12-28-2000

I'm on vacation this week. Glorious do-nothing, be lazy vacation. I've earned this, too many times over this past year and I wish I could take a longer one, but with this project, it simply hasn't been possible. I left email addresses and phone numbers for how to contact me should something happen, but so far, I've only been fielding two or three emails per day and the phone has remained blessedly quiet.

This vacation has been wonderful. Lately, it has been too easy to forget how nice it is to relax. With everything going on, Richard and I often have our weekends planned far in advance, and time to just sit and do nothing has been a rare luxury. I've had a whole week of it, although despite my best intentions, I've not managed to have a completely unproductive day yet.

When I'm on vacation like this, it's easy to start to pretend that it could be like this always - that somehow, I could simply quit my job and stay home. I love my job, really (despite the stress and the hassle and all the complaining I do), but there's also a part of me that wishes so desperately that I didn't have to go back. I love cooking, busying myself in the kitchen and timing it so that the house is full of wonderful scents as Richard walks in the door, home from work in the evenings. I love being able to lie in bed just a little bit longer in the morning, and then taking just a bit more time to savor a cup of coffee over the morning paper. If I didn't have to work, I'd take classes - perhaps join Tae Kwon Do again, perhaps take quilting with my mom, perhaps learn how to build furniture. I know that if I were truly home all the time, I'd be scheduling all sorts of things throughout the day and I'd probably end up just as busy as I am now. But somehow that kind of busy seems infinitely more acceptable then this overwhelming, mind-numbing work-busyness that I'm stuck in the middle of right now.

I realize that even though both of us are earning far more than we need together, we simply couldn't make it on only one salary - not with this house we're building, at any rate. Our plan is to retire as early as we can so that (perhaps by the time we're 50) we will be able to enjoy living instead of working so hard. And part of our goal is to pay off our mortgage as early as we can - another incentive to keep working these high-stress but high-paying jobs. But still, it's hard not to dream of waking up one day and knowing that I don't have to go to work, that I could spend the day puttering in the garden (we *will* have a garden in the new house - we certainly will have the backyard large enough for it!), or sit out on the back deck with my needlework, or whip up curtains for the house, or any of too many options to ponder. And having had just a little taste of it this week means that going back next week is going to be very, very hard to bear.