Here we
are, ready to close the books on another year of ITYWLTMT, and embarking on our
fifth – yes, fifth – year.
We had our
200th montage, explored “the concerto” in its many forms and exposed
the music of Mendelssohn and Bruch. Our yearly “video mash up:” is
a little thin this year, but you will find it – as we do every year – at the
end of this post.
This past
year, 2015, is a year of transition on our journey, and I thought I would take
a few paragraphs to explain why things changed around here after the summer,
and how we might be even less present in the coming months.
No –
nothing sinister, I assure you!
As I said
in my “year in Review” post of 2014, I find I have less and less time to spend
on the blog. In years past, I traveled quite a bit, and had many evenings on
the road that I needed to fill with something constructive, and would use that
time to work on the blog and on creating music montages. 2015 wasn’t a typical
year in that regard – I think I traveled on business once or twice.
This past
year, we did some remodeling on our home – some work in the kitchen and on
refinishing the main staircase. This ate up a lot of my summer – I had
accounted for that, and had prepared an all-Mozart series (I hope you
enjoyed that!). When late August came, I found I was quite a bit behind, and
though I had lots of ideas for posts and illustrations, the cupboard was bare
and I had to scramble to get a sum total of four new montages assembled,
documented and uploaded.
Like I said
last year, time has a funny way of creeping up on you – family, work, and
taking time for yourself (yes, I spend more time at the Gym to try as exercise
helps fight ailments like high blood pressure and high sugar that have crept up
in recent yearly physicals). I have less time on my hands, and the blog and
this experiment – however dear it is to me – simply loses out among all those
priorities.
In short –
I’m struggling to find the right balance, and the right formula.
I have,
however, come up with a great idea, one that may help us get back on track, and
maybe refocus the effort – and I think it’s fitting that we try this as we mark
our fifth year milestone.
I will keep
that new “project” under wraps for now – as I still need more time to mature
it and better define it. My plan is to get the ball rolling on this new project
in April, which will mark our Fifth Anniversary (April 1st, more
precisely…)
In the
meantime, we will continue with new montages at a rate of about one a month,
and complement things with the odd post on TalkClassical.
As for the
Tuesday Blog for the coming months, I am not planning to run “encore” montages,
at least for the next little while. I have a few “Once Upon the Internet” and
“Vinyl’s Revenge” posts sketched out, and those may get published. Sorry Opera
fans, nothing in the Opera department in the hopper, at least nothing for now.
Another
thing I may get out of the habit of is “Programming posts”. I may issue one
later in January, more as a “rough agenda”, but I want to steer clear of “set
dates”, to give myself more flexibility. I’d like to publish montages,
playlists and musings in a more ad-hoc manner, and not have “promise dates”. I
think this may make things easier for me as I continue to keep things going
until I unveil the “new project”.
I have been
delinquent in updating our yearly lists – that again is due to lack of time. I
hope to update our lists in the coming weeks! Another thing I want to start
doing in these pages is to “move” some of my Tuesday Blog and OTF posts into
this website. I got scared when Luiz had a glitch with his service provider,
and I thought I’d lost over 50 posts on OperaLively. I think it makes sense to
“patriate” some of that stuff – as you have seen, I’d begun to post new TC and
OL posts on ITYWLTMT already…
Happy New Year!
Pierre
UPDATE
Our Opera directory, as at 2015
