little., originally uploaded by mintyfresh.

Just over a year ago, I returned from a tropical holiday (my first ever!), sad to be parted from the Mad Dog’s frozen drinks and unable to do anything but daydream about The Baths. Painkillers (the drinking kind, not the I’m-in-pain kind), days full of reading novels on the beach and waking up to a perfect view of the atlantic made getting through the dregs of February a breeze.

This year I have no such holiday, though we were tempted! Instead, an early bout of spring weather and a few weeks of downtime are making the last days of winter feel not quite as stifling as usual.

Centretown is alive again – the neighbourhood is full of bicycles, and we’re all digging through our closets to unearth spring shoes, jackets and rain boots (those puddles of snow are unforgiving). While we are all holding our breath and waiting for the sure-to-come remaining few feet of snow, this early taste of spring has left most of us with a little extra bounce in our step, and a few more pieces of tropical fruit in our grocery carts (like this lovely baby pineapple that found it’s way to mine).

Wilco., originally uploaded by mintyfresh.

One week post-NAC and I am finally returning to regular life.

It’s been hard to explain to people who have never worked in the performing arts what the NAC is like – it’s like no job I ever had before it, and probably like no job I will ever do again now that it’s over. It is a special, magical place that if you let it, will consume EVERY. WAKING. MOMENT. of your life.

Which I let it do, a little bit. And it was great and fantastic and I don’t regret it for a second. But now that it’s over….well….let’s just say that I haven’t quite figured out what to do with my newfound free time, but I’ve managed to read a book, or ten (actually seven, if we’re counting. One a day!), finish half of a quilt, spring clean about a year’s worth of the accumulated “I don’t know what to do with this thing” pile that’s been hiding in my studio closet, go to three concerts, a handful of networking events, and catch up on my embarrassingly full RSS reader (yes….google reader *will* tell you that you have 11,000+ unread posts).

And don’t even get me started on how much of the Olympics I watched. Of course, there’s working, too, but I feel as if on top of working on some new and fun projects, that I have gotten back to the life portion of the work-life balance being more weighted in my favour. Hooray!