Microfamous

Episode #78: In which she fills the endless hours...
Today officially marks the first day of my week-long vacation. I haven't taken a week's vacation in about five years. It's not like I'm a workaholic or anything, at least not in the usual sense. When I left the corporate world to freelance in 1999, I had what amounts to a two-year long vacation (sleeping in every day, out 3 and 4 nights a week, working when I felt like it). When I managed a newspaper, I would have loved to take some time off, but the long weekend here & there was the most I could take and not have to deal with some disaster upon my return (or field phone calls on my cell the whole time I was gone). Now that I am working as editor/writer for a publication I love, I have been negligent in scheduling time off because it doesn't feel like work to me. But since the company I work for pays me for two weeks off every year, I thought I'd be stupid not to take advantage of it. It's also a good test for me, as I do have a hard time thinking about non-work related topics.

On this momentous week off, I'm not traveling (unless you count a couple of days in Hilton Head visiting the sister and now-six-month-old nephew), so I had to make a to-do list to keep myself from going stir-crazy, watching TV around the clock, and taking six naps a day.

First, I'm going to strip the preposterously hideous wallpaper in the kitchen and bath that has been shouting ugly since we moved in (seriously, it's "80s calling, they want their walls back" bad...borders and all). Then I'm going to paint them - Summer Tomato in the kitchen, Sour Lime in the bath. If you know me, you also know this is a project that I would normally HIRE someone to do. Be impressed.

I think that might take the week, but just in case it doesn't I also have a two-page list of errands I've neglected (a pile of clothes to take to have altered, ordering contact lenses, firing my shrink, writing thank you notes for CHRISTMAS gifts, transferring credit card balance to a lower interest card, calling the cable company to see if our monthly bill would go down if we had fewer than FIVE HUNDRED movie channels, and so on).

I'm already having work-withdrawal.