This past week was a complete wash at work, what with one supervisor away, the other supervisor just having left MIT, and everyone else still recovering from the Future of News and Civic Media conference that we hosted the week before. But a week like that was needed, desperately. And it leads, after a few more days, into my first real vacation since my trip to Ireland in the spring of 2007.

With Lindsay and me trying to save for a house, vacations for the foreseeable future will always be to Easthampton, NY, where her family has a lovingly unpretentious second home. We’ve been looking forward to it for months. We’ll take Gatsby, we’ll see Lindsay’s parents, and we’ll even get to see a couple of friends on the last weekend there (starting their own well-deserved vacation as we end ours). We’ll sleep a lot. We’ll walk Gatsby a lot. We’ll barbecue. It’ll be great.

Meanwhile, mostly Gatsby-centric, the latest photos to share…

Gatsby’s was in her shedding season a couple weeks ago. This was the result, after having swept the week before:

Around the same time, my mom was in town, meeting Gatsby for the first time:

Lindsay’s friend/coworker Courtney just got a Boston Terrier/Pug mix named Cagney, who visited us today and was tough keep still:

Not that Gatsby is any better:

And mysteriously, despite loving to chase squirrels, we bought Gats a stuffed squirrel at Petsmart this afternoon, and this is how we found them soon after:

Lastly, completely unrelated but just because I’m proud of it, a Photoshop/Illustrator job I did showing MIT’s most famous building partially underwater:

Congratulations, John and Nancy, on your brand new burrito, Thomas Edward!

Here’s the babe and his happy pappy:

Nancy’s an A+ #1 friend and she’s going to be an A+ #1 mom, especially since Thomas is wearing Mets socks and not Yankees socks.

It’s tough to describe the awesomeness of the conference we just ran at MIT. It was exhausting, yes. But I designed/printed the conference program, helped set the schedule, managed 200 attendees, kept an eye on an intern, and got to work with some incredible colleagues.

Based on the syntax of that last sentence, you can tell I’m exhausted. But I got to meet some folks that I’ve admired for a long time, such as Dan Gillmor, and got to promote the 2009 Knight News Challenge winners.

I’m conflicted. This conference was the last big set of tasks from now until the fall, so I’m glad I can rest a bit. But it was why I wanted to work with MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media—a chance to rock out with media innovators and meet a few of my long-time heroes.

I’m glad there’s a full year until the next conference, but I hope I get to convince all of these folks to come hang out at MIT before then.