I’m coming back up for air after a busy couple of weeks. Hopefully I can finish up some long-standing projects at work (one of which gobbled up my entire Super Bowl weekend) so that I can focus on other things. Things like:

• Moving idiotking to a different hosting platform. I’ve been talking about doing this for years but have never gotten around to it, and my hosting bill at the current provider comes due on my birthday. It’s time to put the wheels in motion.
• Organizing a snowboarding trip with Finn and Zachary. There are two issues here that I haven’t figured out yet: it hasn’t snowed at all this year, so I need to find someplace that has been making decent amounts of fresh snow, and getting Zachary over the Bay early enough that we don’t pull in to the ski resort at 3 in the afternoon. It might be that we do an overnight at our house and get an early start the next morning, or we meet Karean over the bridge at the crack of dawn. TBD.
• Getting some wood filler strips ordered for the bathroom, and scheduling someone to come out and measure for the countertops. With Hazel’s condition being what it is—and no end in sight there—I haven’t touched the bathroom in over a month. I’d really like to pick that back up and make some progress.
• Brewing some beer. I have a kit in the basement that’s been waiting since last summer, and I’m tired of waiting around for my brewing friends to get their act together. This means I’ll have to brew inside, which always makes Jen really happy. While we were in Orlando I tried a chocolate stout that was delicious—flavorful and satisfying, but light in finish. I think that will be the next one I try, with an eye towards bottling and conditioning over the summer months for a fall unveiling.
• Cleaning up the basement. It’s a disaster down there, and there are a lot of long-standing organizational issues that need to be resolved. We’ve been out of shelf space for years, so there are boxes on the floor in random places, and there are piles of things that need to go to goodwill that have been sitting for months. It needs a brutal culling and then some re-organization. And I need to build more shelves in the ice room.
• A dump run. There are 12 casement windows leaning up against the back porch, two garbage cans full of debris, 1 ton of lead window weights, and a pile of other crap that have been waiting to leave since September. Done!

Oh, yeah, there’s the other small matter of my sabbatical, which is now 6 months overdue, and for which there is no current plan. We can now start shopping around for airfare, as we’re within the purchasing window of opportunity. I happened to chat with an old work friend through Instagram while we were in Orlando, and I recalled that she runs a side gig planning trips to Japan. That got some wheels turning, and I asked her if we could discuss the rough outline of a trip for the family. More on that possibility later…