I'm on my way to vacation--changing planes in Dallas. I'll be in a warm place with my parents, at their time-share. I did a lot of preparation for this vacation; finished up a bunch of projects for my day job so that I could actually take time off. But I realized, as I caught myself making a "to do" list, that I'm not especially good at relaxing. Although I'm hoping to avoid doing any real work for my day job, I have all sorts of other things I want to accomplish. For instance, I'm a fair weather runner, but the weather will be fair where I'm going, so I want to make sure that I go running regularly. But most of my "to do" items involve music. I'm bringing a travel guitar, and a I need to get moving on my resolutions to learn a new cover song each month AND to write a new song that I'm willing to play in public. I have only one show booked this month, so that's the obvious place to debut both of those, but I've started neither. And speaking of that show, it's a two-hour house concert the day I get back, so I need to start planning a gig list and rehearsing. In addition, I spent the duration of the the first leg on the airplane watching the raw footing of the video from my CD release show, because Bruce, the videographer, wants instructions about which songs to make into YouTube videos. So I made notes and will send them to him asap. And, of course, here I am in the airport, blogging. These are all good things to do, and it's good that I'll have some time away from my day job to work on things related to might night job. But it strikes me that, at some point, I should perhaps take my own advice and learn to relax.