Latest Update: August 27, 2026.

 

August 27, 2026

 To all my on-line friends and followers on my art sites (Renderosity, etc.):

For the foreseeable future, my on-line presence will be minimal at best. This year of 2026 so far has been, to put it mildly, HELL.

As many of you know, my wife Jolene has been recovering from a severe fracture of her right ankle.

In January of this year, we got sucked into a scam that cost us around $25,000.00. While we were working with that at an ATM at a local gas station, Jolene passed out while sitting on one of those tall metal stools (she hadn't had much to eat earlier). Her right ankle got caught in the stool framework, and her ankle was fractured in 3 places.

She was taken via ambulance to the hospital and treated. She had some pretty intense surgery on that ankle and was hospitalized for a few days. She was transferred to a rehab facility for several weeks afterwards.

She was released and able to come home after that. She has been healing pretty well and is now able to get around without help. She’s a brave lady and I’m proud of her. We turned in her wheelchair as it's no longer needed, and she's using a walker, cane, and for short periods, nothing.

Now I'm starting to have some weird symptoms and reactions.

I have been pretty stressed over her injury, of course. I’m doing a lot of the stuff she still has difficulty with – such as going up and down the spiral staircase to the basement to take care of laundry and so on. Obviously, I have no problem helping and taking care of her and the stuff that needs to be done.

It is now late August, and it seems like more and more things keep happening. It's just one thing after another. She had a fall in April (I think) and although she wasn’t re-injured, I couldn’t get her up from the floor. I had to call 911 and they had the Fire Department come out to help.

In June, the stress from all this got to a point where I ended up driving myself to the Emergency Room. They checked me over (I was there for around 6 hours), gave me some pills and sent me home.

Yesterday, August 26^th the roll-around shelving unit in the kitchen fell over as she was moving it, and struck her, knocking her down, and dumping all the canned goods and other items on the floor. Again, we struggled to get her up, but again, could not. Visit #2 from the Fire Department.

I have frequently been having that weird feeling where it feels like you’re walking around in a dream. They’ve changed my depression meds (the one I've been taking is being discontinued) and put me on a new one. The information sheet that came with the pills said it would take 4 to 6 weeks to stabilize. If I live that long…

Right now, I feel like I’ve been shot at and missed, and s**t at and hit. I’ve had very little drive to do any kind of artwork or rendering. I’ve not spent much time on Renderosity or Deviant Art. My energy levels and creativity have taken an extended vacation, and all I seem to feel like doing is scrolling through galleries or watching silly videos on You Tube.

We both actually felt like going out yesterday, and we had dinner at our favorite BBQ place. So maybe there’s hope and a light at the end of a very long tunnel – for both of us.

Anyway.... I wanted to put all this on my blog rather than in a post on Renderosity. I figured if I put a link to my blog in any posts I uploaded, if anyone wanted to read it, they could, and if they didn’t it wouldn’t be filling up the description in the post.

Hopefully, I’ll be back fully someday.

Thanks for reading.

Rod