There's a new episode of "Age of Lasers" up today, #006, in which Glark and I pretend (but not for very long) that we went to the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. We talk about 3-D TV, devices that stream Internet content to your television, e-books/tablets and other stuff. Also, porn. I'm not sure exactly that got in there.

We recorded it this afternoon and it was up in record time. It's the first one we've recorded since before Christmas and I was relieved to get back into it because the weeks since Carolina was born have been a weird mix of sleep deprivation, boredom, crazy excitement and activity, and little bits where it almost feels like a vacation. (Or, the dreaded word, "Babycation.")

I took six weeks off from work because I had mountains and mountains of sick time piled up from 12 years of not really ever getting sick at my job. In truth, even taking six weeks of sick time barely makes a dent in the almost 800 hours of sick leave I'd accrued.

Of course, you can't just take an extended amount of sick time just because; a doctor had to recommend it and because my wife isn't being allowed to drive and we have a 2-year-old in daycare, I need to be home to help for that time. We did a weird little addendum though: I'm going to work one day a week to clear out e-mails and go through packages that pile up and also meeting with my editor to begin South by Southwest Interactive planning for March. So, really, I'm only off for about five weeks.

I've done this one-day thing for two weeks now and in that time I've completely cleared out tons of boxes and junk under my desk, organized my files, answered e-mails (anytime my inbox has fewer than 50 messages I'm in good shape) and have sent back a lot of review loan products that had been piling up.

It's nice to be back at work but not under the pressure to work on stories or blog. Blogging and keeping up with e-mails and other communication, I've come to find, probably take up about 80 percent of my work day. The rest is spent trying to pull together stories for print and other odds and ends. That doesn't leave a lot of time for sending back packages to companies that loan us products or keeping my paper files up to date. The part of me that still adheres to Getting Things Done loves this opportunity I have to get my shit together.

I also haven't been doing NPR since December and that was mostly the birth but also just luck of the draw in that the last few segments have already been pulled together without me being needed. I think I'm on next Monday, but I'm not 100 percent sure on the topic yet.

And then there's "Trailers Without Pity" which I'm about to start working on new scripts for this weekend and another project, possibly for TV, that some good friends have asked me to help out on.

Things are ramping up again and in two and a half weeks I'll be back at work full time and things will be crazy and accelerated all over again. We'll have new stuff to deal with like the possibility of two separate daycares. I have to keep reminding myself we have a whole other human in our house who needs attention and that it's a very real possibility that I simply can't keep up my usual pace. After Lilly was born, several things I had spent years working on began to fall away (LCP, recapping for TWoP), not necessarily because I was ready to stop but because I had no choice but to stop.

Those decisions have worked out well, but I'm finding that my number one priority right now is finding the balance between keeping these creative endeavors going that I love so much and not neglecting my family or taking too much time away from home. I'm not sure how I'll do it all and, as I get older, simply skipping sleep like I used to is becoming less and less attractive.

I'm hoping 2010 has as many surprises and fortuitous turns as 2009 did for us.