Well, I almost let an entire calendar month go by, didn’t I? Whoopsie. So much for getting back on the horse… again.

So! Notable things about this month? One, I managed to take an entire calendar week off from work for the first time since I started work. (This doesn’t count stretches of unemployment, mind you.) Last time I scheduled a week-long vacation, my boss got canned and I spent half the week in the office anyway. This time? Peace and quiet.

What’s really cool about the time off is that I didn’t actually waste it all. Instead, I used half the week to de-junk my living space a bit. A couple bags of trash went out, sure, but the really big part involved having Green Century come by on Thursday to haul away several 17-gallon bins’ worth of computer paraphernalia. I’d accumulated 15 years’ worth of working-in-IT and taking-my-work-home junk, like old PCI cards and cables and drives and drives and cables and plastic fiddly bits and empty chassis and printers and you get the picture. Finding, sorting, piling, and staging all of this took up the first two days of my vacation.

A lot of work to do on a so-called “break,” yes, but utterly worth it. I reclaimed a lot of storage and floor space, found some nifty things during the sorting that I wanted to store more safely, and my physical possessions total a few hundred pounds less now than they did before. Sweet!

The second notable event this month? My son turned 20, mid-month. Twenty years old! It’s amazing, and he’s turned out to be pretty damned cool. I have the best kids, I tell ya.