Well, that's pretty much it. Four weeks ago I began a four-week break from work; so tomorrow I'll be back in the office, probably struggling through a month of email backlog to begin with and then resuming the big project I was in the middle of implementing when my sabbatical began. (Which was pretty silly timing, but sabbaticals are booked six months in advance and the big project came up on shorter notice than that…)

When my company introduced the sabbatical scheme, I'm sure I remember them trying to encourage people to use the break to do something constructive or at least purposeful. Last time I had one, four years ago, I used it to do some serious PuTTY development including porting some big chunks of PuTTY to Unix, which seemed pretty constructive to me.

Nowadays the company doesn't seem to be emphasising that angle so much; I suppose they must have accustomed themselves to the idea that if you give people four weeks off work it's going to take more than well-meaning encouragement to stop most of them from treating it as a four-week holiday. When I left work four weeks ago they just said ‘enjoy your break’. Regardless of this, I wanted to do something useful with my time, and I had laid plans for some far-reaching PuTTY infrastructure renovation. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

I spent the first week lying on the sofa watching DVDs, punctuated by an occasional walk to Blockbuster to rent a succession of films I'd recently failed to go and see in the cinema. By the end of that week I was feeling rested and energetic enough to want to do something useful, which was pretty much how I'd planned it. But at that point the machine on which I read my email changed its spam-filtering configuration and I suddenly found myself deluged with a flood of Japanese newsletters and stock-market scam mail from which it was quite difficult to pick out anything legitimate; so I hastily changed direction and devoted a couple of weeks to writing some spam-filtering code which would solve my immediate problems. As a result, my inbox is now quieter than it's been in months and I have some reasonably convenient ways to make it quieter still as necessary, but PuTTY's data storage infrastructure remains stubbornly unrenovated.

I suppose I should be glad that the spam emergency came up when I did have time and energy available to devote to it; if I hadn't been on sabbatical last month then I might still be struggling with it now. But I can't help feeling somewhat peeved that a bunch of spammers stopped me from having the time and energy to do what I really wanted to do with that month of freedom.

Still; aside from that annoyance it hasn't been a bad month. Even though I haven't written the code I'd hoped to write, I have at least reassured myself that I can still write useful code in contexts other than work; and I've had time to laze around, time to sort out various things that have needed sorting out, and time left over to spend with a variety of nice people who I don't see nearly enough of. So, could have been a lot worse really.