Showing posts with label vacation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vacation. Show all posts

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Back From Vacation and Looking for Suggestions

Now that my trip is over (to New England to see father, sister, brother, offspring--and their offspring--and my jaunt to the EPIC writer's convention--where I did not win the award), I have returned to real life and realize precisely how much stress my real life involves and how overextended I am.

This 10-day trip was my first vacation in 6 years. That should have been the first indicator of the degree of my out-of-control lifestyle/schedule. The second tip-off was the fact that I did next to no writing and actually forgot to call the office on a couple of days. Since I own two businesses, that probably wasn't a good idea. Fortunately, my staff is quite capable and handled things without me. Thank God I'm not indispensable. (I learned that lesson about 7 years ago. So, okay, I'm a slow learner...)

My youngest daughter and I had a conversation about addictive personalities recently. I mentioned, in all seriousness, that I was fortunate to have escaped my family's genetic predisposition to such a thing. She asked, in equal seriousness, "How would you classify workaholic?" Her point hit home: like a sledgehammer.

So here I am, pondering a number of serious issues, the most important of which involves the fact that each day of my life contains 24 hours and that I have to quit jam-packing a day with 34 hours of stuff to do. The second serious issue is correcting my mistaken understanding that requiring less sleep as a person ages does not equal the actual elimination of sleep in order to secure more hours to do stuff.

I will keep you posted on the results of my new "plan" and welcome your advice and suggestions about how to reduce the number of "important" duties/responsibilities in my life and how to focus more on me (aka being selfish) and less on other people (aka being nice and kind).

NOTE: Picture #1 shows the Mississippi River Bridge in the background. My sister and I were at the Riverwalk in the French Quarter. Picture #2 shows the congratulatory flowers my husband sent me BEFORE the award-winners were announced. He figured I was a winner no matter what the EPIC conference judges said. (He's a keeper.)