Vacation is good!

I haven't worked in over a week on anything that risks bringing in income or affecting the way I teach my class next semester, and I've gotta say it's been nice. (Yeah, I'll be "on vacation" the rest of this week, but I have a couple of consulting jobs on the back burner that I'll knock out in the next couple of days.)

This vacation started when I thought I was flying to Los Angeles last Monday, when in fact my flight wasn't until Tuesday evening. I took some vacation hours I sort of wished I hadn't used that way, but it meant that I could sort of practice chilling for a few hours in preparation for intentionally not logging into the work websites for the next several days. (I took my laptop with me to LA so I could follow my favorite RSS feeds and play solitaire on it, but I never checked the office email and I answered only one relevant to my consulting in a whole week away from home.)

Today's vacation activity has been all about getting home from Christmas. When DD was home in November, she compared the Christmas event at her dad's house as sort of a matter of those who had money getting it out and passing it one person to the left since more specific "gifts" are sort of not on the menu. I wasn't sure how to take that: did she mean she'd rather not exchange gifts at all for Christmas? Or did she mean that a bit of shopping for them could be a good thing?

Hitting the stores with her helped answer that, and while I wasn't in a mood to spring for the Wii she and PC would have liked (having just put four new tires on my car the day before we left), I was happy to pick up the tent she thought she and he could use, and when she spotted a nifty cast-aluminum griddle, I tucked it in, too.

Turns out she not only looked forward to exchanging gifts but she had some spot-on ideas, too. She had been concerned that NOS hadn't upgraded his cell phone in maybe three years, so he was using an old instrument that couldn't take advantage of the web access on our family phone plan. Taking a chance on his particular taste, we stopped by a shop and got a bargain on a new phone that she thought was sophisticated enough and I thought might be durable enough to make him happy.

Buying a new phone meant diverting his service from his old one, so we wondered whether he would make it to Christmas without pitching a fit about its not working in the interim, but as it turned out, he wasn't the one who couldn't wait that long: Friday morning before he woke up, his best buddy called and left a hysterical message on his voice mail. I had plugged in the phone to charge it the night before, and I woke up earlier than NOS Friday morning and listened to the message to see whether he was missing anything significant. Later in the morning, I played it back for DD, who couldn't stand the wait: she turned up the volume, started the message, and held it to his ear to wake him up.

We couldn't have done better; once he figured out that the phone was his, he went to work to learn how to use it, and even at home today he was bubbling over about how cool it is. If he's worried about "lack of durability," he certainly hasn't indicated that. We did good.

While DD and I were plotting for a new cell phone for NOS, he and PC were out shopping for me. DD and PC had been out of ideas for me for some time, but NOS has lived with me for over a year now, and they were counting on him for something that would work. I had somewhat casually mentioned that the slide show screensaver on my laptop is boring because it doesn't shuffle the pictures for me, so I was thinking about getting an electronic photo frame that would let me see my pictures all the time. He passed that word along to PC, and off they went to the electronics store.

The one they bought me was much nicer than I'd have gotten myself, and PC had found time to copy pictures from his and DD's cameras into the memory so I could "plug and play" as soon as I got the frame. DD observed that it wouldn't turn itself to show off vertical pictures very well, and I'd have to learn to take pictures in "wide view" to fit the wide display, but outside of that, she thought it was pretty cool, too.

This afternoon I decided to see what I could do about getting my own pictures into the frame and making them fit. I sort of stumbled into a photo editor that I had to learn to use, but it's got a pretty good handle on fine tuning and red-eye reduction, so I figured it was worth the effort. I wasn't at all sure how to get the right aspect ratio to make the pictures fit the frame, but I sort of eyeballed them to get as close as I could without losing to much of the detail.

The whole project took hours—literally—to get the photos the way I wanted them, and I've spotted several that maybe I need to work on again. But the upshot is that the new editor parks the photos in the screensaver file on the laptop, so now all my screensaver photos are cropped and edited, too.

I'd have never taken time to do this if I hadn't been on vacation, although it's the sort of thing I'd have cheerfully done a few years ago before I began to feel so overwhelmed by work. This vacation has been good!