- I took separate vacations with each boy and with Talia and that was exactly the right thing to do. Dan and I also had our first overland adventure. These trips were mostly mixes of the same key ingredients--camping, seafood, and comraderie--and each featured time on a river (Snoqualmie, Russian, Mattole, and Yuba, in that order). The perfect vacation recipe, I loved every minute. I saw friends who live far away but relatively little of those who are nearby. I apologize to the locals, but I trust this prioritization makes sense to you as it did to me.
- Brekkie readers will not be surprised to learn that I began sabbatical with an aspirational To Do list. The number of items I completed is not large, but I made good progress on many more. As important, I fixed the blockers--cluttered garage space, broken table saw, no personal computer--that were hindering my productivity generally. I face the remaining items with confidence, numerous though they still are. Also a confidence builder, the great if not always real expertise of GPT 5: between that, Youtube, and Amazon I feel prepared to tackle anything.
- I read, of course, though only one book really made me think: Huber's Climate Change as Class War (see here for last sabbatical's reading list). We are, obviously, in the midst of both climate change and class war, and we're losing both, badly. Huber shows that the two are really the same fight against the tiny horrible cadre that runs our current economic system.
I'm back at work now, watching workers finish our new driveway while attempting to reframe my job and trying to get useful results from our enterprise version of ChatGPT. No sawing is required, and I miss it.
