This site has been quiet this week. It will remain so for a bit longer, then I expect to be posting way more than usual.

In about half an hour, I’m headed downtown to WOLA’s 50th anniversary celebration and human rights award dinner. I’m looking forward to seeing dozens of people I’m very fond of, and whom I haven’t seen in a long time.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Massachusetts to pick my kid up at college (sophomore year, incredibly, is over). On the way back, I’ll be seeing an old high school friend in New Jersey, where I grew up.

Then on Tuesday, I’m off to Medellín for three days, to participate in a conference on migration at Colombia’s National University.

When I return a week from Saturday, things get interesting. I’ve got a two-month sabbatical. (WOLA encourages staff to take sabbaticals every five years; in my case, it’s been eight and a half years.)

I’ll be traveling to Bogotá for a few days in June for the LASA Congress, and to El Paso for three weeks in June and July for a “change of scene.”

Both while traveling and while at home, I want to do some deep thinking and also some work on a “coding project” that I’ll discuss here along the way. Actually, it’s two coding projects, but I’ll see how much I manage to accomplish. Like a carpenter who makes his own hammers, I’m fashioning tools that will help me do my work better when I come back.

During those two months, once I catch up on all the accumulated sleep deprivation, I expect to have a lot more unstructured time than usual. That means I’ll be harder to reach, because a sabbatical full of meetings and emails isn’t a sabbatical at all.

I’ll be posting to this site often, though. One idea I’ve had, which I’m not ready to commit to, is to post an original entry every evening, so that I can have a record of this mid-career time “out of the fray.” Those records and ruminations may be of more value to me than to readers, but I guess that’s the whole point of running a personal website.

So be warned, for a couple of months this site may depart dramatically from the “daily border links” and “infographics” groove that it has slipped into lately. I look forward to spending more time here.