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When I wrote about my sabbatical leave, I mentioned setting some things aside to focus my research. That continues. Since my transfer research project continues to take up as much time as I can devote to it, I’ve decided to step down as website editor of Composition Forum. I’ve maintained the web site since Spring 2005, when the journal moved from print to online format. We’ve posted a position announcement and plan for a Summer 2012 transition. I’ll work with the incoming editor or editors to complete CF26 (a special issue on transfer guest-edited by Elizabeth Wardle), then step aside.

I’ve done some interesting things with CF, I think, and I’m proud of the journal’s high accessibility and quality of markup. Yeah, there are some irregularities, if you compare the first and last issues I created, but things are very stable overall, and articles load fast and print well.

Here’s a list of the things I did in my seven years with the journal:

• Moved the journal from servers at a university to its own domain, publishing redirects for existing articles and building a lightweight content management system for delivering content
• Built an index in Delicious, providing an easy way to move between subject areas or to see all of a particular type of article in the journal
• Established standards for metadata, ensuring that articles and profiles have abstracts and keywords
• Installed OJS and helped Michelle Ballif learn to use it to smooth editorial workflow for articles

What would I like to see incoming editor(s) do?

• Keep my commitment to high-quality, lightweight, accessible markup.
• Finish the conversion to OJS, importing existing issues into that system.
• Add online issues not in our Delicious index (and consider moving away from Delicious to a different platform for indexing).
• Tackle some of the big projects I started but did not finish—establishing a way to forward link citations between Composition Forum and other journals.

At CCCC this past week, I met with the CF editorial staff and made plans for transition. Just a matter of finding a replacement, getting them started, and handing over the keys.

If you can call it winter. It’s been pretty darn mild here lately. Now that the worst of my Achilles injury is behind me (I hope!) Chris and I have started brewing in earnest. We’re looking forward to winter 2012 with a lot of these beers, though a few will be ready before then:

1. Pale Ale: our standard recipe, using Alexander’s extract, fairly hoppy but balanced with some malty goodness. Your garden variety pale ale.
2. Hopslam style IPA: I goofed and put a little too much water in this, so it won’t be as strong as Bells’s original, and maybe a little more bitter. But it will clock in at almost 8%, so it’s not a session beer by any means. Three pounds of Chris’s honey, a large amount of hops in the boil (70 IBUs), and we’re gonna dry hop it too.
3. Porter: the third beer made on a Safale US05 culture. Erin and Gloria love porter, so this is made with them in mind. It’ll be an everyday beer with light to moderate bitterness and nice malty goodness (including some chocolate malt).
4. Saison: Jeff Moore shared a culture of WLP 566, so we’re going to take another shot at a saison. Hopefully this time it’ll actually be light, not dark. Last year’s effort was made with extract given to us; we realized later it was past its prime. Now, we have some new pilsener malt extract, so we’ll see.
5. Barley wine: we got a cube of Briess golden light DME (33 lb) from Somethings Brewing. That’s going in about 12 gallons of water–as much as my boil pot can handle–for a barley wine at 1.100 OG. Add in six ounces of the bittering hops I just bought (see below), and we’ll be around 80 IBUs. Yeehaw. We’ll probably start with the Safale US05 and finish with a Champagne yeast.
6. Belgian strong ale: not sure if we’re going to use the 566 for this, or look for a different yeast, and/or which particular style it’ll be. But we’ve got a cube of Briess pilsener malt ready to go.

That’s enough for now. Perhaps mead and a winter warmer in the future… we’ll see how these go first.

To support this and future brewing, I placed a big fat Freshops order:

• 1/2 lb Amarillo
• 2 lb Cascade
• 2 lb Chinook
• 1 lb Citra
• 1/2 lb Fuggle
• 1/2 lb Mt Hood

And, Sean West saw my post about the hops on Facebook, and pointed me to Nikobrew, who had Simcoe pellets in today. Nice! I still remember the Mikkeller Simcoe Single-hop I had last year. Yum!

This comes late, but anyway. I’ve offered years in review in the past. 2011 certainly was an up and down year for me and the girls.

• In January, we traveled to Florida to visit my paternal grandfather, my last surviving grandparent. Two weeks later, he died at age 88.
• Got our biggest snowfall in Macomb yet–14+ inches on Feb 1. Snow fort time!
• I enjoyed a fantastic Computers & Writing conference in Ann Arbor, with a great blogging panel, From A to <A> getting the Computers & Composition book award, and time well spent with good friends.
• With Neil Baird, I began a writing transfer research project which is helping me to kick-start my research into ease. In May, we got approval for our IRB protocol and a $7,800 internal grant; since that time we’ve build a strong set of case study data to work from, with 10 participants sharing their transition to writing in the major with us this this fall.
• Erin and I decided to road trip in summer 2011, covering 2,000+ miles on a three week trip which began meeting my brother in Arkansas, then heading west to New Mexico and Colorado. Chama, Ouray, Denver, Gunnison, and points between.
• As part of my sabbatical retooling, in August I traveled to Hanover, NH for the Dartmouth Seminar in Composition Research. Being away from the girls for two weeks was very hard, but the seminar very much worth it.
• Madelyn started school, in Mrs. Bear’s kindergarten at Lincoln Elementary.
• On September 12, we said good-bye to The Big Kitty, returning to a pet-less house for the first time since 1994.
• Some family issues I don’t wish to share caused us some serious aggravation.
• Obviously, the low point of the year was rupturing my Achilles tendon playing football. To be specific, the bottom came about a month after that, when I ran out of good cheer and struggled to cope. But now that I’m a month into physical therapy, hopefully the worst is behind me.

Here’s hoping for less not-so-great stuff in 2012.