Thanksgiving week, and I am tired. This time of year, my thinking slithers down into some dark place. As the days grow shorter, so does my temper. That proverbial glass tends to be half-empty more often than it is half-full.

Faced with a final to create for the class I am currently teaching, several unfinished projects with looming deadlines, and a house that needs a serious cleaning, I find I have worse Attitude than a teen-ager that has been grounded for a month or more.

Meet the real boss. She likes canned fishy cat food, crunchies, catnip mice and lots of people time.

Now, if you are working for someone else, you can blame it on the Boss. If you are a kid still living at home, you can blame it on your parents. But when you are self-employed and you have grandchildren that are taller than you are, the only person in the world you can really blame is yourself, which takes you to a dark place from whence it is difficult to return.

I’ve been writing-for-pay for more than a year now, but I am still learning the ropes. I’ve been a home-owner for 15 years, if you count my back-to-the-land years. I’ve been a librarian for more than 20 years, and have been self-supporting for most of the last 30 years. You’d think I’d have this self-actualized living thing down to an art by now. But retirement has caught me flat-footed, unprepared, and has created some decision times.

So I took a vacation. It wasn’t a big vacation, and I’d love to have more of one — but I really can’t afford it.  For one whole day I did nothing but play computer games. I alternated World of Warcraft with Magic Farm 2 and Plants vs. Zombies. The second day of my vacation, I cleaned the kitchen and cooked Thanksgiving dinner. It was for two, having done the family thing earlier in the month, so that was actually kind of fun.

Today, can’t be vacation all day. But while I played, I was thinking. I realized that one of the things that is bothering me is that everything I have written for the last year belonged to someone else. That is just acquiring more bosses — not working for yourself. While I can’t walk away from that, I need the income, I can carve out something for me. Today, I began my day with working on the novel that has been sitting unfinished in my computer since last November. It feels good to work for me, for a change, before plunging back into the backlog of Work for Others.

Today, is the first day of the rest of my life. And I can do this.