Hey, folks, we're back... kindasorta. Didja miss us? Well, Slim, don't go expecting much Apple-flavored melodrama just yet; consider this episode our fledgling attempt to start easing back into the swing of things, following the arrival of a significant (but exceedingly cute) broadcast interruption named Anya. Believe it or not, people, it's actually been a little tough to establish an AtAT production schedule around the needs of a newborn child. Believe us, we were just as shocked by that fact as you are!

See, the thing about Anya is, sure, she's an official AtAT intern and a Goddess-in-Training, but at five weeks old, she still lacks the necessary motor skills to make the coffee or answer the mail, let alone craft masterful and gut-wrenching descriptions of Steve Ballmer's multiple icky glandular problems. Worse yet, instead of helping, she's actually hindering AtAT's production, because she needs to eat every two hours, and likes to remind us of that fact loudly and often, which means the rest of the staff is getting even less sleep than before-- a development that has the world's top scientists, philosophers, and religious leaders scrambling to explain how the impossible has transpired.

Add to that the fact that Anya is also perennially cranky-- probably because (get your heads around this one) she can't even see the TV yet. Talk about your fates worse than death. Anyway, when she's cranky, we've discovered that the only way to calm her down is to get a staff member to pick her up and then dance the tango nonstop in the bathroom for two hours straight while the faucet's running. These are, you may well imagine, not ideal conditions for the production of an Apple-themed soap opera. Plus, the next water bill is really going to suck. (Actually, come to think of it, since we haven't had any time to bathe, maybe the water consumption thing will even out after all.)

On those rare occasions when we've dared to risk upsetting the little lump by holding her while sitting at a Mac instead of while tangoing around the bathtub, our initial sleep-deprived efforts to crank out scripts while typing one-handed proved to be about as productive and as much fun as eating broth with one chopstick. And before you rush to recommend speech-recognition software, we already tried that, but we lost the battle of volume. In other words, after dictating an entire scene about Apple's secret plans to acquire Altoids technology for incorporation into next year's "iMint" product, we found that we had four long paragraphs to the effect of "Waaaaaah! WAAAAAAAAAAHH!! WAAAAAAAAHHH! WAAAAAHHHHH!!" You get the picture.

And let's face it: it's a tough but true fact of life that when you do something every day for nearly five years and then stop for several weeks, it can be really hard to start back up again. Don't believe us? Try it yourself. Pick a task you've probably been performing daily for the past five years: breathing. Then stop for a month. We bet you'll have a little difficulty resuming when the time comes.

We should probably mention that we're also still working through some pretty significant feelings of disappointment and betrayal, because Steve Jobs himself royally shafted us in the trust department. See, a few days prior to Anya's birth, the AtAT staff was enjoying some Aloo Gobhi in the Food Court at The Mall when His Steveness pulled up a chair, set down his tray of Chana Masala, and asked us what was shakin'. That's when we told him that we were considering putting AtAT on hiatus during the month of May to focus on the baby's needs, but were concerned that as soon as we went off the air for a while, Apple would rush to release all sorts of long-rumored products and make a slew of breathtaking announcements which we would then miss.

"No worries," said Steve; "I hereby give you my solemn pledge that while you're off the air, Apple won't introduce the long-rumored 17-inch CRT iMac, the legendary rack-mount server, integrated handwriting recognition in Mac OS X, an Apple-branded instant messaging application, or anything else dramatic that's been plot fodder on your show in the past." Uh-huh. Right. Thanks a lot, Steve. eMac, Xserve, and iChat and Ink in Jaguar-- all blown AtAT plot twist opportunities. Steve, bubbelah, we're hurt... really, we are.

Actually, it now occurs to us that perhaps that wasn't the real Steve Jobs at all. Come to think of it, at the time we did notice that, based on our hazy recollection what Steve looked like at various keynote appearances, this particular guy looked slightly unStevelike (seven feet tall he was, with arms like tree trunks, and a shock of hair, red like the fires of hell), but we just chalked up the perceived visual discrepancy to the perennially crappy seats we get at every Stevenote. But we suppose we'll have to reconsider our ire.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that AtAT is officially back on the air, but you folks really shouldn't expect us to be operating at full capacity for a while, yet. We're completely out of touch as to what's been happening in the world of Apple over the course of the past five weeks, and it's going to take us a stretch to get back to our usual Mac-obsessive selves. (We can, however, regale you at length about the possible pitfalls of changing diapers and how best to avoid them, but rather than turn this show into "As the Baby Poops," we'll give it a miss. You can thank us with cash.)

Also, the broadcast times are probably going to be all over the map, because we're totally at Anya's mercy on that front (we can confirm that there's actually a 5 o'clock in the morning, now-- what'll they think of next?), and what we laughingly refer to as our new sleep "schedule" often has us going to bed at 7 AM. We sort of forgot about that when we told you that we'd be back on Monday; most of our "Monday" actually takes place on Tuesday, hence the datestamp of this broadcast.

But the important thing is that we are back, in mere days we hope to have our email backlog back down in the three-digits range (yes, we have well over a thousand unread messages; it's truly a wonder to behold) and we're looking forward to sacrificing quality at every turn just for the sake of continuing production in some capacity with a newborn in the AtAT compound. So if you thought we were mediocre before, buckle up, buddy, because you ain't seen nuthin' yet!