Time for a break ...

Those of you who've been following this blog regularly know that this past spring was hectic, as it was filled with grants, committees, and other such work. This summer was supposed to be a break from all that: a time to relax, catch up on reading, get some perspective, and get energized for the fall.

Well, as you may have noticed, that hasn't been happening much around here. My summer field course has been requiring huge chunks of time, both getting supplies (which I have posted about) and actually teaching the course (which I haven't written much about). Additionally, the wiki that I set up months ago has been more successful than I'd hoped (with thousands of page edits, more than ten thousand page views, and another instructor partially running a course on it), so I've been spending a lot of time working on that, including moving the entire site to a commercially hosted server. I've also been blogging up a storm (at least for me), and actively following political issues that I normally wouldn't have paid much attention to.

While everything I've been doing has been fun, I've been doing something, and more often than not something which requires a good amount of work and thought at a computer, virtually every day this summer.

In short, I'm working my summer away.

Well, starting with this post that's going to change for a bit here. My SO's birthday is approaching, and within a week we'll be off on another multi-week trip to Canada. These two events have motivated me to call a temporary halt to official blogging, primarily to help motivate me to relax away from a computer.

Never fear; this doesn't mean there won't be any posts. However, the posts that are here will likely be sporadic and personal in nature: cataloging our travels, sharing pictures, and/or other such fun. If you want good biology or political writing in the next month, go visit Pharyngula, Orac, ConyersBlog, or any of the other excellent blogs out there (see the sidebar for more ideas). If you want pictures of mice and reports from Canada, stay right here.

And also, since my SO's birthday is coming up, I'm going to be completely silent for a few days as I give my SO a present with no material basis, and which is quite literally priceless (or should I say "worthless"?): my undivided attention (of course, many other presents are coming as well). For the duration of my SO's birthday celebration I'll be shutting down my precious Debian box, ignoring my Windows box (which will be significantly easier than the first item on this list), and not doing a thing online (or otherwise) to distract myself. To my SO: happy birthday!