In addition to voluminous issues at work and at home (and, yes, the new baby is absolutely adorable, but his big brothers require a bit more attention at the moment!), I am finding it extremely difficult to get unburied from all the effing amspay in my e-mail inbox.

What tends to happen with me is I spend a certain amount of time each day on e-mail and other writing, and if my inbox is filled with a thousand messages, I'm spending most of that time pruning the amspay rather than replying to the one or two legitimate messages that deserve my attention. At some point, though, I have to move on to do other things, otherwise nothing gets done.

On the one hand, this means I must beg your forgiveness if you've sent me an e-mail that I haven't responded to, yet. On the other hand... well, there is no other hand. Well, except to say that if I owe you an e-mail even if it isn't in response to one of yours, well, the time I would normally spend e-mailing you has been taken up, instead, by these effing ammerspays.

And I'm getting absolutely flooded, lately. Flooded.

One of the common amspay attacks I'm receiving involves incorporating sensational (and false) news headlines in the subject line, presumably in an effort to sucker me into opening the message and then clicking on the link contained therein (which, I must assume, would only get me more junk e-mail.)

Yesterday, I received the first such fake headline that actually made me laugh out loud: "Bush to Sell Louisiana Back to the French."

Today, another one caught my attention: "Bush Averts Albanian Uprising By Invading Alabama."

I'll be moving my e-mail services shortly to a new server where, my testing shows, at least half of the junk e-mail that's making it past my filters will get caught. That still leaves half a ton left to prune, but I need as much good help on this front as I can get.

And maybe, one of these days, I'll get around to posting more photos of baby Andrew and his big brothers....