Yesterday I stopped and looked for a while at the flowers in drums outside St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. They’re absolutely beautiful. Lots of other people were looking at them also, in a sign Spring/Summer is well and truly with us.

I was on my way for a swim at the Cook & Phillip Swimming Pool, a ritual I’ve been enjoying for the last month or so. I get up, I have some breakfast, I go for a walk, I visit a gallery, and I go for an afternoon swim. Oh, and I have an afternoon nap also.

Last Wednesday I also caught up with my friend Kate, who was down from Newcastle. We enjoyed a couple of gallery visits, and a lovely lunch at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Wednesdays off?

Currently, I’m not working Wednesdays. This is because I have an “excess leave problem”, meaning I have accumulated more than my four weeks of annual leave allocation. So to bring things “back to normal”, I asked if I could take Wednesdays off, rather than take a block of annual leave.

It’s great. A couple of days work. A day off. A couple of days work. Two days off. I feel like it’s giving me much greater “work/life balance”.

And for my workplace, it seems to be working pretty well too. I’m still taking the occasional phone call, dealing with urgent emails, and have even attended a phone in video conference. But by and large, I’m able to achieve what I need to achieve in four, albeit slightly longer days.

So strictly speaking, I’m probably not making full use of my days off, but mentally, it’s giving me a wonderful mid-week break where I can put on the out-of-office reply on my email, and not feel “guilty” about it all.

A fore-runner to retirement? Maybe. Or at least a fore-runner to a retirement which may include some part-time work.