Back to School...

It's been a pretty tough year. As I've written about before, my son has had a long running illness, that has affected him for about 18 months now.

Last academic year he wasn't able to return to school at all after Christmas, and has had various stays in hospital in the intervening period.

Over the summer he's made good progress, and this morning, now, he's gone off in the car with his siblings, for the first day back at school. (Normally they'd walk, but we're not quite there.)

I don't know how it's going to go. I hope that he'll catch the wave, and it will push him forwards, that by Christmas this whole thing will be firmly past tense. Maybe that doesn't happen. Maybe he can't do a whole day, a whole week, a whole term, … But that's OK too. Just seeing him where he is, where he's gotten to, that's enough. That's amazing.

…

To the Autumn

I've been putting off a decision about DjangoCon US and DjangoCon Africa. I'm calling that now: I'm not going to make it.

I've got this Autumn to regroup, see how we go, and pick up some balls from the floor.

• Will and I have a whole new season of Django Chat in the pipeline, that's coming soon.
• I need to pick up the open source projects, that are all fine, but have been definitely back burner.
• At last, I'm making progress on the UI for Button. That's actually coming now, which is a big finally for me.
• And in general I'm building, daily, which is letting me explore a whole backlog of ideas that I've had hanging around for far too long. (There'll be more on that.)

But that's it. We still don't have capacity for galavanting around. So I need to pass this time. It's (more or less) head-down until the end of the year. We'll reassess then.

…

Nonetheless, however it goes, I feel today marks a milestone. En davant! ✊