I was planning to wait until sometime after the first of the year to get back to regular blogging -- Carla and I are in the country full-time until then, where we connect to the Internet at the blazing rate of 24.0 Kbps -- but I'm finding it awfully hard to stay away. So, instead of simply waiting things out, I've finally given in and placed an order for the only kind of high(er)-speed access available out here in the middle of nowhere the pastoral heartland of America -- satellite.

Supposedly, the new system will be up and running in the next week or ten days, and I'll start blogging again as soon as it is. Until then, thanks for your patience, and I hope to see you shortly.

POSTSCRIPT: Hard as it may be to believe, I haven't been wasting the hour or two a day I normally spend on this stuff; when the site returns, it will once again be running on a true blog platform -- WordPress -- and, for the first time in years, all the archives will be in one system, and all the old permalinks will be properly forwarded to their current addresses.

POSTSCRIPT 2: As bad as blogging is out here, e-mail is even worse. Much worse, actually. It literally takes a couple of hours a day for me to download the trencherman's helping of spam I get at some of the addresses associated with this blog. So, frankly, I haven't been doing it. Or at least not much of it. Which means, of course, that if you've sent me any e-mail in the last couple of weeks, I probably haven't seen it yet. I apologize for any inconvenience that may have caused, and I'll make those replies a priority as soon as the new satellite arrives.