At the end of next week I am taking on a new challenge. Its something I have never tried before. That’s right, I have to move on. Wait…no….not that….I am talking about how I take vacations. Every time I have taken time off in the past, I have gone somewhere. My last few vacations I have spent in Vietnam, Cambodia, New Zealand, Croatia, and other great spots around the world. But this time I am going to try something new. I am going nowhere!!! I am just going to stay in Amsterdam. I am going to be able to do all the things I have been wanting to do here. But I don’t want to just sit on my ass and stare at a wall. So I am trying to come up with a list of things I want to do. I will have plenty of time since I have pretty much the entire month of December. So here is my list so far. Its in no particular order other than the order they came out of my head. Now some of this may look like work, but it isn’t. I just happen to have a job that covers the topics I genuinely enjoy working on.

• Tweak this site – come up with a blog design that I really like and that isn’t broken in some spots. Make it easier to update and friendlier to you.
• Read some books I have bought in the last few months (and put them into action) – CSS Anthology, Principles of Beautiful Web Design, Windows Powershell in Action, Pragmatic Unit Testing in C#, etc.
• Organize my life – Get rid of some of this extra crap in my apartment, get rid of the extra feeds I don’t really read in Google Reader, get rid of the extra crap on all my PCs, etc.
• Every time I have seen something interesting on the net, I added them to my del.icio.us account. Now I can actually look at them.
• Prepare for my new apartment – Be a bit more involved in the renovations as they come closer to completion.
• Write up some reviews of amazing software I use everyday and that I can’t live without – Dash, ClearContext, SpinVox, Trog Bar, etc
• Learn about new and interesting technologies that I haven’t had a chance to really focus on yet (I could probably spend a month alone on each of these):
  • Sharepoint 2007
  • Facebook and Facebook development
  • Windows Vista Sidebar development
  • Firefox and Thunderbird addon development
  • The new stuff in Visual Studio 2008
  • LINQ
  • Windows Presentation Foundation
  • Windows Communication Foundation
  • Windows Workflow Foundation
  • Silverlight
  • YUI
  • Everything else in .NET 3.5
  • System Center
• Actually start to use Powershell more often so that I don’t have to relearn it every time.
• Maybe see a little bit of Amsterdam and the Netherlands. There is so little I have seen of this place. This guide might help.
• Sleep – I plan to sleep a lot. I haven’t been getting much of that for a while.

OK, so I think I may have a bit more to do that a single month will allow. But that may be a good problem to have.