The old social calendar lately has been packed. Last weekend my parents came into town for a visit, bearing some belated Christmas presents: a set of customized kitchen cabinets and a coffeetable that my Dad and I designed. This thing is amazing – it's made of solid cherry with a half-and-half stain that really brings out the grain, built with a new industrial riser system under the top so it can be lifted up to make a regular-height table, and designed with a piece of brown leather stretched across the top beneath a pane of glass, between which I've sandwiched a reproduction of an antique map of Venice and a 1950s-era postcard of a Vespa motorscooter. I'm so proud of this thing, and this weekend I get to show it off when my friend Nick Ferraro shows up.

Nick's not just coming into town to see me, though – a veritable platoon of Kenyon grads are descending upon our friend Emily's place in Lansing for a belated Super Bowl party. Really it's just an excuse to see old friends, but I'm really in the mood for a mini-reunion. For some reason I've been kind of bummed for the last couple of weeks, which I suspect has to do with the somewhat bleak Chicago winter. The sun is finally coming out and there are hints that spring might put in an appearance here someday, so I should start perking up here soon, but for right now... Man, this little get-together couldn't come at a better time.

Then my Untyped co-conspirator Matt Jadud is showing up the week after that, and then before you know it SXSW will be upon us. Wow. Where does the time go?

Oh, right. It goes into projects. One reason why I've been quiet around here lately is the frenzied completion of a new big site, over at renhealth.net. If the URL sounds familiar, it's because I've been doing a lot of work with these guys for the last year-and-some-change. Now a new site has been rolled out, with much better graphics, a weblog of their very own (for which the TOTQ install of CaRP was a dry run, I should add) and a bunch of bells and whistles still to come. This is yet another site where a judicious install of SlideShowPro might be in order. I'm excited about the prospects of SSP joined with Flickr. One could easily hammer out a spiffy photoblog using SSP, Flickr and RSS. I need to find a couple new photographer guinea pigs clients to try out some of these ideas...

I have another couple of gigs bouncing around in the hopper and nearing completion. Just like always, a couple of months will go by when everything's percolating, and then in the course of a couple of weeks, it's Finishing Season again, when everything goes live. Feast and famine, my friends, feast and famine... Look for some niftiness coming down the pike soon.