Toast Note - 26 October 2017

As I prep for a vacation in India, I am struck once again by how flipping difficult it is to go on holiday. We just don’t make this easy. The culprit – as it is so often – is the Busy Boogeyman. There are these obligations – at home, at work, with our families, banks, creditors, peers, friends – that recur with such alarming frequency that a mere 3 week vacation requires a mountain of pre-work. It’s like I have to stress out for two weeks, go on holiday for three, then stress out cleaning shit up for another two weeks. I’m pretty sure all this effort defeats the point.

My lifehacker resources tells me that it is too late to salvage this vacation. To make this work, you have to make a whole lot of tiny changes way the heck in advance. For example: put all your bills on auto pay, stop getting paper copies of anything, train your second in command at work, maintain an up-to-date handover plan, keep your travel documents and meds sorted assuming you’ll have to go anywhere within 2 weeks, kick the kids out of the house, move into a condo, don’t replace dead pets. See? Easy peasy.

I know Aeron and Dulcinea (the cat) will manage to feed themselves -- they are both just short of feral already. Brook and the team at work will thrive notwithstanding the fact that I’ll have exactly 2 days to train my replacement. Jaime and Mera will not even notice we’re gone, and Carol and Deb will keep sending me snaps, chats, and memes with no real concern with where I am physically. History tells me the real victim in this vacation is going to be my garden. I just cannot figure out how to digitally water seedlings from halfway around the world. Gods help my daughter if those thyme seedlings are dead when I get back.

“A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in.” ~ Robert Orben