While the date of this post will be July 24th, a Friday, I am actually writing it on August 6, a Thursday, two weeks later.

On that Friday, I was looking at my “Today I choose” chain and wondering how I was going to keep it going while I was on vacation at the inlaws’ cottage. Making conscious choices is hard enough on a given day, and when you’re thrown into a shared-space environment of joint decision-making about meals and times, or even activities, it is sometimes less stressful and more harmonious to just choose to go with the collective flow rather than try to make conscious decisions to “go my way”. On top of that, I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to keep blogging consistently. And there is the escape phrase of “it’s a vacation” to excuse all laziness.

The short answer as it turned out was that I wasn’t going to be able to do either very well. So I made a conscious decision, a “choice” on the 24th of July, to break the chain at 9 days of choices, a new record.

Over the course of my vacation, and my return, I still made some conscious choices. One of them is about my computer setup, which I’ll post about later tonight.

I also actively tried to read “more”, and ended up binge-reading 7 books in a series (I Am Number Four, by Pittacus Lore, which is way better than the movie). Jacob was reading them too so it was fun to go through them sort of together.

I did some photography of the night sky just with my tripod and iPhone, no telescope involved. NEOWISE was missing in action, but I got to play with shots of the moon, Saturn and Jupiter, the Big Dipper, and star trails around Polaris. I’ll post about those sometime soon too.

And I reached out to my family in Peterborough to try and get together for a socially distanced lunch, and managed to do so with my brother Don. Not the most uplifting of experiences, but it was good to see him.

Oh, and Andrea and I got to check out a pub in Norland near the cottage that we’ve been wanting to go to for a couple of years and timing was never quite right. Plus, no word of a lie, you normally need reservations. It’s small and popular. One of Jacob’s short-term bucket list items was to go to a restaurant again, so we ate on the patio at the pub and the food was quite good.

A good vacation, extended by an extra day on the end, and then back to work this week on the Tuesday. A little rough on the re-integration, and I’ve been feeling a bit of separation anxiety, so to speak, with my computer being in the shop. I wanted to work on a couple of projects that are just way too painful to try and do on the laptop, and when I was at the cottage, my laptop’s wifi wasn’t even connecting. Now that I have the PC back and can get going again, I feel like I’m able to work on a couple of fun things. Just as soon as I reinstall all the software. Sigh.

Today (okay, actually 13 days ago from when I’m writing it) I choose to break the chain and just “be” for the next two weeks.

What choices are you making?