The Bottom of the Well

I've been absent from these pages for too many days now. Some of you have written wondering if I fell down a well or some such fate, and you weren't far from the truth.

The good thing about being at the bottom of a well is that when you look up, all you see is light, no one bothers you, and it is relatively easy to focus on your goal even if the climbing out means hard work.

My primary focus for the past week has been finishing my orchestral arrangement and score for the May 14 Chattanooga Waterfront Grand Celebration, which I'll perform along with Zachary Carrettin, Hussain Jiffry and the Chattanooga Symphony. The score has to be done by the end of the Yanni tour which concludes in four days because I won't see Zach and Hussain again until a few days before the performance.

The good news is I'm almost done and can now turn my attention to other projects and daily tasks from which I've been hiding.

One of those tasks is email.

I'm begging forgiveness from those of you who've emailed me in the past week, andI have to confess that I did something really stupid. I'm normally methodical about keeping up with email, flagging messages that I don't have time to answer immediately, and trashing junk on the spot. My email client, Entourage, is set to the highest filtering level and anything that comes to me from an address that is not in my address book goes automatically to my junk mail folder.

I normally do a quick junk mail scan when I check my mail and add the addresses of messages I want to keep. Everything else I delete. Well since I wasn't checking my email regularly, my filtering system, based on the way I set it up, did the work for me. Unfortunately it deleted everything in the junk mail folder that had been there more than one day. It means a lot of email got deleted even before I had a chance to see it.

If you wrote me an important letter and are wondering if I got it, then go ahead and send it again. I have since changed my junk mail filter so I have to manually delete junk mail messages. I plan to spend much of my free time tomorrow catching up on email that didn't get deleted.

I have pictures to post and stories to tell but they'll have to wait. It is time to go get ready for the Jacksonville show.

More tomorrow! ¶ 6:22 PM