The Week Before Burning Man

I was just listing my activities for the week before Burning Man and amazed even myself:

• Shopping for and celebrating my wife’s 36th birthday

• Helping to prepare for and then watching Sells brother #1 test for his Jr. Brown belt in karate (he was amazing)

• Hosting my aunt and grandmother on a very rare 4-day trip

• A day-trip to the beach

• Celebrating the birthday of Sells brother #2

• Coordinating the update, from my house and at the last possible moment, of more than 100 pages on microsoft.com to reflect the recent announcement of WinFX being made available on down-level versions of Windows (this included 3 all-nighters)

• Preparing for and running a 2-day garage sale of the stuff I pulled out of my house over the last 8 months in my own personal episode of Clean Sweep

• Packing for 5 days in the desert (I worried about survival and my wife worried about having enough costumes…)

Of course, after that I spent a week at Burning Man, and today we’re cleaning the playa out of everything, preparing the boys for school, hanging out with the relatives for Labor Day and celebrating our 13th wedding anniversary. Starting tomorrow, I have to figure out what to do with the Longhorn Developer Center now that WinFX will be available on down-level windows, co-author two Avalon books and one Windows Forms book and run the Applied XML Developer’s Conference 5. Should be fun. : )