Ugh! Nothing like a two-week vacation to help you feel refreshed, invigorated, and completely SWAMPED when you come back to work! I was just getting used to forgetting what day of the week it was, when BAM! work rolls around and reminds me. I think the Europeans are on to something with their long holidays and decent work hours.

Speaking of European vacations--when I lived in Norway, I got transfered to the Great White North, several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle (and I'm not talking about the restaurant). It was so depressing to be that far north in the springtime, because the sun only came up for about a half and hour each day. We'd wake up at dark, work for a while, head home when it started to get light out, eat lunch while the sun was up, and be back out working by sunset. Well, we only had to do that one day--I got into a horrible sledding accident and hurt my foot. Sledding, you ask? Yes--SLEDDING. They don't use bikes up there, since the roads are a perpetual ice skating rink that are hard to traipse on foot, let alone a wheeled anything. All the locals use something called a "spark," which means "kick" in Norwegian. It looks like a dogsled without the team of dogs to do all the work--unfortunately, THAT job fell to the rider, who stood on one runner while kicking with the other foot. Well, this was fine going on level areas, but the first hill we came to, we had no idea how to slow the thing down--I went first and got going so fast I couldn't control it, was about to enter a highway, so did the prudent thing and wrecked into the biggest snow drift I could see. I didn't come out unscathed--I ended up hurting my foot bad enough that I couldn't go out and do any missionary work for a month and finally ended up having to move to Oslo to have physical therapy. Now I wouldn't advocate having a serious accident in order to take a long vacation, but as injuries go--developing tendonitis in my foot turned out to be just what the doctor ordered to restore my sanity.