I’ve been putting off taking some kind of vacation for a month now (as of writing this). I started this year knowing that I’d need to spend the first three months focused, working a lot of hours, and not taking any time off to rest because we had a super important deadline we all needed to meet. Then, once we met it, I’d need to stick around for a while in case anything came up during or immediately after the product’s release. That sort of thing doesn’t happen often since my team is really good about doing high-quality work and not missing problems during our first pass, but it does happen sometimes and this project was important enough that I could get called in from any vacation I was taking that didn’t involve me leaving the state. Then all of this planning became reality and I was right on the money until it came time to do the final release meeting for the project. Turns out that this release meeting was delayed for another four-ish weeks due to internal reasons I’m not going to go too deeply into (for the same reasons I don’t talk specifics about my job) while I was working from home due to being ill a week ago (as of writing this). Which means I got to come into the office after all that was done, learn that most of the people I worked on the project with were gone on vacation, and then, after a day of exhausting myself with frustrated spiraling, realize that I could take a whole week off since I’d already told my boss that I had a week of vacation time in the chamber. So I did that and now I’m sitting in my home office, Final Fantasy 14’s title screen music playing in the background, as I write this over the remains of the Chinese food I picked up from the place down the street for my lunch.