For the last four years or so, I've tried to take one week off a year, with my family and away from work -- to take a vacation, which I'm told is a good thing, but also to detox from TPM. Only I've never really been able to do it. More generously, you could say the staff wasn't big enough for me to feel we'd have everything covered; less generously, my obsessiveness just wouldn't let me let go.

One particularly egregious example -- and don't write in to tell me it's egregious, since I know it's egregious -- was back in 2005 on my honeymoon in Mexico. This was right when we were getting TPMCafe off the ground. Only our site design consultant was completely behind schedule getting the site ready for launch. So I found myself sneaking off in odd moments to the computer room at the place we were staying at to get updates on what the hell was happening and to try to apply whatever pressure I could from a couple thousand miles away.

Anyway, this is all a way of getting to the fact that this time I was finally about to do it in spades. I was away for ten days. I didn't look at any work email. And I went days at a time without even looking at the site, which was both weird and deeply liberating. But stepping back from the daily grind of editing the site has allowed me to do what I hoped it would do which is to clarify key points in my mind about the editorial direction of the site.

Nothing earth-shattering, more a matter of focus and clarity and zeroing in on what's critical about what I want us to be doing, which is something that can get fuzzy and imprecise when so much of my time is spent running TPM as a business as much as I'm running it as an editor.

More to come on this front.

Finally, on a personal note, I've got a big backlog of emails that have piled up over the last ten days, most of which I'm only seeing now. I'll try to have them all responded to tomorrow. But please give me at least through tomorrow to get replies off to all of them.