The holiday break has been wonderful here, albeit a bit colder in weather than I would have hoped (which is mostly unnecessary whining, as we still wore shorts to the beach on Christmas Eve).

(Yeah, I’m wearing thermals in the pic above, but swear I was actually wearing shorts over them.)

Mostly it’s been a quite chill-as-in-relaxing holiday week for me more than the get-a-sweater variety, and I’ve spent the entirety of it with my wife and son. Doing randomly stupid but oh-so-therapeutically-beneficial tasks like shooting stomp rockets at the beach, kinda like this:

But that’s not all…

We’ve also been making random creations out of Lego and K-Nex pieces like this:

Or just enjoying the natural beauty around us (our second rainbow in as many months!):

Yeah, there’s been a lot of productivity on the side, too – my research for a sci fi article turned into a full blown novel draft and outline, rewired the home for automation and a new printer setup (AirPrint for the win!), designed branding assets and rate cards/signage for Des’ new business, and wrote about 4 songs in part thru the week – so I can’t moan about losing ground on my own projects. At all. In fact, I think just enjoying life, taking things a bit more in stride and not stressing over a holiday checklist made it all even easier to pull off.

I truly hope this is setting the bar for my 2013.
Balance is a beautiful state to rediscover.