16 Years, 9 Months !!

I just returned from a 2 week vacation. It’s been 16 years, 9 months since I last took that much time off. It took me a few days to unwind and get in the groove of doing nothing. “Nothing” here is defined as spending time with the kids and last minute Christmas shopping and decorating. About 5 days in I realized I was having “trouble” falling asleep. It turned out that once the exhaustion passed, I didn’t need to collapse into bed every night at 9:30. What a weird feeling.

Now back at work everyone seems pretty relaxed. Many colleagues took quite a bit of time off during the holidays. As I may have said earlier I think the last minute vacation scramble is due to two factors: First, our company’s use-it-or-lose-it policy where we can only carry forward 40 hours into the new year; and, second, the fact that everyone had a very busy year and couldn’t even take time off until now.