Ramsay and Silverman’s Functional Data Analysis is a tremendously useful book that deserves to be more widely known. It’s full of ideas of neat things one can do when part of a dataset can be viewed as a set of 
What’s a “Friday fun project”? It’s a small computing project, perfect for a Friday afternoon, which serves the dual purpose of (1) keeping your programming/data analysis skills sharp and (2) providing a mental break from the grind of your day job. Ideally, the skills learned on the project are useful and transferable to your work 