EXCLUSIVE | G4 TV 2004 Let's Watch and Cringe! | UDUG Ep 17

Happy New Year!

Wait, "new year"? It's February... Yeah! This is the video you were supposed to get in December... yeah it's been an absolutely insane few months but things have calmed down enough for me to film this episode of UDUG, January's episode of UDUG, and have a nearly finished cut of the Faceball 2000 Documentary!

Your inbox is gonna be full this week!

But what happened? Where the hell have I been??

Well ok, it's a bunch of personal stuff but you deserve to know as supporters. On thanksgiving my parents came down to see their doctors (yes, their extremely important doctors are in Washington State, not Alaska where they still live). My mother has had stage four cancer for 3 or 4 years now. It's been odd because that's the final stage medically speaking, yet how can you be on death's door for several years? I'm saying the rhetorically but it's been this sorta "hey, maybe soon but she's still feeling fine" situation for a long while now. But at Thanksgiving we went out to dinner and she told me that things are maybe finally progressing and I need to be up for Christmas this year because it might be the last one. There's no question, I'll be there.

Of course these things are never timed well, just a few weeks earlier we'd gotten the keys on our new apartment! One without lots of mold! And we'd already booked movers for the middle of December. Grace and I opted to pack ourselves to save money because we wouldn't be able to get out of our old lease until January (we were officially out on the 21st), meaning we were paying two leases for two and a half months. This is why you have savings, right?

While all this is going on, our dog Dollop's health has been suddenly collapsing. She's caught yet another UTI (it's about once a month fro her) but also started peeing and pooping everywhere. She's having trouble walking, often slipping on the linoleum floor, unable to get up off her belly. She'd started straining really hard when she does her business and had become unable to keep herself upright, falling into her droppings, and getting dirty and matted. As the days roll on through November and December she's just getting worse. And we're spending hours at vets to get tests and medication. We're buying boxes and boxes of pee pads and making a small gated area in front of her crate so she has somewhere to go because she otherwise needs to be let outside every 10 minutes. After several nights at ER's and long appointments with our regular vet, we're recommended a specialist who's supposed to be the best, but getting with him will take a few weeks. Oh, and he'll be leaving for the holidays at the end of the month... great.

Basically I spent December worried about my dog and my mom dying while packing up our apartment and trying to get any work done on the Faceball 2000 documentary. There was never a good time to just sit and stream some fun G4TV content. We move, but we don't hardly have time to unpack before we're able to finally see this new vet and get some tests for Dollop. She got her scans and tests on Wednesday, our flight was Saturday. Our vet called us with the results on Sunday while he was on layover for his holiday trip! But by then we were in Alaska with our two dogs, one of which cannot be left alone or be without a diaper. Not to mention the stress of holiday travel and being in Alaska of all places in December. I did try to get some work done while there, but I was informed quite plainly that I needed to be with the family the entire time. My mother and I already have a complicated relationship, and the circumstances did little to ease tensions. The trip was absolutely exhausting. It was what I needed to do for the family, for my dad, and my two siblings and of course my mom, but I returned with far, far less than what I came with.

We fly back on the 30th and come home to an apartment of boxes. Because of the mold situation with our old place, we junked our couch but hadn't had the time to buy a new one yet. Thankfully our new mattress and bed frame had been delivered back in November, we had something! And then we had friends with a pick-up truck who drove us to get a new couch!

I'm happy to say that while Dollop now has incurable, degenerative issues that just happen with old age, a huge stressor in all this was her Cushing's disease which we learned was not be handled correctly. We adjusted her meds and she's bounced back almost immediately! And my parents have gotten some caretakers to come over and help them with meds and cook. I talked with my mom this week and she said she can't wait to come down and see our new place. I'm not sure how realistic that actually is but that her spirits have risen since Christmas is a relief.

I still have not actually unpacked my office, but I have shot two UDUG videos and nearly finished the Faceball documentary! Like I said above, the doc and the other UDUG video will be coming! Tomorrow and the next day! And then we'll have the poll for UDUG February!

I'm sorry I just kinda vanished there at the end of 2024. But I've already had a pretty productive 2025! The Faceball doc is nearly twice as long as the cut uploaded in November (97 minutes), and is essentially the entire story. And for the January UDUG I have a fun surprise, a topic you might not expect but one I've been kinda working on since last summer.

Assuming I don't need to fly back to Alaska or take Dollop to damn the ER again, expect SSFF to be back up and operational in February!

Thanks as always for your support, see you tomorrow, stay powerful!
-UD