Announcement on the Future of this Site

About a month ago I alluded to the fact that I might have some news to report soon.  It took longer than I expected, but I can finally talk about it.

I may not be able to post my recommendations for movies quite as often as I have been.  It’s for a good reason, not a bad one.

I started this site a couple of months into a sabbatical.  I had originally intended my time off to be one year, with a cash buffer of a second year to find work.  I estimated very conservatively, so I ended up being able to take three years off while I lived on my savings.  The entire three years I have been doing this site it has been either my number one or number two priority.

Well, that now has to change.  I am finally going to be a productive member of society again.  I started a new job Friday.  I will be a Project Manager in the IT department of L.L. Bean.  (No, I can’t get you a discount on their products.)  In addition to once again having a full work week, I also have a two hour round trip commute on top of it.  This job will be taking up the large majority of my time.

Now I know that many, if not most, of the bloggers reading this are already holding down full time jobs of their own while still posting reviews.  I’m not looking for sympathy; I’m simply explaining why I may not be able to post quite as often as I have been.

Long time Followers may remember that I posted a review almost every single day for the first two years.  In this last year I had cut that back, posting only 3-4 times a week.  I also stopped posting comments on many of your sites almost altogether.  That was due to the fact that I had another big project: I have been working on a 15 year Supplement to a 900 page genealogy book I published in 1999.  Researching all the families again, gathering information, getting it into the manuscript, looking into self-publishing, etc. have been taking a sizable chunk of my time.  I need to complete this by mid-year 2014 in time for the 90^th anniversary of the first meeting of a family association.  This has been my top priority in more recent months.  With starting a new job, this now becomes my number two priority and I will be spending much of my evenings and weekends on this, probably in peaks and valleys as I either get more info or have to sit and wait for someone to send me more.

What this means for Tips from Chip is that it unfortunately has to be only my third priority.  I would like to be able to say that I ought to still be able to keep up only three posts a week, but the simple truth is I don’t know how much time either the job or the book will take.  I especially might have to invest even more hours in the job at first to try to come up to speed there as quickly as possible.  I will say that my intention is to try to keep to the same posting schedule, but if you don’t see anything for a week it’s probably because I got pulled away for either the job or the book.  Once I get the book published I should be able to return to devoting more time to this site.

In the immediate future I still have one more Best Picture nominee to recommend (Gravity).  There are two others (Philomena and Nebraska) that I have not seen and now do not know when I might.  Normally I do a post ranking the Best Picture nominees and include some analysis of them as a whole.  I’m unsure if I will still do that having seen only 7 of 9.  (Trekkies/Trekkers – feel free to insert your own Star Trek: Voyager joke.) 

In either case, I will then do what I have always done leading up to the Oscars which is continue with recommendations for films that received nominations in other categories, post an Oscar quiz, my predictions, and then the results and analysis.  Following that will be my Top 10 of 2013.  That gets me into March.  After that I don’t know what category of movies I will do, but I might pick ones with fewer entries simply because of how spread out they may be.  If I did one with 15 movies in it people will have forgotten what the category is by the time I finish it.

So, I might not be around my site as much, which unfortunately means I might not be around your sites as much either (even though I hadn’t been commenting, I had still been reading when I could.)  I will still reply to any and all comments I get here, so please don’t stop with those.  I enjoy the feedback and thoughts that you share.