A deep breath…

OK, I feel like a kid on the night before Christmas. The wife and I head to Durango, Colo. tomorrow for a much-needed vacation. We’re celebrating a year of marriage and it’s a chance to catch our breath after quite a bit of change. While doing our taxes, I realized my wife of one year (as of March 1) had lived in Oklahoma, Florida and Texas in less than a year. For me, last year included Florida and Texas.

After that, a couple weeks later and I’ll be able to get my NICAR on, where hopefully I’ll pick up some sweet skillz. I’m most excited about seeing some sessions on text mining and the other unstructured data stuff being discussed by Chase Davis here, here and here. Combining that with what Aron Pilhofer and his crew at The Times are doing with ProPublica to make DocumentCloud, I think there’s a ton of new possibilities out there.

I look around our newsroom and see box after box of documents collected through the years. I can’t help but thank there’s limitless potential in those boxes.

I’m also heading to Django boot camp. Hopefully that’ll help me put together some of the ideas floating around in my head re: the previous couple paragraphs. As you know, I’ve tinkered with both the frameworks, but have not done anything of substantial value. I’ve just never had the time to REALLY dive into either. It’s been way too casual. Hopefully this camp will indoctrinate me.

So, as of tomorrow, I’ll spend nearly a week in the mountains, take some deep breaths, clear my head and be ready for some new challenges.