The five of you that regularly read this probably noticed that I went dark for most of last week. I took a vacation from work and decided–beyond getting my daily bike ride–I was going to take a real break. I kept up on webcomics, but I mostly unplugged from the daily news. I didn’t do my hobby coding, nor did I write much.

The closest that I came to work is that I made a big dent in what will probably be the next 100 Hour Review. Other than a few nights of drinking, I didn’t do much of anything. I realized around the time that I stopped having a writing gig that I have had two jobs since I went back to college in 2006. Now writing isn’t as demanding as my day job, but it did get harder to stay motivated to write tutorials after working 50-60 hour weeks.

Even on vacations, I was usually working on hitting deadlines. I am already not the best with time management so that meant a lot of late nights hammering away on the keyboard. This space has been nice to just stretch out and write. The lack of structure to most things allows me to do everything from criticism to exploratory essays.

I occasionally toy with the idea of making a real go at freelancing and pitching articles when I have time to write them. Though I miss being on staff at a website, I find a lot of time this small space serves as a methadone for overworking myself. I actually made a dent in writing some actual fiction, so for now, I go back to being a hopeful amateur.

I haven’t really done a traditional check-in blog post for awhile, so I thought this would be a nice way to ease back into it. I have another couple of Python Diaries to catch up on, and the links keep coming. Putting 25 hours of my time off into a video game means the next book review is also a bit out.

I was going extol the virtues of unplugging, but that’s dumb. You already know the grind that you’d like to slip away from. Whether it’s the dumb crap you see on social media, or it’s just finding out exactly how far down the dipshit rabbit hole politics has gone today–you already know that embracing the slack for some time can help you get your mind right.