“I’m going to have one beer, some mussels, and tater tots for dinner,” I told a friend. “Nothing too extravagant.” Fast forward a few hours and reality was two beers, a double cheeseburger, and tater tots. One out of three ain’t bad, right?

I’m not going to lie, this year has been tough. Sold our condo, bought a new one, moved across town, downsized. Taught two classes in the spring semester, another class in the summer semester. Got a new job at work that had me supervising six, then seven people starting in July. Plus teaching eighteen people on a fairly regular basis. All very good things, all things I genuinely loved. All of which have added up to a level of exhaustion that I haven’t known before.

My old boss (for almost all of my 18 years at my old job) was great in many ways, but not when it came to time off. “Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do when [redacted] takes a week off to visit family,” we’d regularly hear for a solid month and a half leading up to the momentous occasion of a co-worker heading out of town to put their parent in assisted living, go through everything in the house, and sell it. And then for months afterwards, we’d hear, “We’d be doing better on this project if [redacted] hadn’t taken that week off.”

So it’s no surprise that for my first two years as a Federal employee, I took little or no time off between Christmas and New Year’s. “They’re going to yell at me,” I’d tell myself, even though the one time I’d taken a week off for a friend’s wedding in Barcelona, the only comments I got were, “Have a great time,” and “Are you sure you don’t want to take more time off?”

I did take off between Christmas and New Year’s last year. After all, we were going to sell our condo soon and I needed the time to pack boxes. Instead I got a horrible chest cold in early December and never shook it as it slowly resulted in bronchitis. I lost my voice on Christmas itself. Not exactly a vacation, and time that really should have been spent using my hours from my sick leave balance.

This year I took no such chance. Originally I was off starting Christmas and through January 5th, but with the office now closed tomorrow, I wrapped up in late afternoon. Which is how I found myself asking for a table for one at a brewery across the street.

I love Christmas in DC, because no one is from here, which means everyone leaves. Of course that’s not really true, there are tons of people from here (I moved here before I was 2 years old and consider myself a native, in fact). What is true is that the city empties out, which means that you can sit in one of your neighborhood’s always-packed bars/restaurants and not worry about large crowds. I read the majority of a book that’s been on my Kindle for a year and a half, and I finally exhaled. I’m on vacation.