It's been a longish break (22/12/01 - 07/01/02) and I have fully used it to rest, sleep, eat, see friends, move around, and drink, and used it rather little to code (though there's been quite a lot of drafting. I needed it, my last break (including full week-ends) was rather long ago.
To begin with I went celebrate xmas with my parents in Grenoble (south-east of France, in the Alps). We went to a chalet and there was a fair amount of snow and nicely low temperature (-15C, which is circa 258.15K for those of you that can't handle Celsius). Trekking in snowy forests has a way of being very relaxing.
Of course, we ate lots. Oysters, snails, langoustines, salmon, foie gras, various birds, and lots of chocolate; all of that with a fair amount of champagne and various wines and spirits. It was delicious.
My xmas present was a washer/drier, which means that it'll require a lot less organisation to actually have clean clothes. That's infinitely froody.
After that I came back to Paris for some more relaxing, mostly between reading in my bed and going out to bars to see friends. I wish my girlfriend had been around, but she was visiting her sister in Japan and I can see how that would have more appeal than the same old Paris.
New year's eve was fun, with lots of gatecrashing and drunkenness. We originally wanted to go see a friend in Berlin to spend it there, but the guy I was supposed to go there with was ill, and the friend there unfindable. In addition to that, Germany went through a terrible few days of awful cold (down to -50C/223K) so I gave up.
Since then I've basically been doing some more relaxing and slowly catching up on email (yes, I was off the net most of the time).
I can't normally stand that much relaxing, but last year was a tough one (notably with lots of money problems, getting rid of one of the company's partners and all sorts of various unpleasant other things). I feel as if all the tension I accumulated has been slowly dripping out, and that I can start this year afresh. I can only hope that it'll be a nice one, with enough money to get by comfortably enough (which isn't all that much) and time to do other things than work. I wish, dear reader, that yours will be equally good.
PS: interesting coincidence... When I chose the title for this entry, I had no idea that it was going to be entry number 42 :-)
