This is a heads-up; the current discussions on the OTR Digest and the resultant personal email are really keeping me hopping…add to that the increasing number of funerals I’ve been attending lately, and my sometimes-desperate attempt to have a personal life, and there isn’t a whole lot of time right now for me to put up with a lot of nonsense.

So if you send email (which I continue to encourage, BTW), plan on it taking a little extra time to be read and dealt with. If you are making a comment on anything in the Digest to me personally (which I also encourage), please know I read all my email - if it doesn’t require a response, you may not get one right now, but I will read it, and I will carefully consider all comments. If you get a form email and it doesn’t answer your specific question, please feel free to ask for clarification, but I am sending out a boatload of form letters right now just because I’m pressed for time. I’m honestly not trying to ignore you when I send a form letter…but ten or fifteen people every week ask about how to change their email address, for example, so I run through the basics in a form mail. If the form mail isn’t clear (or I am harried enough to send out the wrong one!), please ask me for additional info, and give me an extra little while to get out the answer. Really, I’ll do anything I can to help.

If, on the other hand, you want to argue with me for the heck of it, or decide you’re so angry you need to yell at me (PROBABLY IN CAPITALS!!!!!) for someone else’s posting instead of reasonably commenting, or anything else I consider in my somewhat frazzled situation to be a waste of my time, now would be a really bad time, since my patience for such nonsense is currently exhausted. Wait a few weeks and I’ll be back to rolling with it and thanking you for calling me a know-nothing idiot, but right now I’m running a zero-tolerance policy for time-wasting.