Interruption of service announcement redux.

I'm starting to think the interruption in the blogging may be permanent -- another unfinished Robotech-related project on my part, like the various comic synopsis/blogging projects I've been playing with for the past decade-plus. Here's the situation as it stands.

Three days after I got back from RT 25: THE CELEBRATION, I lost my fifth manager in not quite two years. The district manager tapped me to serve as interim manager until he can find a replacement, although it seems what he really wants is for me to step up and say I'll take the job on a permanent basis. I'd rather not do that, but I'm taking a "wait and see" attitude on it -- I'm waiting to see what my first paycheck as interim manager looks like, and what my workload is like once the nearest hiring manager sends me some additional staff. Right now our store is terribly understaffed, and even on my days off I find I'm stopping by and calling in to make sure things are proceeding apace. I come home exhausted, and have no energy to spend three or four hours analyzing a Robotech episode or comic book or whatever. At most, when I come home I throw in a DVD and lean back and try to relax -- and then feel guilty about it, because in the back of my head I'm thinking, "I should be writing a blog post, or drawing something, or doing SOMETHING constructive."

Unfortunately for all of you who were following my latest laughable attempt to maintain daily blogging activities, that "something constructive" won't be the Roboblog for the foreseeable future. This isn't a big dramatic "I'M LEAVING ROBOTECH FOREVER" shutdown like last time; this is totally about me and my own energy level and my work schedule, not about negative energy floating around in the community and associating Robotech with a fractured fandom or whatever the heck was going on in my head last year. I'm reserving the right to come back to the blog later if and when I step back from my current position, or find another job elsewhere, or get myself fired -- basically anything that lands me a great heaping pile of free time to return to gazing deeply into the depths of the Robotech TV series and its twenty tons of printed spin-off material.

I still will need a creative outlet, something that allows me to express myself in a positive way that makes me feel like I'm not just a zombie-like retail monkey, and I do have an idea what that might be. If and when something comes of this idea, I'll let you all know. It's not SCWONKEY DOG this time -- no, that's on hold just like the blog, because that requires even MORE energy and effort than the blog; that requires me to dig into the depths of my being and tear out bits of my soul, silly as that may sound, especially given that on the surface it just looks like a twisted psuedo-mature Saturday morning space opera action cartoon. But at its core, SCWONKEY is a project of self-examination; what I need to do right now is something a little lighter. If this does go forward, it's going to be another webcomic project. A friend of mine's been bugging me to collaborate on something with him for months now, and I'm thinking I might go ahead and do it. I'm shooting off that e-mail sometime in the morning.

So, until I've got time to come back here and start hammering out the Robotech thoughts again, this is Captain JLS, signing off.

See you on the next go-around.