It’s a perfect night in Seattle: cold, rainy, and windy. We’re likely to lose power here on the south end of B.I.: there are lots of very tall trees. Multiple (seasonal) days of rain softens the ground, the wind blows them over, my house and 267 of my neightbors go dark, I pull the generator out of the garage and plug it in, and then we wait for PSE.
So, there are two choices: ask Stewie Griffin to control the weather out here or go to Hawai’i. I think the latter: six days in the hills of the Big Island (Volcano Rainforest Retreat) is a good start…and then I’ll finish with five days on Maui, venue as yet undetermined. All this is commitment-dependent, of course: I’ll blow it off if one of the open projects gets approved ahead of schedule. I had to change the flight reservation 12 hours after I made it, to accomodate by decision to attend the local PMI-sponsored ITIL V3 class. It’s still 60 days away and I’ll be nucking futz by March.
Vacation is easy. It’s the getting ready for vacation that’s searingly, abdominal-crampingly painful. Returning from vacation is just a migraine headache.
In high-performance environments, you have a lot of mental plates spinning and a lot of people providing you with input and output. And before you check out, you have to get those plates spinning fast and get some new ones spinning just as fast. And you have to deal with gut-wrenching anxiety the last few days before you go. I know this from years of struggling with it, and there’s no solution without a smart boss and a good team.
There are times when the hassle of vacation isn’t worth it, and in that case I recommend retail therapy.
