Outta Here!

Spring Plan is officially behind me, and now I have to turn my attention to packing for vacation.  This feels eerily similar to last year, when I (re)took the GMAT on a Thursday and took off for vacation early the next day.  This time, the source of frustration was work, not a bunch of deceptively tricky basic math problems, but once again I find myself making the rapid transition from chaos to pure, sweet resposibility-less-ness over a span of less than twenty-four hours.  I feel like I need a few days to dip my feet into the pool of relaxation before I dive into the deep end--my head might explode from the radical and rapid shift in mindset.  But it's a risk I'll gladly take.

My approach to packing for this trip mirrored my preparation for all of my past travels, with one notable exception.  Like every other packing endeavor, I have part of an afternoon and an evening to get everything done.  As you can see, my progress as of mid-afternoon amounted to absolutely nothing:

I have many loads of laundry and lots of violent cramming and wadding of clothing in my near future.  The one different thing about this trip?  I'll be going (lap)topless for the duration of the trip.  That's right, no laptop! This will be first experience traveling with an iPhone, and the first time in several years that I've been away from an actual, full-size computer for more than twenty-four hours.

The good news is that even if work tries to call me with lingering follow-up questions about Spring Plan, not only will I ignore the calls, I'll also be completely incapable of logging into any work files.  The bad news: when it comes time to do any extended writing on this trip, I'm going to have to do it the old fashioned way:

Let's just hope I still remember how to write by hand.  But even if I can, it'll be useless if I can't read my own handwriting five minutes after I put something on paper.  As for this blog...well, the consecutive days streak might very well end on this trip.  But I'm much more comfortable seeing it end because of a vacation rather than an unnecessarily long day at the office.

But traveling with an iPhone presents me with an opportunity to make my first foray into mobile blogging, so don't think that Away From The Cubicle will experience a complete blackout for the next two weeks.  I have the Blogger app loaded on the iPhone, and I'm excited to give it a try.  The posts will be insanely short, but I'll do my best to let pictures do the talking.

As I left work today, I couldn't stop smiling as I posted my out of office message in Outlook.  While I'm out, I can only hope that many, many people email me with "urgent" yet completely irrelevant questions:

I'm currently out of the office.  If you have an urgent question, please contact someone who cares.  In my absence, enjoy Christmas in the summer:

With that, I shut down my computer, flipped the sign over, and said goodbye to the office.

Up yours, Spring Plan!