EDITORS NOTE: Written in early March 2020 before quarantine, but funny how it came back around in a new way…
My last post over a year and a half a go talks about how bad I am at maintaining this blog. The time between posts would suggest that is still the case. It is. But if you haven't checked in during that time, there is a reason other than being busy or being lazy. After nearly a year and half of trying to treat chronic lower back pain, on Janaury 19th, 2019 I was taken to the ER after all the muscles along my sciatic nerve below waist seized and left me completely bed-ridden, was unable to sit, stand, or walk. This started 9 months of medical leave in which I tried to find out why this happened and how to fix it. Months of mostly lying in bed, therapy, surgery, more therapy and trying to catch up to the fast moving train that is my work environment long after I had to hop off.
One quick laminectomy, discectomy, and spinal fusion combo and I'm back at it! Sure, in between there was plenty of time to clack out a blog, but honestly, the whole ordeal sucked and anything I wrote would have had a lot of anger, frustration, fear, and anxiety. Not exactly the right stuff for a self-promotional tool such as this. Some heavy and interesting stuff for sure, but we're trying to keep things light here! I mean, I did organize a lot of my videos, re-uploaded everything to Vimeo, added more videos to the site, organized things a little better, and starting added the other credits in the videos other than my own, but I just didn't feel like pouring myself out on here with tales of woe and sorrow.
So yeah, lots of laying. Good opportunity to catch up on some movies and TV, but you can only watch so many mid-day episodes of Bar Rescue without getting a little bored. Though I wasn't able to lead Monsters production, I still kept myself busy and tried to contribute where I could. I did some late request, CR Night graphic type things to keep stuff off others' full plates, and I used our stock media sites’ libraries to whip up some random, fun game ops inventory...
created the game look elements for Monster's Moon Landing Night...
and remixed our game look to get ready for a play off run.
Before I went down for the count, I had some fun with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Night late December…
But eventually the season ended, the building changed its name from Quicken Loans Arena to Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, the arena transformation project added new LED displays and millions of more pixels to make dance, and preparations to debut a completely face-lifted and modernized facility and efforts to get asses in their seats went on full-steam as I focused on getting surgery and habs both pre- and re-. Well... kinda. Doc gave 90 days post surgery, which put my full-time return date September 14th. Read this post<link to other post> to see why a month to prepare for the season as a less than ideal situation. Next blog, I'll share how I got 3 months worth of work done in 1. And hopefully now that the 2019-2020 season is coming to a close, I can hopefully better maintain the site without a season or life altering injuries to contend with (EDITORS NOTE MAY 2020: Or a viral pandemic). I didn't write much, but I did come up with plenty of possible features to share I hope someone out there enjoys! Farewell until then!