{"id":9664,"date":"2012-11-17T23:59:16","date_gmt":"2012-11-18T04:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=9664"},"modified":"2012-11-18T00:22:31","modified_gmt":"2012-11-18T05:22:31","slug":"saturday-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=9664","title":{"rendered":"Saturday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/81595350@N00\/8162903163\/in\/photostream\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7262\/8162903163_46d78f7601_z.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m pleased to say that while I <i>did<\/i> absolutely bring my laptop home with me from the office yesterday, and while I <i>have<\/i> glanced at a few e-mails since then &#8212; on the iPad, not the laptop &#8212; I have yet to do any actual <i>work<\/i> beyond that. I still might, if only because I have so much of it to do, and because the end of the year is fast approaching. (I also feel like I need to justify bringing the computer home with me in the first place, after Windows Update caused me to miss my earlier train.) But today I largely ignored it. I don&#8217;t officially go back to work until a week from Monday, and I am, technically, on vacation.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a vacation more in spirit than in deed. I had paid time off I needed to take before the end of the year. My sister, who&#8217;s visiting this weekend, recently went on a cruise to Turkey and Greece, and my parents have taken to travel in recent years as well, now that they&#8217;re both retired (or weeks away from it, in my father&#8217;s case). It must be nice. Apart from a day trip to Danbury, Connecticut, and a few days on campuses in Maryland, I haven&#8217;t been anywhere all year. Even my next work-related trip, if I can set it up, will probably only be somewhere out here on Long Island. The last time I went anywhere, it was to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=7328\">Canada<\/a> for a week a year ago. And before that, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3595\">Vegas<\/a>, which &#8212; and I had to double-check this to be sure &#8212; was way back in 2009. I&#8217;m not looking for any great globe-trekking, but something a little more exciting than a week stuck at home &#8212; of which I&#8217;ve had, several this year, thanks to sickness, weather, and PTO &#8212; would be nice.<\/p>\n<p>This evening, my parents, my sister, and I drove out to Port Jefferson for a birthday dinner for my aunt. The restaurant was okay, but unremarkable &#8212; a dessert sorbet was basically a large, unappealing dish of frozen cranberry juice &#8212; but it was a nice evening.<\/p>\n<p>The rest of the day I spent doing not much of anything. Though I actually <i>wrote<\/i> some, working on the start of a short story, which I haven&#8217;t been doing in way too long. Maybe it was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lectio.ca\/\">Heather<\/a>&#8216;s tales of her recent writing residency, maybe I was just feeling inspired by the prompt I stumbled upon. But it felt good to flex those muscles again, even if I didn&#8217;t end up writing very much. <\/p>\n<p>As much work as I have to do &#8212; and I do &#8212; I think I&#8217;d be rather pleased if I actually spent more of the coming week writing something that didn&#8217;t involve textbook pedagogy and using my &#8220;vacation&#8221; that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m pleased to say that while I did absolutely bring my laptop home with me from the office yesterday, and while I have glanced at a few e-mails since then &#8212; on the iPad, not the laptop &#8212; I have yet to do any actual work beyond that. I still might, if only because I &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=9664\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,52,12],"class_list":["post-9664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-personal","tag-work","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9664"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}