Beachy

We went to the beach and even though I didn’t do a lot of swimming, I could still feel the salt and the cool gulf water cleanse away a lot of the residue that this year has left on me.

Not that I was in a bad way or needing saving or anything like that, but this has felt like like a very rough 2012 for a lot of people I know and although my year started badly and a few curveballs have been thrown my way, I feel very lucky overall.

But the trip to New York City and now a trip we just took to south Texas for a wedding and a beach trip to South Padre Island both cleared my head to the point that I could see how foggy things have been in there for months. We hadn’t traveled in a very long while and I hadn’t taken a proper vacation in so long that I was just in a really bad way creatively and feeling completely uninspired in a lot of ways. I didn’t even want to write anymore for a short time; that’s how bad it got.

But the break from the routine and have a change of scenery both with the girls (beach fun!) and without them (NYC!) really helped. I’m just in a better mood, and a little more inspired and my energy to create stuff, which felt completely sapped for most of the summer, has returned.

In the week since we got back from South Padre, I wrote 10 new pages of the “Project,” successfully pitched a column idea to CNN (which I’m both nervous and excited to write this week) and got back in the routine of saving time for myself to jot stuff down and have real time to write instead of wasting my night in front of the TV or skimming Twitter and starting up way too late at night to get any real stuff done.

The beach itself was a very short time — we were only at South Padre Island for a day, but it was the first time Carolina had ever been to the beach and only the third time Lilly had seen it. They loved it, just as we expected. It’s deep in their genes to love that place. My wife and I both grew up near there and spent big chunks of our childhood on that sand, playing in those waves. It was very important for me that the kids gets to visit it this summer, no matter what hassles might be involved in a road trip with two kids who are not the most patient travelers.

We ate lots of seafood, let the kids run back and forth to the surf until the sun was setting and wished we could stay three or four more days. We’ll be back, I know.

Even though I was on vacation for a few days the Digital Savant column continued like a mechanism with a ticking clockface. Last week’s column was a back to school tech gift guide where I tried to steer away from the more obvious laptop and tablet choices toward accessories and other must-haves.

The Digital Savant Micro that week was a definition of “domain names”: what they are and (to some degree) how they work.

The next column, which runs in the paper on Monday, is an explainer about the South by Southwest Panel Picker. Every year there are lots of misconceptions of how it works (and discussion about if it works), so this was an attempt to demystify it a little and explain why it’s next to impossible to go through all the proposals. (I usually just wait until the actual, finalized programming is announced since I don’t allow myself to vote for or against panels anyway in my role as someone who covers the fest as a journalist.)

This week’s Micro is a definition of the term “YOLO” as it appears online.

The CNN column I mentioned, if all goes well, should run at the end of this week. It’s tech-related, but it’s timed to next Sunday’s finale of Breaking Bad. Trust me, if I’m able to make this piece work, it’ll all make sense soon.

The other big thing happening this week is that Lilly starts kindergarten in the morning. That means I have to go to bed, like, 10 minutes ago. I have to get her to school every day by 7:45 (or earlier), which given my morning crankiness seems like a superhuman feat. Her daycare was much more lax about such things and the girls were only required to arrive anytime before 9:30 a.m.

7:45 a.m., it sounds like, is much earlier. I don’t really know because I have very little experience with 7:45. It sounds awful, frankly. I don’t know why people put up with such a horrible-sounding time of day. Are there better donuts at that hour? Public nudity? Something I’m not aware of that makes consciousness at that hour more rewarding than an 8:30 wake-up?

I think I only have to keep doing this, the getting up far earlier than I would like, for something like 10 more years, so… we’ll see how that goes.