Are you still there?
You may have noticed that some time has gone by since there has been a letter from New York.
The great quiet started on my birthday, last November 18th. I had written a letter, all full of musings about birthdays, aging, the gift of life and all sorts of other things of grand import, I am sure. It still sits on my desktop, a reminder of the day the laptop began to die. A MacBook no less. I thought MacBooks were invulnerable, indestructible – an illusion created carefully by those folks at Apple, purveyors of fine electronics.
Alas, it was not true! On my birthday, no less, the faithful MacBook began to slide into eternity. I could not send out my letter, my mailing list was in a piece of frozen software.
A wonderful Mac technician, Manca, struggled mightily to save it. First there was one new hard drive. I rebuilt my mailing list but alas, alack and more to be pitied than censured, that hard drive died a premature death. The MacBook was rendered useless and I had fallen far down the queue for the tech team’s rescue response. They had grown deaf to my strident calls for HELP!
Eventually, with the MacBook gone, really gone, unable to even limp bravely forward, I found myself in the possession of a new MacBook PRO. But because there is a small debate going on within the office about what software should be installed upon the new machines we’re all getting [moving to an all Mac office are we] that a temporary software solution was installed which is – oh, I don’t have words to describe my feelings about what it does and doesn’t do. It’s virtual you see, software that really isn’t there and one of the things it doesn’t do is build email lists.
Tossed out into the wilderness on my own, I searched for a solution and quickly came to the one used by many a small email list – Constant Contact and once more I plunged in and rebuilt my list, with hope that with it now living in the cloud it would always be there for me, so long as I paid my bills.
So you are receiving this letter because in my memory you once upon a time received my letter. You’re getting this because I have made my best guess as to who was on the list and if you don’t want to be [oh, here I fear rejection but it must be so, say the rules of the game (be brave, Mathew)] let me know and I will remove you from my list and the Letter From New York will only be digital dust as far as you are concerned.
Seriously, thanks to those folks who did miss it and let me know. It will be back next week in its usual vein, tempered I am sure by my having been silent for a bit, freed to think and after having progressed through one of the finest holiday seasons of my life.
Hope yours was too.
Letter from the Vineyard 