It is now the my 20th day in Japan, and I just realized how remiss I have been in my blog-posting duties.  I told myself that I would be blogging more often, but so much had happened since I last posted that I feel there is a tremendous need to fully catch everyone up on what’s been going on since I last posted.  Firstly, let me apologize to those of you who’ve actually been reading my posts since I first started this blog.  To be more truthful, I started blogging long ago under Venomoftheday, but I’ve since made the mistake of attempting to add WooCommerce to my blog pages over and over again.  This mistake gave me the distinct pleasure of having the entire screen turn white and losing everything that I had previously posted.  Thus, I had to completely erase all of my previous work and start all over again.  This had happened with hotdogandbun.com/ericsandoval, hotdogandbun.com/venomoftheday, hotdogandbun.com/themanincorporated, and hotdogandbun.com/stuff, over the past few years.  I’d lost some of my best written material, yet I’m not a quitter, even if I admittedly am a slow mover.  I truly enjoy the written word, and though I tend to write more political and social commentary and criticism, my true passion is in fiction.  I’ve written four screenplays, developed a 13 episode series bible for a television drama about transnational criminal syndicates operating within the United States, produced around 20 stop-motion animations of which some are shared on this blog-zine, produced 2 live-action short films, and wrote a couple plays of which I have yet to get up on the stage.

But allow me to fill you in on what’s happened since I last posted.  Back in late August of 2018, my wife (whom I prefer to refer to as Mrs S.), and I received the news that her mother had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (A.L.S.), once commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.  However, since most people nowadays don’t even know who Lou Gehrig actually was, (American professional major league baseball player, nicknamed “the Iron Horse”, who played for the New York Yankees for his entire 17 season career with 6 World Series under his belt, made All Star 7 times in a row, Triple Crown winner once, American League MVP twice, hit 493 home runs, was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and was so chingon that he was the first baseball player to have his team number, #4 to be permanently retired when he retired from baseball), most people these days simply refer to it as A.L.S..  In fact, up until last year’s absurdly narcissistic social-medial self promoting Ice Bucket Challenge campaign on YouTube and Facebook, I only knew it as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, but I digress.  Once we’d received the news, my wife had to start making arrangements to return to Japan to settle affairs.

MORE TO COME…