vacation needed

I start vacation tomorrow and I am in such desperate need of a break in the action. It's been a long time since I've been able to take a break at work and I can see how the pull has been affecting my attitude at work from time to time. The constant grind has made me a bit short with others, oddly glib at times, and, most serious of all, really cut into the blogging. This has been a challenge because I've never done anything meaningful that didn't have a predetermined end, kind of like school

Obviously, work doesn't reset to a new semester every 16 weeks. That short term nature was one of the reasons I enjoyed school. It had well-defined beginning and ending points and specific objectives were to be achieved during the semester that allowed me to keep a pretty good focus on the purpose of being there. Sure, there were always broader matters that carried over the entire year or many years. However, the overarching purpose of being in college was to graduate and there were specific tasks to complete in order to do so.

Work has some specific tasks too, but the stance I've adopted to what I should be doing goes something like this: whatever is necessary to help the district, and specifically the department I'm in, run. The result is that I do a little bit of a lot of things. Actually I do a lot of a lot of things. In short, I plug holes that other people leave behind (even though they shouldn't). This vacation is a sort of test, but not a test for me, or at least not directly anyway. It's not my test because I don't have to actually take it. My new department manager and my successor field engineer are taking the test of living without me for a week. The test for me is if I have sufficiently helped my new manager adjust to Farmington and provided him with all the local information he needs to do his job. The test for me is if I have prepared the next field engineer well enough to do what I do. I guess I find out if I pass in 10 days. (Or I'll find out sooner since I'm taking my work laptop on vacation to be able to answer e-mails and explain anything that needs explaining.)

In a way, I have made myself too useful. Go back to the last paragraph of March 13 to see what I mean. And the process of doing so has involved responsibility upon responsibility, often self-imposed responsibilities. And that is burning me up. And now, vacation awaits.