Just sit down and write

My life doesn't really allow much time for calm reflection. As I write this, I'm in an almost-empty house. It's basically pretty quiet, except for the two 5-year-old girls screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. Well, actually, it's just the Young Daughter who's screaming. She does that a lot. That's how she earned the nickname Diva of Decibels. The other little girl, YD's best friend, generally gets her points across more quietly.

The rest of the group is out at a local water park. YD and I aren't much into water parks, so we stayed home.

I'm on "vacation" this week. It's my first extended time off since last year's family trip to Washington, D.C. It comes at the end of a(nother) marathon travel stretch, the kind of travel I thought I was going to be able to avoid after having been promoted. The deal was that, rather than project trips lasting 5-8 days, I'd be doing support-type stuff and management schmoozes lasting a day or two each. That's basically true. However, I just did five of them in the last three weeks.

My 20-year high school reunion will be held this weekend in Anytown. I won't be there. A small part of me wishes I was going; I'd love to renew some of those connections and hear what these people are up to. But that small part has been drowned out by the larger part, the part that doesn't want to see the interior of another aircraft for a good long time. I'm tired of talking to my wife and kids on the phone.

I'm still taking the week off. There's a garage to clean, walls to paint, kids to watch. It's nice to prioritize those sorts of things above work, for a little while.

I've been thinking a lot about writing. I've been thinking I just need to sit down and tap keys for a while, just to see what comes out. I've certainly had some interesting experiences the last few weeks, the kind that in years recently past I would have chronicled almost immediately.

In fact, I just spent the last 20 minutes chronicling one of them before giving it the Click-Drag-Delete treatment. After writing it all down, I decided it just wasn't that interesting.

Not all that long ago, I had a voice in this forum. I can go through the archives and see that time was when I could sit down and construct a series of coherent sentences. I've learned many things in the last two years: How to install and manipulate a database, how to manage an enterprise-wide software installation project, how to get a flight on another airline when my originally scheduled flight is hopelessly delayed, how to read and speak rudimentary Danish and French.

Somewhere along the way, however, I seem to have forgotten how to appreciate the things going on around me. That's a skill I need to regain.