Hiatus, Sabbatical, Time Off, Leave of Absence, etc.

First of all, congratulations to all who won their races in this election. Specifically, I want to congratulate Jason Chaffetz and Carl Wimmer. It was truly an honor to work on both of your campaigns.

I am of course a little upset about the Obama win. However, the people have spoken, and now we must live with the “change” that is coming our way. I personally am bracing for impact, but praying that it won’t be as hard as I imagine it.

Now on to the reason for this post. About six months ago, I started a project right in the middle of all this campaigning that I had volunteered to do. Thinking back, it wasn’t really the smartest timing for starting a new project. With family, work, church, and campaigning, I had no time to work on anything else. Further, I got myself rather involved in several online “social networks.” I have generally enjoyed interacting with others on these sites, but it has consumed a lot of time.

However, I have realized that this has consumed a lot of my time. Perhaps even more than television had once occupied.

So, the big news for today and the reason I am writing is to let you know that I am leaving the online world (sort of). I will be discontinuing much online presence for a while. I am not going completely off-line, and I am not deleting any accounts. I am just taking a 6-month break.

Here is the rough break down of what exactly is happening:

This blog (and others)
I will discontinue all blog activity. I have no plans or intentions of commenting here for the next 6 months. No stories about my life, no political commentary, and no more dutch oven recipes. If anything significant happens during the Utah legislative session, I might jump on here briefly, but I really am not planning on much. I strongly recommend you follow me through RSS or the Utah Bloghive. Both of these should let you know when I have started posting again. Otherwise, you can just wait until May.

Twitter
I pretty much plan on abandoning this for the next 6 months. I am for sure not going to be reading others’ posts. And I don’t expect that I am going to make any comments there as well. I might on a rare occasion give an update on the progress of my project, but I won’t be following what is going on in others’ lives.

Facebook
This may be the one place that I stay with. I won’t follow it as closely, but I am thinking that I will post a few pictures and videos. This will be mostly to keep in touch with family. Sure I will interact with friends, but for the most part, I will not be following people’s status reports or pictures.

RSS Reader
I have greatly reduce the number of feeds that I am following. Don’t worry, I have saved a back up of all the RSS feeds that I have been following. But I have reduced my current feeds from 129 to less then a third of that. I was hoping to do more, but there are a few forums, people, and news items that I still want to keep up with. However, I did remove some of the most active feeds. I expect that I will have only about 10% of the amount of reading as I have come to expect.

You might be wondering what project could be so important that I would change my life so much. However, I am not telling, and only a select few know. Most of you probably won’t be interested in the project. Most of you will find it a complete waste of time. However, there are a few of you that might find it a worthwhile project. I am choosing to keep it under the cover for now, and I promise that by May 15 2009 I will tell you what the project is. However, I will drop a wee little hint for you.

During my time away, I hope all fares well for each of you. In the unlikely event you want to contact me, there is a contact tab at the top of this page, go ahead and use that. Or you can try t r g r a n t -at- b y u -dot- n e t.

Thanks for your readership, both in good times and bad. I hope that this project is a success, and that I am able to publish a positive announcement is 6 months. Good-bye for now.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Case Against Seniority
• Charter Schools Receive Praise
• Protests on Private Property
• Change Is in the Air
• Join a Group of Hundreds in a Fast for Our Nation