Back to the grind

Today is my first day back at work -- my nanny work, that is.  I did work both days over the weekend, and of course I had freelance work all week, but somehow being back to work at the nanny job -- the five-days-a-week, fairly demanding (especially since it's summer) job -- feels more like work than either the freelancing or the babysitting over the weekend.

I had a good vacation, but I do have some regrets.

My writing vacation

All the writing work I've done this week -- client work, writing for my own blogs, and working on my novel for Camp NaNoWriMo -- has made me ponder why it is that I consider time to write to be vacation time.  It would be more understandable if I were spending the time just working on my fiction, or at least my own projects, but I'm not: I've spent quite a bit of my vacation week working on freelance work.

Commence vacation week!

This week I'm on vacation from my nanny job -- actually, from most of my jobs, since two of the families I babysit for are out of town, as well.  I don't have any work -- other than taking care of my primary employers' dog while they are out of town -- until the weekend.

Except for writing work, of course.

Back from vacation

I'm just back from a stay-at-home vacation, during which I wasn't checking email or even getting on the computer much at all.  Michael had taken last week off with the intention of us going to Durango, as we did last summer, but we decided at the last minute to stay home.  Instead, we did a lot of things around the house that we'd been planning on doing, including rearranging and reorganizing the office to make it easier for me to work.  I'll blog on that later this week (with pictures).

I also made a pretty major decision about my career...  More on that later, as well.

Coming back from vacation is always so hard for me, but I think in many ways it's harder when I've taken time off and stayed home.  The reason (I think) is that I've changed my routines, but since I associate the vacation routines with home, it makes it harder to get back into the mindset of my old, work-related home routines.  For instance, I was staying up late and getting up late all week last week, and that particular habit is especially hard for me to break.

But overall, the break was refreshing.  I feel rested mentally, and I love my new workspace.  Combined with the decision I made during the week, I feel better about work going forward!

Freelancers: Do you take minor holidays?

I couldn't help but notice that some of the writers' blogs I follow had new posts up on Monday, President's Day.  Michael got that day off from work, and since I've finally learned that I don't get any work done when he's home, anyway, I decided to just take the day off too.  Actually, we both took yesterday off as well, and enjoyed a long weekend together.

But this brings up an interesting point: Do you take minor holidays off, and if so, which ones?  It seems to me like many writers take fewer days off than other people, so I'm curious what holidays my readers take.  I really only take the holidays that Michael gets off, because as I said, it's really difficult to try to work while he's at home.  I think if I had kids at home, I would probably also take the minor holidays that the schools recognize.

What about you?

An unscheduled vacation

My husband took last week off from work.  We weren't planning on going anywhere, and in fact it was a fairly last-minute decision — he asked for the time off about a week beforehand.  He was getting stressed out at work and needed a little break.

I was planning on working while he was off.  I had a light week scheduled, so I figured I would work some short days and spend the rest of my time with him.  Ha.  I ended up getting very little done — my resolve to work fell apart by about Tuesday.

It was a great week.  We shopped together and got some things for the house, and did some upgrades to the bathroom that we have been talking about doing for ages.  How many husbands want to spend their time at an antique mall on their vacation?  And now you see why my will power to work failed me!  Who can resist temptation like that?

Luckily I'd only had a light workload last week, so I was able to more or less get away with it.  I have some catching up to do this week, on client work as well as getting ready for NaNoWriMo, but nothing I can't handle.

What about you?  Have you ever taken an unscheduled vacation?  How did it turn out?

Happy birthday to me

For those of you who didn't know, yesterday was my birthday. It was nice to have it fall on a Sunday this year, because I was able to spend the day with Michael — but I have to admit, I still did a couple of hours' work on my birthday.

The day started out sunny and gorgeous. It almost always snows in Denver right around my birthday, so this was a real treat! My deaf cat woke us early by sitting next to the bed and meowing at the top of his lungs (I'm sure he was telling me happy birthday), so we got up, went to Starbucks, and then took our drinks and our dogs to the park for a birthday walk.

I also used the Birthday Guilt Trip to get Michael to come out to the barn with me. (He's not really all that into horses, and he hasn't spent an afternoon out there with me in months.) We decided to take the dogs, and spent an hour or two with them in the back pasture while I tied and groomed Panama.

Then we went home, and I worked a little bit, took a short nap, and worked a little bit more.

For dinner we went out to my favorite Japanese restaurant, where we ordered my favorite food: sushi. Then we came home, watched a movie, and I worked a little bit more before going to bed early.

I suppose some might think it's kind of sad that I worked on my birthday, and I actually did try not to have to — but it just wasn't going to work out that way. My client needed their project finished, which meant I had to work! But honestly, it only added up to about three hours, which wasn't that bad.

What about you? Have you had to work on your birthday and other special occasions?

My first day back at work full-time

As it happens, working in snatches during a vacation is very different than working full-time at home, particularly when you have more than a thousand emails to catch up on when you get home. As a result, today was my first day back to work full-time.

Monday and Tuesday were both half days — or should I say half-hearted days — where I worked part-time on going through emails, corresponding with clients, and updating my blogs. Easy but tedious. Plus, Michael took those days off for "recovery" purposes, and having him home with me always makes it difficult to work. Instead we walked the dogs, went out for brunch, and I visited my horse.

Today hasn't been all that much more productive, but I think it's helping me just to be at home in front of my computer all day — never mind that what I've actually been doing is a lot of blog-reading, email-reading and -writing, and administrative stuff. After all, after a good six hours of that I finally managed to do a couple hours' work, which is a vast improvement over my productivity yesterday and the day before.

What about you? Do you find that you have a difficult time settling back into your routine upon returning from a vacation — even if you worked here and there on said vacation? How do you cope or help yourself settle in faster?

My working vacation

I have a confession to make: Even though I worked my butt off to meet several deadlines before I left, and even though I did leave my regular laptop behind, I did actually work a little on my trip.

And I planned it that way, too.

I was afraid of losing my work — heck, my livelihood if something happened to my laptop overseas, so I decided early on that I was not going to take my laptop to Europe with me. Instead, I brought my old NEC Mobilepro 770, an outdated handheld laptop that I'd bought used in college to allow me to take notes in class via typing rather than hand-writing.

The Mobilepro is probably about a decade old now, so it doesn't have the same capabilities as modern laptops — it has a regular phone connection and a built-in modem, but no DSL jack, and definitely no wireless capabilities. Still, it has its uses: Running on Windows CE, it has "pocket" versions of Microsoft Office, including Word, and a Compact Flash drive that allows you to transfer files quickly and easily. Also, the screen is a half-VGA and the laptop runs completely on flash memory (meaning it has no moving parts), so it weighs just over a pound and fits easily in the messenger bag I was planning to carry as a purse overseas.

So one of the things I did before leaving for Europe was to get together a bunch of research for some content articles I was writing for a client, copying everything into Word so that I could pull it up on the Mobilepro. I also took with me the files for my website (so that I could work on the updates I have been meaning to finish), and kept a travel journal. In this manner I planned to have plenty to do on the plane and the trains: Although the batteries don't have the same 8-hour life they had when they were newer, they still last for around 4 hours each, and I have two of them.

Laying in bed working our first night in England, I started to think how terrible it was: Here I was in Haworth, for heaven's sake, and I was working! Then it occurred to me that maybe it wasn't really so terrible. After all, I was working because I wanted to, not because I had deadlines I had to meet. And I had known all along that I would — in fact, the main reason I brought the Mobilepro was because I was hoping that being in Haworth would inspire me, and I wanted to be prepared.

So maybe working on vacation isn't such a bad thing. After all, we are all writers because that is what we love, so it's different than someone with a job they hate having to work on vacation.

Do you work on vacation? And if so, do you feel guilty or regretful about doing so, or do you work on vacation because you choose to?

The longest day of my life

I mentioned in my last post that Michael and I just got back from a trip to Europe. However I had not blogged very much in the weeks leading up to the trip, either. This was due to my mad rush to finish several big assignments before the trip — we had only decided to take the trip about a month beforehand, so I already had quite a bit of work scheduled for March.

I did get everything done in time, but just barely, and it contributed to what was officially the longest day of my life. In order to finish my work on a large client project, I worked through the night Wednesday night, finishing the project a bare 25 minutes before we were supposed to leave. We were leaving early Thursday morning, so I figuered I could sleep on the plane (two separate flights), and then be on about the right schedule when we arrived in London Friday morning.

It didn't work out that way. Surprisingly (since I can normally sleep almost anywhere) I was not able to sleep much on the plane, so when we arrived in London I had had only about two and a half hours of sleep over the last 30 hours.

And unfortunately, we still had a lot of traveling left to do: Our destination was Haworth, home of my favorite classic authors, the Brontë sisters. This meant taking the Heathrow Express into London from the airport, the Tube to King's Cross, another train to Leeds, connecting to a train that would take us to Keighley (pronounced "Keithley"), and taking a taxi from Keighley to Haworth.

By the time we got into Haworth around lunchtime, I was dead on my feet. Still, I was momentarily revived by excitement, so we decided to eat lunch. Big mistake! I ate less than half of my delicious Yorkshire pudding, I was so tired. When I went to bed directly after lunch, I had been going almost nonstop for 48 hours.

Our trip was heaven for me, from a writer's standpoint as well as for the value of the international travel itself. While I'm adjusting to being back and catching up from being gone for 10 days, I'll be blogging a little more about my experiences overseas.