It's summer and, at some point, people's lives are going to line up wrong, schedules are going to go crazy and the result is a perfect storm that threatens to shut things down. As a rule, your GetReligionistas try to put up three or four new posts on weekdays and then two or three new posts every weekend (unless, of course, news events simply dictate otherwise).

For us, that's business as usual.

This summer has been different, to say the least. We've had all kinds of health issues in our midst (I've been in surgery three times), busy day jobs and, of course, we lost young master Brad Greenberg to the world of law reviews (dang it, since the same thing happened years ago with a young man whose last name was Pulliam).

Through it all, we stuck close to business as usual.

I just wanted to alert readers that things are going to get a bit lean the next week or so -- in large part because of travel and work matters that are hitting the Hemingway clan and Sarah Pulliam Bailey. Bobby is busy, as always, and I am away from the office, getting to know the first grandchild to enter our nuclear Matt family. I'll be up in the wilds of central New Hampshire trying to get used to the idea of being called "Papa" for a week (gotta get one of those "Live Free or Die" sweatshirts).

On top of all of that, J. Calvin "Jay Bob" Grelen has decided, after a week of wrestling with the mysterious doctrines of Wordpress and the giant waves of emails that are exchanged every day between members of the GetReligion team, that the whole pace of this blogging thing is not for him (especially right now as he makes the jump from his years of being a columnist to working on a modern copy desk). Thus, he has elected to hit the cyber trail early and not even finish out his trial month with this weblog. This is really sad news, because he is a great Southern writer and we looked forward to working with him.

So we are still down a scribe (and, yes, I have already talked to some logical names in recent weeks and will talk to more).

Jay's decision only underscores the fact that serious blogging (as opposed to first-person obsessive, "What my cat ate for dinner last night" blogging) is hard work.

This was underscored for us a few years ago when Ari Goldman, one of the great religion-beat professionals (and journalism professors) of the late 20th century, gave blogging a whirl here at this site and then bowed out, noting that he was overwhelmed with the pace of what we do. It is hard work.

It's hard work, even under the best of conditions -- when all of the members of your team are caught up in their ordinary, hyper-busy lives.

So bear with us doing this perfect storm. I think we'll all get to chime in on a semi-regular basis -- think two posts a day as a norm -- and we'll be hovering a bit less over the comments boards (which I am sure will be good news to some of you, and you know who you are).

The storm should pass in a week or so. Thanks for your patience. And, hey, if your want to leave comments on this post, why not tell us about all of the horrid or great mainstream religion news stories (don't forget those URLs) that we missed TODAY?