing it up-to-date.

Of course, I don’t consider writing work, and I look forward to being able to do a little more writing, since the pressure of the day job is temporarily neutralized. I managed to write 30,000 words last December, about 20,000 while I was on vacation. I hope to do even better this year.

All told, we’ll be on vacation for 23 consecutive days. We begin our drive down to Florida on December 13. As this is a Disney World year (we take the kids to Disney World every other year) we arrive at the park on the 15th. We are there through the 18th. That afternoon, we’ll drive down to my in-laws, and spend the rest of our time there, until we head back sometime around January 1.

We’ve been prepping for the trip for a while now. We’ve arranged for a house-sitter, we’ve taken the car in for maintenance before the long drive, and we’ve started to figure out what we need to bring with us.

Still, I keep eagerly counting down the days until I am actually on vacation. I look for milestones along the way. We have a lot of family coming into town this week for Thanksgiving, which will be a nice milestone between now and vacation. We spent much of the day yesterday cleaning the house and getting it ready for our guest. That included doing some rearranging of furniture so that we could support 10 people at the dinner table.

I’m hoping to make a lot of progress on the second draft of my novel while I am on vacation, something about which I’ll have more to say soon. And of course, I will be posting here as well.