I'm portable

We're watching the news of Hurricane Irene this morning - it sure is a lot of hullabaloo - because you can't turn on the tv without running into it.  To me, even the news anchor looks sick of the live 24-hour coverage of the hurricane; or maybe she's just sick of saying the same stuff over and over again.

Anyway, I was watching the news and they are reporting live from Cape May, NJ, which is the southernmost (and possibly easternmost) tip of the state.  We happened to be there on vacation last week, and this is the exact spot the reporter was standing on the news... kind of cool:

It was so lovely to have a vacation.  One of the things I was worried about with changing jobs was that I lost a LOT of annual vacation time.  At the college, I got somewhere around 20 days off per year.  I never had time to take all of it, but that's not the point - it gave me the flexibility to have at least two full workweeks of vacation plus lots of random extra days if I needed them. Now, in the business world, I get 10 per year.  Woof.

BUT the one advantage here is that I am completely portable.  I can work from anywhere as long as I can get cell phone reception for calls and internet access.  This means that last week, I could go on vacation with my family but only actually take two days off of work.  I didn't get to be in the sun all day, but I still got to hang out with my family in the evenings and be in a vacation town.

For three days, this was the view from my office:

Not too shabby, right?  It was lovely to work with a little ocean breeze in my hair. 

I really do feel much freer with this job and in my new location - I can be myself all the time.  In the small college town, it was hard to go anywhere without bumping into someone who was somehow associated with my work, so I always felt like I had to be 'on' or was being watched and I didn't really even notice it until I left.  Now, I never run into anyone.  I'm not even Facebook friends with any coworkers.  It's truly liberating.  I could dye my hair pink if I wanted to and no one from work would even know!  Now that's a thought...