I’ve got to apologize to you, dear readers, for not having posted for the past week or so. Not wanting to go on public assistance and thus add to the already-burgeoning National Debt, I had to take some time to attend to my other career- the one that actually pays me money. After all, I do consider myself to be a patriotic sort, and so I couldn’t bear having the sole responsibility of having thrown our tenuous economic recovery completely off-track.

What has happened is that I’ve been assigned to a new project “team” at work.

“Ok, so what’s the big deal?” you might ask. Well, in the corporate world, “teams” are considered to be a very big deal indeed, and thus it becomes important to invest the time to build the quality relationships that are essential to the team’s functioning as a cohesive unit. Otherwise, open hostilities of the magnitude seen in congressional hearings or on episodes of “Survivior” are bound to erupt.

In order to build an effective “team”, it is necessary to invest countless hours in “team building” activities. These activities have to be held after regular working hours, outside of the office setting. This way, so the theory goes, you can get to know what everybody is like when they’re not engaged in the details of conducting actual business. In practice, though, you sometimes become exposed to too much information, if you know what I mean.

In order to do effective “team building”, the first thing you have to do is find some common interest shared by most, if not all, team members. It does no good, for instance, to go on a hunting trip when half the members have never hunted for anything more than the morning paper after the delivery boy had lodged it into a tree limb.

Now, ours is a multi-cultural “team”, representing countries as diverse as The United States, South Africa, and Texas. Thus, finding something in common was a particular challenge in our case. However, after much deliberation, we were able to find one activity that we all equally enjoyed- that of drinking beer.

So, as you see, with all of this time I have had to invest at the Fox and Hound Tavern downing pints of Shiner Bock so that our new team can become a harmonious entity, it has cut into my time for writing. It’s tough sometimes, but one is forced to make these types of personal sacrifices for the greater good.

Now that things have pretty much gelled into some sort of amorphous blob, I can now turn my attention back towards posting those articles that keep you, dear readers, informed of the important news items from around the state. I realize that you all have been in a complete state of bewilderment during this lapse, but don’t worry. I promise you, things in the state haven’t gotten any less bizarre since my last post.