I wasn't ignoring you. I was just losing my mind.

I have no idea how this could even be true, and I can't even begin to tell you how incredibly stupid it makes me feel. It's one thing to have "moments" of not thinking clearly and doing something foolish. But to go for almost an entire year not doing anything about something you keep noticing every now and then just doesn't seem right...well, there's really no excuse. 

Although, it has been a tough year.

I started this blog a few weeks after my mother had a stroke, after all. Just a few days before I drove cross country. And that was only the first of 3 moves in 12 months, with a good bit of travel in between. There's been a lot of upheaval in the last year, and I have had tons of stuff on my mind.

It's not over yet, either. I'm marking time until November 1st, hoping it will be the first day of a life with much less stress and more freedom than I've enjoyed in years.

One can only hope.

In any case, none of that is really an excuse. I'm just wondering if all that stress has killed a great number of brain cells. And they don't regenerate, do they? Sigh.

Anyway.

I am absolutely flabbergasted that it's necessary for me to tell you that I have not, until a few minutes ago, seen any e-mail sent to me at this blog's e-mail address.

If you have e-mailed me, I apologize profusely for not getting back to you.

You see, I have a handful of e-mail addresses set up for various purposes. A few are for me, a few are for others. And I have them all forwarded to my main, personal e-mail address. They are all gmail accounts, so I can then arrange to reply to all of the e-mails from the address to which they were sent. I love gmail. 

I've been doing this for years, and I love the convenience.

As any of you who are gmail users are aware, this is a two step process. You set up forwarding from one address to the other, and the 2nd address has to consent to being forwarded to. Then you set that 2nd address to send mail from the 1st address and that one has to give its consent.

It doesn't take long, gmail sends you a link and you click on it. And, as I said, I've done this many times.

For some reason, with the e-mail address for this blog, I skipped a step.

I set up my personal address to send mail as the blog address. And I had the blog address consent to that. But I neglected to set up the blog address to forward its e-mail to my personal one.

So they've been sitting, forlorn, in the blog e-mail account, all of this time.

A few times, I did wonder whatever happened to an e-mail I was expecting. But they were so few and far apart, that it just didn't ring any bells, and there was always something else to do before checking into it. Until, finally, tonight, I went over there to look.

And I still can't believe what I found.

But even more than being horrified that I could be capable of being so utterly stupid, I am mortified by the bad manners represented by an entire year of unanswered e-mails. Although, I have to admit, when you reach that magnitude of rudeness, there's something almost funny about it. Kind of like black humor.

Still, there are at least some people that I owe personal apologies/explanations to:

B*, that's why I never showed up at the 2nd blog you set up. That's where the invite went to.

Quinn, it's been almost a year, but I did see that subtitle at the time. I was so honored, I either blogged or tweeted about it in a general non-name dropping kind of way. I'm still a little awestruck when I think about it.

Mike and Sally, this is why I may not have responded to any of your replies to my comments on your blogs. The same is true for you, Tina, and thank you for the recipe.

Joe Don, I'm so sorry, I don't know you and I don't have a LinkedIn account.

To people who's blogs require a confirmation of my request to follow the comments of various posts: if you replied back to any of my comments, I'm so sorry I didn't get to see that.

Fortunately, that wasn't a problem with Blogger blogs. Those comment feeds went straight to my personal address, and it was one of the reasons it didn't occur to me that there was a problem with my blog's official e-mail address. I was having all kinds of interactions with blogs and bloggers, and receiving a ton of comments to my main e-mail, which kind of obscured the fact there was a problem.

Time to simplify my life.

Maybe in another month or so, I can start working on that. My goal will be: 2011 - Year of perfecting the minimalist life. Wish me luck, please. After this appalling discovery, I'm afraid I'll need all of that commodity I can get my hands on. Sheesh.