Back to normal

Yesterday was technically the kids' first day back to school, but they only had a half day, so I actually ended up working about the same day that I did all summer.  Today, therefore, is my first day back to my normal school-year schedule: I don't work until I pick the kids up from school at 3pm.

Time off

This is the last week of my summer schedule, and to complicate things, I had to put my old kitty, Cleo, to sleep over the weekend.  She had been struggling for the better part of the past year with some kind of progressive paralysis, and she was finally getting to the point where she could no longer eat.  I tried syringe feeding her for a few weeks, but even that -- which she liked at first -- became problematic when her immune system could no longer keep up with her body's demands, such as an infection in her mouth from a broken tooth.

I don't want to write the entire story more than once, so you can read about Cleo's final illness and passing over on Cleo's old blog, the one I created for her back when she had fatty liver disease.

Counting down

At long last, the end of the summer -- and the return of normality, routine, and free time -- is in sight: The kids go back to school on August 25th, which means I have only two more weeks of summer.

And actually, less than that now.  I have eight more days of my summer schedule, to be precise.  And what's left of my summer should be relatively easy, since I have a rare (of late) easy weekend coming up.

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 vacation week in review

Since today is the last day of full-on vacation (I don't go back to my nanny job until Monday, but I work both days this weekend), I thought it would be a good time to review the week.  I had a good vacation week, but it seemed altogether too short, and I'm afraid in some respects I wasn't as productive as I wanted -- even though I have to be fair to myself and admit that (as usual) I was overly optimistic about what I could achieve.

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.

Success!

It took me a little while yesterday, but I finally did find my motivation.  In the end, I wrote three blog posts for my own blogs, a handful of posts for a client, and worked on my novel for a solid hour and a half.