Thursday, January 13, 2011

Today's fortune: January 13, 2011

Today's fortune: Need adventure and enjoyment? Take a vacation.
I clearly won't be able to take time off work in the near future, so I decided examine what a "vacation" actually is.

Dictionary.com (I have a feeling I'll be using that site a lot during this project) defines a vacation as "a period of suspension of work, study, or other activity, usually used for rest, recreation, or travel; recess or holiday."

Hmm. "Suspension of work." That pretty much means "time off." This definition also seems to exclude weekends, since a weekend really isn't a "suspension of work," per se; it's a pre-scheduled, regularly-occurring event.

An alternate definition is "a part of the year, regularly set aside, when normal activities of law courts, legislatures, etc., are suspended." We do have a holiday, Martin Luther King Day, coming up on Monday. But I still have to work. So no vacation there.

One other alternate meaning is "freedom or release from duty, business, or activity."

I think we have a winner. I'm released from my business every evening, and I get to come home to the freedom of my own house, my wonderful wife, and some delightful cats. I relish my free time.

Especially Sunday mornings. My wife and I have a ritual on Sundays. When we wake up, I go out and get the Sunday paper and Jamie heads to the kitchen to make a simple breakfast (usually toast or something of that caliber). Then we go back to the bedroom. We sit up in bed and read the paper cover to cover. Jamie pores over the ads looking for deals and coupons and I read the sports section while we watch "CBS Sunday Morning."

It's my favorite time of the week. And it's sort of like a tiny vacation each time.

But we do other things, too, to make our free time enjoyable. Tonight, for example, we're heading to a local comedy club to see one of our favorite comedians, John Heffron (if you've never heard of this guy, YouTube him - he's extremely underrated).

In a way, though, this is all a bit of a copout. I have no doubt in my mind the fortune is talking about that first definition - a trip of some kind, and time off work.

I was joking with my trainer at work today that I would need all of next week off to fulfill the fortune. He laughed, and said no, but he also said, "That doesn't mean you have to take a vacation right now."

And he's right. This fortune gives no timeframe.

By this summer, I'll have some vacation days accrued. Jamie will have some, as well.

So we're gonna take a trip. I don't know where, and I don't know when, but we're going. We deserve it. Besides our honeymoon seven and a half years ago, Jamie and I have been on only one real vacation - and that was just a couple nights in New Orleans. And, anybody could use an extra dose of adventure and enjoyment.

I'll be sure to pack enough fortune cookies.

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