A sabbatical is a tradition in the academic world -- why not for hard-working plumbing pros?
One of the most memorable periods of my life occurred in the early 1970s, when I bought a 41-ft. boat down in Florida and spent most of the ensuing year living on it. My wife and kids joined me for various periods of time, and I was away from the business for around 11 months altogether.
It was a time when I had finished transitioning out of new construction work strictly into service plumbing. A bunch of retainage money came my way all at once from jobs I had finished months before, and with no more projects to finance, it served as something of a windfall that enabled me to enjoy life as I never had before.