Sabbatical, 2
The combination of my health problems and hitting my 11 years at Google (I've been there longer than 99% of the company now!) have led me to take another sabbatical. I'm off of work until mid-October.
Here are my notes from my previous sabbatical. Much like my previous sabbatical, I don't have any specific objective in mind. My wife is still working so I'm not spending my three months on a tropical beach, but rather just relaxing around the apartment, cooking more, and hacking on personal projects. Expect more blog posts, too.
However, I do have tickets to Europe and back in August for the Chaos Communication Camp 2015 near Berlin. (I'm not sure what to expect, but I've been telling skeptical family members it's "nerd burning man".) We'll be travelling in from Vienna up to Berlin and then back to the US via Iceland; if you're somewhere along that route and reading this, I'd love to have dinner!
Some people, when told I'm taking three months off of work, immediately assume I'm starting a new business (which is not allowed, nor something I am looking into) or searching for a new job. And truthfully, at times I despair over big company syndrome and think about how my broad skillset (I take pride in being equally comfortable with low-level systems guts as I am with high-level web development among other things) would be more suited for a different job.
I've even spoken with a number of startups, but most are (reasonably, understandably) interested in extracting a maximal amount of work over a short time window with lottery tickets as incentives, while I am not especially motivated by money and am more interested in living a balanced life.
Which another way of saying that I feel like it'd be a pretty ideal life if I had three months off like this every year. I've heard from friends who do contracting that you can maybe arrange this sort of thing. Are there any other options?