In a week from tomorrow, I’ll be going on vacation. I’ll have some errands to run in the morning, including getting a blood test and doing some grocery shopping, but then I’ll be loading myself up for a trek northward to spend some time in a cabin in the woods with two of my siblings and one of their partners who’ll actually only be there for part of the trip. It’ll mostly be my siblings and I. I’ve also got additional time off of work after that, for post-trip recovery, resting up in my place of ultimate comfort (such that it is), and probably trying to get through my massive backlog of books, movies, and video games. A week of escapism, in as many ways as possible, followed by a week of rest and reordering of my life in whatever ways I can think of while also playing a bunch of video games, reading whatever books I’ve got left from the first part of the trip, and probably watching Delicious in Dungeon since I should be all caught up on A More Civilized Age by then. The possibilities are not exactly endless, but they’re pretty enormous, considering most of my two-week vacations over the past decade have been in the winter, around the holidays, and have suffered from the emotional angst that goes with them. This time, it’s all summer and all freedom to rest or do whatever. Maybe I’ll even stream! There’s so much I could be doing.

The first two things I’ll be doing, though, are working on the next entries for my book club. Now that I’m through Dune and Dune Messiah, I’m finally moving on to a fun, relaxing book that will at least be a pleasure to read, followed by the start of a video game trifecta. First, technically for the month of June since we’ve fallen a bit behind, we’re reading Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, one of my favorite novels by him (I’m the only one who has read it and I don’t mind reading it again, even if I’ve fallen off the Sanderson train a bit in recent years after he opened his entire collection of books to being a part of a multiverse/cosmology, which is one of my least favorite things anyone can do). After that (and alongside it, technically), I’m playing Dragon Age: Origins since our book for July is actually a video game. We’ll be playing through the Dragon Age games, one every other month, as we prepare for whatever is coming in the fourth game, Dragon Age: Veilguard. I suggested we do those every other month rather than monthly so we’ve got the time to play them without rushing things too much, considering how long each of the games is and how many other games I want to play. If we tried to play those each in a month, I’d have no time for any other gaming! I’d also probably burn out incredibly quickly.

Once those two things are done, or alongside playing Dragon Age I guess, I’ll be moving on to other books and other games. I’ve got Unicorn Overlord to keep working through, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door to play in its entirety, and so many other games to go back and finish. And that’s all for games I’ve bought in the last year. I’ve still got an extensive Steam library full of things I’ve always wanted to play but never quite gotten around to enjoying. I might be able to make a solid dent in some of those, considering a lot of them are shorter narrative-focused games. I’ll need the distractions, after all, since it’ll be difficult not to think about work and where all my projects fall in regards to their deadlines. Taking two weeks off feels irresponsible still, but I think I’ve convinced myself I need the rest if I’m going to keep this marathon going for the next nine months or however long it’ll take to be done. We’ve been going for seven already and I’m so burned out that I’m not sure nine more is actually possible, even with this rest…

In the mean time, though, I’ve got a bit of blog business to set up. I’ll have another post set up for the Friday I depart on my vacation (a week and a day after this post goes live), but I’m going to take a full week off new posts. I’ll share a few of my favorites again, just to put something up here every day, but I expect that I’ll be much more absent than usual. Which I’m sure none of you can see or tell, except for the one or two of you who regularly like my posts or occasionally comment (and know that I appreciate you for being an active reader), but even then I’ll still probably be around enough to reply or whatever. I’m not going to lose myself in some deep and fathomless forest. Just a comfortable cabin in the woods, complete with TV, air conditioning, and reliable power. I’m not trying to completely escape life, after all. Just the stressful bits.