So, where was I?

time to read 3 min | 436 words

Well, this has been quite a period of silence for me. The last post on the blog was made two weeks ago, and that is about as long as I have been silent in five years or so.

I took an unscheduled, urgently required, vacation. For the last three weeks or so, I barely even touched a computer, couldn’t stomach the thought.

It shows in my inbox, which I usually try to keep empty:

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The problem with this type of vacation is that the longer you are gone, the more you don’t want to get back. I can only imagine the amount of stuff that has been piling in.

The reason for the vacation is actually quite simple, I think that I have been overdoing things, and after I got back from the last trip, I realized that 18 hours of sleep a day for a week are not just my reaction to jetlag.

It has been my experience that there are people who try to do too much end up getting burned.

"burning the candle at both ends"

There are some forms of escape from that, probably the most healthy one is to avoid doing what you have been doing. That is rarely the response though. About 7 years ago, I was working in Prison 6, as a prison guard. It was… hard. Probably one of the hardest things that I ever had to do. I distinctly remember being burned there, totally and completely. I was just a short stop away from going AWOL in an attempt to make it stop. I didn’t, and looking back, I am pretty happy about the way it turned out, but the memory of that time is still one of the worst times in my life.

I would really like to avoid having the same thing happen to me in my own field of expertise. One of the reasons that I like software development so much is that it has been my hobby as well as my profession. The last thing that I want to happen is that it would be a cause for distaste for me.

Hence, the reason that I called that vacation required, not merely needed. I also made a few other decisions, regarding the amount of travel and parallel work that I am going to take on from now on.

Hopefully, I can now return to my regularly scheduled blogging/working.