Inside the Break

Today is Thanksgiving, and aside from the really awesome time we are having staying in a haunted room at The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park (SO AWESOME. We keep accidentally interrupting various tours as they stop outside our room to tell about the guy who evidently wants to steal my wedding ring and push Brandus out of bed, and we’ve heard a whole host of weird noises – bells and knocking and drawers opening and the closet door that does it’s own thing..), I’m having an even more awesome time having an ENTIRE WEEK OFF.

It’s sad, in all honesty. I like my job in a general sort of way (if you’ve been reading any length of time at all, teaching and I have a very turbulent relationship. We’ve broken up several times and I’m constantly considering divorce), and in all honesty and with no humility whatsoever, I’m pretty damn good at it.

But.

I’m so much happier and more relaxed when I’m not teaching. I manage to quilt and cook and can things. I write and I clean and I run errands. I’m not exhausted all the time – during teaching weeks and weekends, it’s all I can do to read through tumblr and drown myself in fanfiction after Voldemort goes to bed. The house is constantly a disaster and the cooking is generally massively subpar and involves little time and much stress. Those other things (quilting, canning, etc) sometimes happen, but with much less focus and sometimes involve going upstairs to the office and staring blankly at whatever I want to be working on until I finally just go back downstairs and eat toasted freezer waffles and nutella.

I can’t quit. I’m currently the sole bread-winner, and even though we live just fine on my salary alone, we can’t exactly go without ANY salary.

But I dream about it.

The time to be at home. To make stuff. To work on things that interest me. To actually be able to go to the grocery store by myself and cook the things I’d like to have the energy to cook. Voldemort is seven and in school all day, so it’s not like I’d be doing the whole kid-raising thing all week long.

Would I start going stir crazy after a few months? Probably. But I’d really love the chance to find out.