Posted Sep 6, 2023
I honestly can’t remember when I last went this long without working; maybe before I even started working? So like…15 years ago? Perhaps I’m exaggerating and I had some longer stints without work during my high school or college times, but certainly not since then. I suppose technically I didn’t have a job between August and December of 2018 when I moved to Barcelona, but since I was treating learning frontend development like a full-time job and doing my courses 40ish hours a week, it doesn’t really feel like it was time off.
Anyway.
I’m excited! It doesn’t really feel real yet! I’m a little anxious about getting done all the things I want and need to before we leave!1 I have probably 5 different Notion pages at this point which are dedicated to organizing some specific part of this endeavor, from the beforehand to-dos to the rough outline of the road trip we want to take to the lists of things to do and souvenirs to bring. But mostly, I just feel surprised that it’s suddenly so soon.
Summer really feels like it flew by, and I feel like I didn’t squeeze as much out of it as I wanted to, somehow. I think part of that is due to the 3ish-week period in which the weather was too crappy to spend time at the lake, but it’s not like there were no days of good weather. I did make it to the lake several times and baked in the sun like the happy little lizard I am at heart, but it doesn’t feel like enough. I climbed at least once a week, I had brunches that turned into full-day(-drinking) affairs, I worked, I went to clubs, I played D&D, I danced with my friends on a truck at CSD, I did karaoke, I continued practicing making latte art (and failing), I bullied a lot of people in drinking Berliner Luft with me… on paper, it looks like I did a decent amount of things. But it still doesn’t feel like much! And now, with summer ending and my sabbatical trip coming up, it really feels like I should be cramming in as many activities as possible.
On the one hand, I do look forward a lot to the things that are coming up — seeing family and friends in the States, the road trip, fall weather, hosting my annual Halloween party, escaping somewhere warm for a month of the winter, all of these are things I will definitely savor when they come. On the other hand, I love Berlin summer, and I’m sad to be letting it go without having wrung every last drop of enjoyment out of it. I’m not even sure why I have that impression, since I’ve been actively planning and seeking out activities that make me happy! It kinda seems like my standards for how much I have to do to consider that I’ve “properly” enjoyed a season are not in line with the reality of how much I have the energy and ability to do in a given period of time.
All of that being said, I have a hard deadline in 2 weeks when we catch that flight, so I guess I better get on all those to-do lists of mine 🏃♀️
We’re going to the States for most of the time we’re off work, with a week back in Berlin to settle in before getting back to our usual schedules. ↩