I am recently back from a two-week vacation. Two weeks IN A ROW! I Can’t remember when I last did that. Perhaps only one other time in the last 26 years or so of business. I think that is crazy, never taking the time off that I am entitled to and hardly ever taking even two weeks off in a row. How many weeks a year do you get off and how many do you actually take? How many weeks in a row do you take off? How many emails or other work-related tasks do you do each day when you are on vacation?

            

As someone explained to me once, a two-week vacation is not just twice as much, but more like four times as much restful time than one week alone. During a vacation it takes me several days to fully wind down from work mode and at a few days at the end to gear up for work again. If you take a week off, that leaves only a couple true, deep relaxation days in the middle where you are 100% on vacation, at best. 

            

 

 

But if you take two weeks, that is an entire seven more days of real R & R. That is 350% more ‘real’ vacation time than one would experience taking only one week at a time. Go ahead, do the math. 

            

I am convinced that taking vacation time enriches one's work and one's life. If one’s life is healthy, one’s work prospers. Take the time to smell the freakin’ flowers, eh?  

 

Go out and Play. Just like kids do. And enjoy.

 

"Live to ride, ride to live" - the Harley Davidson motto. It's nice if you are part of a motorcycle gang, but it doesn’t work if you have a regular job, a business to run, a family, or kids.   

            

Live to work, or work to live? Which is it? Ever get confused on that score? I know I have done so. I often used to subscribe to the former, that is, I lived to work. I derived great joy and satisfaction and meaning in my life through work.

            

Then one day a good industry friend explained that he didn’t live to work. Instead, he worked so that he could afford his life. I thought he had his priorities wrong. That was just a corporate drone’s approach to life and work. Now I am not so sure. Maybe I just worked too much and devoted too little time to the other dimensions of life. If I have done so, I don’t intend to continue doing so.

 

 

            

With that said, I do still like to work. There are Ants and Grasshoppers, according to Aesop, and I am an Ant. I love inventing. I get a rush from creating new toys and discovering new technologies that delight and amaze. I enjoy the challenge of what we do, and I love the team that I have the pleasure to work with each day. I am constantly amazed at what they do. 

           

My good friends from Hillsborough, NC claimed to have a monster, that they called the Catamount (a name often used to for wild cats). It was a hairy man of the forest that lived in the extensive woods near their home. They could hear it yelping at certain times of the year and moving quickly through the forest, frightening their menagerie of cats and dogs.

 

 

            

In fact, the grandfather of a mutual friend told a story from his youth - he was on Orange Grove Road by those very same woods, when he was jumped and thrashed with a tree branch to within an inch of his life by a short, hairy man-like creature. 

            

Decades later his grandson, my friend, and an airforce officer, claimed to have seen that same creature one night along the very same road - its large, luminous blue eyes shining in the moonlight. He turned back to confirm what he had seen, and while it had retreated into the shadows of the trees away from the road, it stopped and squatted, man-like, meeting my friend's gaze. Both grandsons of grandfathers who had met once, long ago?

            

Who knows. But reports of manlike creatures are so many, and so vivid, and by so many credible witnesses that they are hard to explain away or discount. Something may yet live out there, somewhere. 

            

So what is it that we love so much about monsters?

           

Kids love monsters. Toy monsters, pretend monsters, monsters in the closet, under the bed, in their head, are a staple of childhood. I always loved playing with them and loved watching movies about them. I do so hope that there really are some monsters left in the world.  

            

The world once teemed with monsters of all sorts, but that population has been decimated by the spread of civilization and those that remain are confined to preserves and zoological gardens.

            

Or not.  

 

Maybe, just maybe, in the depths of the oceans or the deepest, most remote forests or Himalayan snowfields, some real monsters may yet exist.

 

 

 

Surely the elusive Giant Squid would qualify, and we do know that it exists from some very real and tangible evidence of saucer size sucker scars on the bodies of sperm whales. A tentacle with twin rows of saucer-diameter suckers (two rows of 8” suckers side by side) must be one big sucker of an arm on one very big sucker of a squid.