So I spent three days on the road to Northern Michigan, in a house with no wireless, reuniting with the BF and friends and..hiking...and sleeping. The whole time, my Blackberry kept me posted on the world: email, NYTimes, twitter, friendfeed, techmeme, and so on. The fact I could, even while I was on the road and in transition, do what I think of as continuous partial attention monitoring--ie looking at data more than I was contributing--is why I consider my mobile device as attached to my person forever (of course, as I write this, I then realize I left it in the car. Dooh!)

On the other hand, I've missed blogging...terribly. For me, blogging is part of a process of thinking, communicating, articulating, observing...just stopping would be a real shocker, so it feel so good to get back to the machine, coffee beside me, and start writing again.

For the next week or so, I am going to be in juggling mode--balancing working remotely on two projects--with taking a long-planned, long-awaited vacation by a lake with family and friends.  If I had no wireless, no mobile devices, no laptop--I couldn't have made this trip, even if we'd been planning this for a year (as we have.). Even now, I feel like its the strength and support of the teams I am working with that got me here. And I am grateful. For the colleagues and friends I have--and for those mobile, portable devices.