Help me plan my summer and learn to solder!

My time at The American Conservative comes to an end this week, as the new crop of editorial assistants rotate in. I’ll be heading out to California shortly afterwards to drop in to teach Bayes for layfolk, run prediction markets, and take other actions correlated with delight as a guest instructor at one of CFAR’s workshops. In the fall, I’ll be starting work doing statistical consulting in education, but swaths of my summer are as-of-yet unspoken for.

And by swathes, I mean mostly July. I’m still kicking around some larger plans (possible travel? ASL classes at Gallaudet?), but, at the moment, the only thing I know I have to do is learn how to solder, program Arduinos, and learn to hook up LEDs to accelerometers for this year’s Halloween costume.  (If I tell you the sewing pattern I’ll be using is this one from McCall’s (closest to the purple version), can you guess who I am?)

I’d certainly appreciate any useful references and tutorials you guys have run across on these electrical skills.  I didn’t have much luck when I tried a similar project for my cyberpunk courier costume, and wound up just taping LEDs to batteries and sticking them in my hair (like a little black dress — always in style).

I’d also appreciate any clever ideas for what to do what may be my very last summer vacation in my adult life.  Any bright ideas?