Sabbatical

I took this panoramic over a month ago now, when the crocus’ weren’t even opening yet. A pretty spectacular weekend, and the view of Lake Union and east to the Cascades was amazing.

It seemed like a damn good photo to start my sabbatical with. As I’m posting this, I’m just beginning a sabbatical. I’ve been wanting to do this for over a decade, and this year its feasible. Learning, Playing, and Travel are the top contenders for my time. I have been making lists for nearly 3 months about “what I could do” – I’ll never get to it all, but it makes a good target.

I’ve started some art classes, which I’m inordinately nervous about, but have been trying to work on for months now. I figured a full-out class would enforce some structure around what I’m doing, and hopefully lead to some interesting things. I have been loving the new camera on the iPhone 7 and posting photography experiments to facebook and twitter. It’ll be interesting to see if I can fuse a few different arts together.

I can’t even begin to think of not being a geek, so I am also contributing to a couple  open source efforts. I’m now a contributor to Apple’s swift project: just fixing a bug or two at this point, but it’s a start and gives me a reason to dig more into the language. I may do the same with Kubernetes a bit later, and expand on learning the Go language.

Travel is also in the plan – although like usual I’ll post more about where I’ve been than “where I am”, so don’t expect updates until after the fact for the travel. Lots of things to see on the horizon…