. . . in the distant, early morning . . .

Ahh, time off..

Allow me to preface this by saying that I love my job.  It started as a hobby and has lead to an extremely fulfilling career with an incredible company and a team that goes above and beyond constantly.  I absolutely, 100%, love my work.

. . . and . . .

I think I took a week off some years ago. Other than that a day here or there, two days to go to the coast, and I ended up working on one of them.  I was doing great, then we released the public beta.

The lead up to the public beta was busy.  But the post-release response was incredible and just… exhausting.  Fun, one of the most fun times I’ve had - but exhausting, all the same.

I knew pretty quickly that I needed some time off.  Initially I had asked for only 3 days off, and then I sent another email asking if I could have an extra week as well.  The entire team is incredible and my request was granted.  People are covering my various roles and I’m so grateful that I work for an incredible team and that alone is making this possible.

Officially my leave begins on Monday, but we get Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off, so I set up my auto-responders today, and did something that I hadn’t done since 2004: I logged out.

I logged out of ExpressionEngine.com, EllisLab.com, CodeIgniter.com, and our sales system.  I disabled my work IM accounts and I disabled my work email accounts.

I haven’t logged out of all of that since I downloaded ExpressionEngine on May 15, 2004.

It feels good.  Kind of nerve-wracking: what the heck am I going to do with the next 2.5 weeks?!  But I need this, and so I’m doing it.  Chris arrives Saturday evening; we have no concrete plans, but we’ll figure stuff out.

Having nothing to do is a strange and yet nice feeling.

-Lisa, on December 23, 2009 at 7:26 pm

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