This morning, I took a deep breath, held it, and walked through security at work after three days (and a weekend) of vacation in toasty, toasty Texas.

I'm back. To the grind.

And I was bracing for it to be baaad. But much to my surprise, I sat down, listened to some voicemails, sifted through my inbox, made a to-do list, then headed off to a meeting relatively calmly and more or less collected.

Now this is not normally how I come back from vacation. It's usually more akin to a tornado-hurricane-tsunami with a shirt on inside-out and backwards and mismatching socks. But today, I think I pinpointed the difference: I didn't do any work on vacation. I actually -- gasp! -- took a vacation! And, what do you know, I'm feeling pretty refreshed.

The agency I work for is strict with telecommuting stuff, and my supervisor and I decided it wasn't worth the hassle to get me remote email or server access for a three-day vacation. So I sort of crossed my fingers that nothing would come up and hiked out of here on Thursday afternoon -- and honestly hardly thought about work at all because there was nothing I could do about it anyway.

I know that's not possible for many people in many positions, but boy, would I recommend it.

Do you really take vacations, or are you glued to your email/phone/'berry on the beach?

Thanks to Nils Geylen for the photo. Yeehaw!