What I Did on my Winter Break

What I did:

• Built LEGO Star Wars kits with my son.  (He did about 90% of the work, which was great!)
• Introduced my daughter to Scorched Earth, then spent some quality time blowing each other up.
• Watched Doctor Who with my wife on New Year’s Eve, and went to bed ten minutes before midnight.
• Saw my parents, my in-laws, my brother and his wife … pretty much every family member in the state.
• Read two Peanuts collections.
• Trounced three young children at Mario Kart.
• Unpacked and assembled my son’s trampoline, then ran around using the foam packing material for swordfighting with the children.
• Assembled my daughter’s art easel, which turned out to be missing One. Single. Screw.
• Ate way too much.

What I didn’t do:

• Work on the short story that’s due March 1, or the book that’s due at the end of the year.
• Write or plan any new blog posts.
• Catch up on all of my backlogged e-mail.  (I did get through about 50% of it, though.)
• Get into an argument with a certain individual about e-books.  (I’ve now been informed that the reason I’m not doing better with my DAW e-books is that $6.99 is too expensive, and the reason I’m not doing well with Goldfish Dreams is because $2.99 is too cheap, and I should be charging $9.99.  I give up.)
• Write up reviews for any of the books I’ve read recently.

I feel a little weird about this.  I’m not terribly good with the whole vacation concept.  My annual leave time at work is pretty much maxed out, because I so rarely use it.  But we had two days off the day job each week for the past two weeks, and for once, I didn’t want to spend the whole time working.  I had to deliberately and consciously say “You know what?  Screw it.  I’m going to spend this time playing with my kids and relaxing with my wife and sleeping in and having fun.”

It’s not something I can do long-term.  Those deadlines aren’t going away, and there’s always going to be too much work to do.  But it’s been a very good two weeks.