I took a few days off recently to get a break from work. I've rarely taken time off since last winter, often working weekends, and I could feel the stress building. So I arranged for a few guest editorials and scheduled last Thursday and Friday off. My wife was sure I'd be firing up the computer and working a bit, but I really tried to avoid that.
So I tiled my bathroom.
This was my bathroom last week before I started. An ugly, gray carpet that the builder had put into the house. It was in the whole house, including the 4 bathrooms, when we moved in. I had tiled the other 3 baths the first year we lived there, but had avoided our master bath since the room is used so much.
And it's a big project, about 95sq ft of floor space. But I thought I could get it done in 4 days, Thur-Sun, if I had nothing else to do. My wife was planning on being gone to some horse event, and the kids were in school a couple days, and could hang out with friends over the weekend.
As I started to write down my plan and get a list ready to go shopping, my wife asked if I really wanted to spend my vacation working around the house. Wasn't there something else I'd rather do? Go out, do something, see a ball game, etc. There are some things I'd do, but what I was saving vacation for was to do a lot of snowboarding this winter. Since it's too early to do that, and I needed a break, I thought this would be simple, mindless work that would give me a sense of satisfaction.
I ended up losing all of Thursday to other chores and shopping for supplies. That meant that Friday was devoted to ripping out carpet and getting the underlayment down. Then Saturday was cutting and gluing tiles. I didn't finish, and that actually moved into Monday to get the last few tiles done, but I had started grouting and here was the current state on Sunday night when I knocked off.
My wife asked me if I felt better, and was it a good vacation? I said it was. Despite a sore lower back and knee, despite some nicks and cuts, and a lot of up and down the stairs, I felt like I accomplished something.
I still get satisfaction from going in the other bathrooms, and seeing the work I've done, and I still like driving by the 1000' fence I built in our last house. Those projects stand out to me and give me a sense of accomplishment that pushing bits around doesn't.
I'll post a more detailed look at the project on my personal blog for those that are interesting in how an amateur lays tile, but the final total looks like this:
I'm taking the next two days off, heading down into the basement for a four day weekend. Nothing particular going on, just a little stressed with life. Between work here and a busy life with kids, I realized a few weeks ago that I was feeling stressed. So I decided to take a few days off. I would have done it then, but it's a little hard at times to get coverage for the site here on short notice.
That's changing, and I realized it's an issue. I've been working with a few guest writers to cover the editorial content, and I'm trying hard to keep a 2-3 week schedule on content so that if I need to take a day off, I can. Hopefully it will be easier to do this moving forward.
I have no great plans. My wife will be gone Friday for some horse thing (and all weekend), kids in school, so I think I'll actually tackle a project around the house; something non-technology related around the house.
After we bought our house, I started working on various things, but one project I was proud of was tiling our bathrooms. We have 4 in the house, and after an accident our first week in the house, we knew that the carpet which had been put in there by the previous owners wouldn't do. I tiled my daughter's bathroom. It was the smallest one, it worked well, and my wife was pleased. So I then did the boys' bathroom, and while it was a little more involved, it worked. A few months later I tackled the guest bathroom, and things were looking good.
I never got around to the master bath, mostly because it's a big project, and the kids tend to use our shower/bath regularly. That's changing now with kids getting older, and with my wife gone, next weekend is a good time to lay tile. It's a messy job, so don't expect me to respond to many emails or notes over the weekend. I'll be up to my elbows in ceramic chips and dust.
See you Monday!
Today is the first day that I've really had any significant time on the computer over vacation. That probably sounds like it should be the rule, and it does tend to be, but this is the first time in a long time that I've let go of SQLServerCentral for a week and allowed others to be responsible for editorials, scheduling newsletters, everything! Typically I've done some work beforehand to be prepared.
Being busy with my nephews and family has kept me going, and it's been great wandering around the northern DC/southern Maryland area. I've had the chance to catch up with my brother, Mom, and other family. Only with my son being gone to a leadership conference, and my daughter sleeping in, do I have time to write a little bit.
And I've missed it. Not the work, but the writing. Perhaps I'm more done as a technology guy than I realized.
It’s rare that I’ve taken vacation in the last few years. In fact, when I took an unwired week in June 2007, that was probably the first vacation where I didn’t have a computer to check on work in 5 or 6 years. However throughout the rest of 2007 and 2008 I rarely got away. That weighed on me a bit, especially as I struggled to get in skiing during the 07/08 winter with my kids. I ended up working early in the am, going out with them for the day and working at night quite a few times.
In late ‘08 that changed, with quite a few people coming onboard the Simple Talk publishing team at Red Gate and I started scheduling a day off a week. Actually that and the fact I was going to lose some vacation got me motivated to take some time off.
So to date, I’ve taken almost one day a week off since late November and a whole week off the first week of February, barely checking any email or posting anything to SQLServerCentral. Then this past weekend, my family and I traveled out to Steamboat Springs as well for another weekend. Some good snowboarding for me, closing on 20 days this year, and I’ve really enjoyed it.
It’s also recharged me, which I hadn’t expected. I hate leaving work undone, and I like to have a long pipeline, usually 3-4 weeks, so all the recent travel has messed that up, but surprisingly I haven’t worried too much about it.
Instead I’ve enjoyed the time off with family, gotten some exercise, and tackled some projects around the home. And I’ve just come back to work and buckled down to get things done.
I’m certainly not caught up, but I’m getting there and looking forward to a few more days of snow this spring.
After taking off 2 days last week for Thanksgiving, and outsourcing 3 editorials (Thanks to Phil Factor and Tony Davis), I feel like a slacker today. It's been almost six years that I've been writing the editorials and running the site full time. That's well over 1,000 editorials and it's rare that I'ev missed a day in that time. Granted some have been slacker (bloopers, Holiday poems, and more) than others, but still I've had to put them together.
It's been two years since Red Gate purchased the site and in that time I've still rarely had anyone else doing work on the site. Some of that is resource issues, and some is my control freak nature. I have a hard time letting go, and even on vacation this weekend I struggled to not check on things. I'll admit that I even answered a few posts on Thur and Fri.
And I worried about the site. I know it's irrational, and it doesn't make sense, but I still worried.
I was thinking about that as I drove the kids to the bus this morning and listened to the radio. I kind of alternate between ESPN radio, the local sports station, a couple local radio stations and my iPod. However I have favorite people on the radio (Jim Rome, Dan Patrick, etc), just as I used to have favorite newscasters (Tom Brokaw) and favorite talk show hosts (David Letterman, Jay Leno, etc.). And all of those guys take vacations, in fact some of them get 4 or 5 weeks off a year. And their shows don't suffer, in fact they're probably better.
It's something I need to learn, and something that I hope to get better at next year. I sold back some vacation this year because I couldn't take it, but I'm looking to take some over the winter to ski with kids and perhaps even disappear for a whole week next year.
Baby steps
I got back Friday afternoon from the PASS Summit and immediately was busy with family stuff. In fact, through Saturday night I was spending time with the family and running around. It wasn't until today that I had a chance to relax.
And I did so, avoiding chores and things that needed to be done to lay around and help my wife with some horse stuff and then watching football. However I dreaded going into Monday with a busy week and having a lot of stuff left over.
So with the kids laying in bed with me watching TV (football got turned off), I decided to start working my way through the various queues I have on the site. I started with scripts because those are mostly just approvals and scheduling a few here and there, but then I got going and decided to get more done. I got through the Question of the Day queue, which requires more thought to reword questions, think abuot the issues with them, pick points, etc. I finished those and then even added a few others I wrote to try and make sure I was ahead. I had enough for this week, but since I'm going on vacation later this week, I decided to get a few done for next week as well.
Since the kids were happy laying with me, my wife was outside, and it was early, I moved on to articles. As an editor, one of my main jobs is editing articles. I try to get those done when they come in, but honestly I hate going through articles. So many of them that I get are in pretty bad shape that they require a lot of time to edit. There are even times my comments are close to the size of what's written. I try to coach people on how to write better, but that requires a lot of work. There are only a few people (David Poole, Jacob Sebastian, and 4 or 5 others) that I don't have to edit at all, or that I trust their work. I tend to give them a spell check and quick read, but otherwise let them go.
Trying to get ready for PASS last week, I avoided a few articles and as a result, I had 12 articles in my queue, plus a few more in email that I needed to examine. Since I knew this would mess up my writing tomorrow, and I need to write while the kids are gone and it's quiet, I decided to tackle a few.
I got through 2, which wore me out since those needed comments to authors for re-work, and I almost stopped. Then I got a third that looked good and I could make minor corrections and edits and put into the approved pile. Now I'm stuck on one that needs coaching, though it's not bad, so I'll finish that one up and call it a night.
I've been in Seattle since Friday afternoon and I've pretty much ignored SQL Server. And it's been nice!
I came up early with my son, Delaney, who turns 10 next week. Every year I've just made it home for his birthday, with the PASS conference that typically is a week earlier than it is this year. Or it seems to fall that way. This year when I saw that the conference overlapped his birthday, I knew I needed to do something special.
He's a lucky kid, and doesn't need material stuff for a present, but he likes the military and planes. I've wanted to bring him up to Seattle, but since this is a long week for me, I've avoided it most years. This year I decided to change that and so we planned this trip in the summer and he came up with me Friday, going home Monday morning. We've gone to the Museum of Flight, the Pacific Science Museum, been through an Underground tour, which was interesting for me. We drove around Seattle, enjoyed some good food and jammed out at the Experience Music Project. We made a Seahawks game and rode the monorail downtown. It's been a fun weekend, and I'm ready to head back to work.
Sure I did a little, send newsletters, answered a few questions while Delaney was watching TV, and checked email tonight. And I'm writing this, but overall, it's been a fairly unwired weekend, which was needed and deserved before a very, very busy week for me.
