I owe multiple people e-mails or messages or books, with profound apologies. I’ve been AWOL from the internet (or at least blogs, Facebook, anything interactive) for the past 4-6 weeks, and this includes being hideously bad about responding to people. If I owe you an e-mail, I’ve probably composed several messages to you in my head, but I haven’t managed to type them out yet. But I will. I promise I will.

I’m not sure why I suddenly developed a weird aversion to communicating with people online, except that like everything else, it snowballed. I let one or two e-mails go unanswered, and then I suddenly felt overwhelmed, unable to blog or post on Facebook, unable to prioritize, all the usual.

My excuses, or at least explanations, are as follows: the semester is at its busiest time, with papers stacked up for grading; I’m trying to get my retail website launched for Black Friday; I’m trying to participate in National Novel Writing Month along with a few of my students; Sadie had a bout of illness that I thought was going to end her life*; I subsequently got sick; somewhere in there was the rescue of a dying salamander from a parking lot; there’s some crazy stuff that I can’t talk about publicly; and of course I spend as much time as possible with these two characters–

–because who in their right mind wouldn’t?

So I have some wonderful memories, fun photos, and great nephew quotes (“I love you, Mowique. You’re my favorite son”…”We’re eating at McDonalds had a farm!”). The salamander survived. The papers will get graded and the website will get launched and I need to stop stressing about it all and just do it. And I’m going to try to start being a good friend again, the kind who responds to e-mails and checks up on the people she cares about to make sure they’re okay.

*Sadie is back to her feisty and affectionate self. And it looks like she’ll go to an excellent new home after Christmas, a home where she’ll be the only pet, which I think will send her into ecstasies of purring bliss.