Back from vacation

So I'm back after a well-needed week off from Steem, spent in Montreal seeing some friends, eating well, reading, and trying to catch up on my sleep debt. That last didn't work very well, but I guess small progress is still progress.

This was originally going to be a convention and photography trip, but the closer it came the more tired I got, and it got pared down more and more as it got closer. I didn't quite skip the whole convention, but my participation was mostly limited to meal groups and hanging around in the lobby talking to people. I did skip the whole photography; in fact I left all my gear at home on purpose so as not to be tempted to work.

^{I did take a cell-phone photo of a pizza on the last day.}

Then the pared-down version was supposed to feature some writing and some Inktober and maybe some test plays of Steem Monsters, but those didn't happen either. My tablet computer never left my bag.

This is kind of how travel goes for me - I fill it up with work of some sort or another. Partly because I tend to be more productive when on the road than I am at home. I haven't had a full-bore vacation since a weekend trip to Duluth in 2013 or so, and that one got converted on the fly when I forgot my camera batteries. I'm not sure when the last one that was intended as a non-working vacation was; maybe spring break of 1998, when my home was destroyed by a tornado while I was gone. That might have something to do with why I don't do those much.

This one was kind of the opposite of the 1998 candidate, in that almost nothing changed while I was away. It doesn't seem to have stopped raining for a moment here, consequences from hardfork 20 are still exposing holes in the Steem development philosophy, and Jimmy Butler somehow still hasn't been traded. My own existential exhaustion is only mildly relieved, and while the physical exhaustion needs a little more distance from tiny planes to really know, it seems to be more or less the same as well. That's disappointing.

I didn't exactly come back raring to go. Instead I'm feeling a lack of ambition and worried about the winter, since I don't usually feel the way I do now until mid-December. Hopefully we'll get a little bit of sun before it's all ice all the time, and that will help me to something of a second wind.

Until then, at least I have a backlog of book reviews to write.