Image by Paulo Brandão via Flickr

I just returned from a glorious two week vacation, the longest vacation I’ve taken in my entire life (unless you count when I was really little and had no clue what was going on). Husband had some use it or lose it vacation time and it turned out to be cheaper to do two weeks in one place then two different vacations spread out so we decided to just go whole hog.

When we first scheduled it, we were afraid it would be too close to Christmas break and that we wouldn’t be ready for a vacation yet but after all the snow we had around here, we were more than ready to get out of town. Florida obliged us with a couple of warm hours here and there and, hey, sitting on a beach in 3 layers of long sleeve shirts and pants is still sitting on a beach in February, damn it! 🙂 We also ate way more food than is necessary or healthy and generally had a really fantastic time. Best of all? Now that we are back, there’s almost no time left until Spring!

Spring = Hillary can open the windows. Hillary with windows open = ludicrously happy Hillary.

Right before we left for vacation, several things happened at once that sort of altered the course of both my career and how this year is going to go. It’s nothing massive but it has rearranged my plans and priorities for the year in a very good but unexpected way. Because of the timing, I came back from vacation to not only my old life but this strange new life that I’m still trying to figure out. In a way, part of this change was the part time gig I left in December so at least I had a few weeks to get used to that part of the change but its going to be a steep learning curve and adjustment period.

This is where the title of my post comes in. Because I have this feeling of anticipation, this very calm feeling before I face all the insanity of all this new work and routine. Until I get used to it, this new routine is going to kick my butt but the thing that is sort of making it that much more scary is that this isn’t a storm, a one time freak occurrence. This is the new normal. And while I’m 100% sure I’ll get used to it and it will become mechanical, right now, it’s scary.

But not scary like I want to run and hide. More like sword in hand facing down the dragon freaking BRING IT scary.

Anyway, I’m going to stop being cryptic soon, I promise. Well, mostly. 🙂

But in the vein of hitting the ground running, I was asked to be on eBay Radio (again) today so if you have a chance to listen in, that’d be great!