Requiem for my vacation…

And here we are… on the final evening of my vacation.

For the first time since I started this job, I am happy to say that the vacation truly relaxed me. I spent the first few days worrying about the office, the release that went out over that first weekend, and whether or not there was any fallout, but after the phone stayed silent and my lines of electronic communication were not roused the guard finally started to lower.

Much of my time spent was used to reconnect with my cousin, John. John and I grew up pretty closely, and while he was working third shift in a foundry I wasn’t able to hang out with him in the evenings as we had so often done prior. He has changed professions, and is now going to school to become a welder so his evenings are once again free, and we capitalized on this opportunity to get back together over the last week.

I also spent a lot of time studying and getting back after some pursuits that I had long marginalized. I worked on my MythTV, rediscovered the joy of emulated and classic gaming, and learned a fair bit about the C# programming language.

And then came the holidays themselves. In our family it is traditional to have Thanksgiving lunch and dinner, and then the following day my grandmother makes totelli (a ravioli like Italian dish stuffed with swiss chard) and we all gather to eat and play euchre until obscene hours. My niece was baptized on Saturday, and add into the mix our usual family dinner on Sunday nights and I had a good solid four days worth of family time. I love my family, but that’s quite enough togetherness for awhile.

Tasha and I tackled a little Christmas shopping today, and ended up hitting one hell of a sale at Borders and completed another quarter of our holiday shopping for about half the price as we had planned. That makes me and my wallet quite happy at this time of year.

I wish every vacation could be so fulfilling! Luckily the return from Thanksgiving is a pretty universal thing at our office, and things should be slowly cycling down for the holiday shutdown. That doesn’t mean I have to be thrilled about heading back, but I’m also not entirely dreading it either.

Only five days left of NaBloPoMo! I was surprised to have such a full topic for tonight! 🙂