Priorities

Most people I've worked with would tell you that I'm a dedicated engineer, for one reason or another I always end up personally involved in my projects and more often than not I go the extra mile to help folks that are struggling in the field supporting customers around the world. Periodically, I go through periods of time in which I question this behavior, sometimes it's triggered by the realization that time keeps passing by and the professional growth doesn't always match the amount of work and effort, other times it's just the feeling that I should be able to separate professional and personal aspects better. For a period of time, after my return from Beijing, I did manage to control the amount of working hours and to get involved in other activities: photography classes, lots of live music, volunteering as a teacher for 1st and 2nd graders....

This year I did not take any time off at all until now. We found out about the pregnancy on New Years Day and, therefore, decided to save all the vacation days for Marc's arrival and for our trip to Spain for Christmas. Although this was the right thing to do, I was mentally exhausted as the summer passed by, the never ending stress level at work creating, optimizing and deploying a brand new technology, trips to visit customers... Taking 2 weeks off is not an easy one, having a Moto Q connected to my work email server doesn't help either, it's impossible to refrain yourself from checking out what's going on and even more difficult not to react...

That's when I think about priorities, Marc's arrival is a life changing event, once that will never occur again, we may or may not have more kids, but Marc is unique and he deserves my undivided attention. Every time we lay down on the bed just playing around, every time he cries during a diaper change, his first full bath, etc... And quite frankly, during these moments I wonder whether all these work high priority issues are really SO important when compared with seeing your son grows healthy and happy....

There go a few fun pictures that we took yesterday when Marc and I were having fun (more as usual at our Picasa gallery).