Welcome to my Spring post for 2026! I’ve been busy with a number of things that I’m happy to share with you now, so let’s jump on in…

Reading

In my New Year’s 2026 post, I mentioned that my son Everett and I have been reading through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and that we were about halfway through Two Towers at the time of posting. Just about two weeks ago, we finally finished The Return of the King! Across the past two weekends, we as a family watched all three movies, eating our pizza while we watched on the Friday nights. It was a fun way to cap off a memorable and meaningful ten months or so since we started reading last summer. I think we’ll take a break from reading together on this scale before we tackle something else.

As for my personal reading, I’ve gotten through half a dozen books — some of which are in support of my instructional design work while others pertain to the college courses I’m teaching this summer. I’m excited for this year’s TBR list, especially for later in the year when I hope to get into books intended to support the writing of my next book project, which will be the first book I’ll release since The Ivory Obelisk in December 2024. The idea is that I’ll switch out of “academic mind” and into “writing mind” around New Year’s 2027 after having finished all the course redesigns for my teaching jobs, thus allowing myself the time and space to focus on writing.

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Professional News

I’ve mentioned that the University of Jamestown has greenlit the design and offering of the Holocaust course I proposed, and I’m happy to say that its development has progressed nicely. I chip away at it here and there when I have spare time between design work; the design window assigned for this course will be from June through August, so I’ll spend most of the summer designing it in earnest. I’m excited to see it come together, and to get back into the subject matter through the books on my list over the coming months. This is an important historical development, both personally to me but also objectively to the public, and I’m humbled and honored to have the opportunity to teach it.

As for my college courses through Mount Union, I have finally wrapped up the final tasks for my Early Modern Europe course, set to be offered in the second summer session. This has been a long process, starting way back in April 2022, but I’m proud of this course design and am happy to see it come to fruition. Let’s just hope this time that students enroll and it can actually run! After I finish the Holocaust course, hopefully by end of August, I plan to set about redesigning the Western Civ 2 course in prep for a Summer 2027 offering. This course is still technically in the “old” template (16 weeks instead of 14), and it’s also not as rigorously designed and assessed as I’d like. So my intention is to redesign it more along the lines of my redesigned Western Civ 1 and Renaissance/Reformation courses. All told, when I finish Western Civ 2 I’ll have four redesigned History courses that I will offer on alternating summer terms. There haven’t been any developments regarding potential Education Department courses, but I’ll remain hopeful as we press into the summer months.

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Family News

In February, we decided to get some work done on the foundation of our house, which ended up proving a wise decision given that some foundation-related problems were discovered upon digging into the ground inside the basement. Long story short, we feel that we made a good investment both for the house in general (e.g., integrity of the house, resale value if needed) and for ourselves (e.g., resting easier knowing the house is in better shape than if we’d left it alone). After some concrete was poured and plans were made to extend the sump pump drainage outside, the project was completed.

Amid this project, Sarah and I tossed around the idea (hers initially) of remodeling the one side of our basement into a master bedroom instead of turning it into the boys’ room like we originally intended. After many days of talking and measuring as well as a developing ideas in our phones and on a vision board, we have a pretty solid idea of how we want the remodeled space to look. We want to do it right and well, so we’re not trying to rush in any way; we’re thinking of aiming around New Year’s as a tentative target date to move into that space. By extension, part of our plan is to shuffle the kids around to different rooms in the house as well — all to better utilize the space we have. Maybe down the line I’ll share some before-and-after photos!

That’s it for now. I hope your days and weeks ahead are fruitful and healthy, and that we can get through the gloomy days of spring to the more sunny ones!

Mike/”Eli”