Several days before Christmas, encouraged by my mum asking, "when you're going to start your Christmas break", I stopped working and hacking on stuff and started relaxing. Until then, I hadn't realized just how tired I was. I slept quite a few ten hour nights in the following week, and had an enjoyable Christmas break. I'd figured I'd maybe take a week or so's break, and then get straight back to things, but a week on I had no motivation or energy to dig in again whatsoever. So, I decided my break would go on through New Years. New Year's celebrations this year involved curry - something I certainly wouldn't mind it involving again.
Early January brought several days in Sweden, part of planning for an upcoming refactoring of my work/location - there's details on my personal blog, but the short version is that I've accepted a job at a Swedish startup and will be moving there in March. It's not full time, so I'll continue to have time for Perl 6 development. They know about and, happily, are supportive of my involvement in Perl 6 and my continued attendance of Perl conferences.
I spent a weekend in Prague on the way home. I did it by train rather than flying, which was enjoyable. It snowed almost my entire time in Prague, and I caught a cold in the following week, but it was kinda worth it to wander around this beautiful city. Didn't bother studying Czech at all, and sorta got by with speaking Slovak, though some folks heard me speak and immediately concluded English would be easier. :-) Somehow it kinda felt like I was back somewhere I belonged, even though I'd never been there before. I love central Europe, and excited as I am about Sweden, I know I'll miss this part of the world a lot.
Anyway, I eased back into some work in January, but mostly took it quite easy. The happy result is that, come February, I'm finding myself recharged and ready to dig back into things again. I got some nice commits done to Rakudo yesterday, and today I meant to, but instead participated on an interesting thread on p6l and did some other useful meta stuff (like this post). Tomorrow should have plenty of hacking time though, and I'm looking forward to it. I also have a couple of blog posts to do about Vienna.pm-funded Rakudo Days I did in December, but never got around to writing up; thankfully I did make notes on what I did on them. :-) My main focuses from here on will be on:
Anyway, that's what's been up with me. If you take away anything, it's that you may not realize how much you need a break from something until you take it, and if it's not the only thing putting food on the table, then it's probably better to take the needed amount of break and come back revitalized. I guess the other option is to dig back in regardless, but I suspect that's the path to burnout, something I'm quite keen to avoid.
More technical blabbering here soon. :-)
But it is hard to relax when there is so much interesting things to do and to follow...
I found my self being sick with a fever for the third time this year and realized that hey this is not OK, I do need to slow down and relax. It is really important!
