A couple of weeks ago, I had a vacation planned – I was going to go to Yellowstone with some friends for a week of camping, hiking, and doing a small amount of touristy stuff.  Unfortunately, the part of my vacation that involved going to Yellowstone got cancelled, so instead, I had a week off…  …And no plans.

Those first couple of days were the worst – I couldn’t really start on anything or make any plans, because we might just leave the next morning.  Once it got to Monday though, and it was clear we weren’t leaving, I had the opposite problem – I had no plans and a whole week to spend.  What was I going to do?

For me, on a weekday, I typically go to work.  Even though that consistency is extremely valuable to me, I resisted that urge, which is probably for the best (I really needed a vacation).  Still, I ended up logging in to work and checking on a few things to ease my worries.  As expected, my team was taking care of it admirably, so there was no reason to do work stuff.

It wasn’t actually until Wednesday that I actually got into the swing of making time to do stuff that I wanted though.  I got a fair bit of work done for Dune, and I pounded through a lot of my model assembly backlog (I spent almost two full days just doing assembly while watching Castle with Jessa).  I made some plans to hang out at the shop on Friday, and also finished up Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak.

Overall, I feel like most of my projects progressed, with the prime exceptions being my writing, reading, and exercise.  These things are so tied in to my work schedule that it was more difficult to find out how to do them when I wasn’t working.  Specifically, I always write on the bus on the way to work, which means that if I don’t bus to work, I don’t write.  On the one hand, it’s a great habit, on the other hand, it means a vacation (or business trip) wrecks my writing cadence.  Luckily, I had a backlog ready since I knew this was coming, but, it turned out to be a lot of dead time without writing.  Reading was somewhat less critical (I was between books during my vacation), but it was definitely something I felt.

Getting my daily exercise in though was the thing that I noticed most acutely.  Nominally, my walk to and from work and lunch as well as my evening walk is enough for me to reach my goal of 11,500 steps per day.  Typically, when I have a day off from work, I take the extra time to take a morning walk to compensate, but, if I (say) spend all day painting or doing model assembly, that’s not really sufficient exercise, and I can tell.

All of this piles up to why I don’t whimsically take a vacation – it’s hard for me to break all of those patterns and habits that I’ve built up over the last few years.  However, not only is it difficult because they are habits, I also don’t want to break them.