How I Get Back to Work after a Vacation

SLOWLY.

I am back from eight days away, visiting lots of people! I spent time with friends I've known for years, and I met several seriously awesome new acquaintances. The trip was fantastic. And now I must settle in, somehow, and start being a productive member of society again, and how does that work again? I forget.

Therefore, it's time to turn to my old standby, the list. Basically that's all I can do at this point. The first workday after a trip is practically another vacation day as I wander around aimlessly, poking at the keyboard now and then as if to check whether or not it still lives. Usually I get a little irritated with myself toward the end of that day. I may or may not, at that point, also be showing symptoms of the cold I will have picked up during the trip.

Day two is when the list comes in. By day two, I'm DEFINITELY showing those cold symptoms, and I'm moving kind of slowly on all things, still, so just identifying things I could possibly do next is a struggle. I have to go stream-of-consciousness on the problem first, freewriting until the guilt of having been gone comes pouring out of my mind in the form of stuff to catch up on. Then I can take all that garbled mess and arrange it into a list of priorities, and just pick a few important ones to hack away at until I'm warmed up and functioning again.

This blog post was on that list! I told myself to make it a short post so that I could say hi and then cross "blog post" off of the list. So hi! Here I am, a little achy and sneezy, but back from my time off and working my way down my list. I hope you feel as good about this as I do. I'll write something longer next time.