Moderator's wish: Happy New Year, everyone!

Hi all,

As you may have noted, I'm back. Rather jet lagged, and now trying to deal with
hundreds of emails, a stack or snail mail, and all the rest that seems to come
with leaving town for a couple weeks.

Part of all that is a bunch of mail in the group inbox, which I'm not sure just
what it is. Some is copies of messages already sent and approved to the list by
Mike Stevens, in my absence, and some may be messages you all sent to the group
that for some reason, may not have gone to Mike for moderation. Not sure just
how that worked. It may take me a little while to wade through all of it.
Please be patient.

I do note that a few of you seem to have found reason to complain about a few
posts Mike chose to allow. I gave him that authority, and the guidelines,
interpretation of which isn't always clear. Every moderator has to make such
choices, and usually doesn't wish to spend lots of time agonizing over it. Such
is life.. So stop your whining. Rest assured that the majority of the issues
were handled just as I'd have done. The rest, you can live with. Next time I
need a hand with the group, if you didn't like the way it turned out this time,
please feel free to volunteer to help.

I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Mike Stevens for happily
agreeing to fill in for me while I took a vacation. He had to figure out the
software and guidelines in a relatively short time period, and seems to have
managed pretty well. So thanks, Mike! I appreciate it a lot, and I'm certain
that, especially after a moments reflection, so do all members of the newsgroup.

As I noted, some glitches in the way we did this seem to have resulted in a few
lost messages. If you sent messages to the group that did not seem to make it,
and you feel they should have done so, please feel free to resend them now.

Thanks everyone, and here's hoping 2007 is a wonderful new year for each and
every one of you, as well as the rest of the world at large, even those who've
sadly not found our little enclave of sanity... (grin... hows THAT for a
hopelessly naive description of this group? )

Peter