Cleaning Up and Apologising

Wow, it’s been awhile since I’ve blogged.

I had previously posted a couple of messages on here about some of the personal upheaval that’s kept me away from the puppetry intrawebs for so long. I’m somewhat reluctant to discuss my personal life and circumstances in a public forum like this – if anything recent events have taught me to never, ever do that again – but suffice to say I had a number of deaths and serious illnesses among my family and friends including the passing of my father and the combination of natural grief and dealing with all the mundane things you have to deal with when people die or are ill kept me away and distracted.

I owe an especially big apology to everyone who enrolled in the Puppet Building 101 course (see previous post) I was running at the beginning of the summer. Circumstances forced me to postpone the course after it started by a few weeks, then until the Fall and finally to cancel it outright because changes in my personal and professional responsibilities just don’t allow me the time to do it. Refunds to everyone who enrolled were held up because of some PayPal-related snafus, but I’m relieved to say that the last of them were issued this week.

Now it’s come to my attention recently that there was some particularly nasty chat about this on at least one other puppetry website. I haven’t really been online much for several months and the relevant threads seem to have now been deleted by moderators, but this flame war seemed to escalate last week to the point where certain individuals (well, ok, mainly one individual) who had been enrolled in the course wase harassing and beginning to cyberstalk other members of the online puppetry community.

I certainly can understand people being upset and frustrated about Puppet Building 101, but I’m baffled as to why someone seems to be taking that out on folks who have nothing to do with the situation. I am not going to name names, but this person knows who they are and would like to appeal to them to come to their senses and stop this. You are only going to end up hurting yourself and not the person you’re mad at (me).

I do want to take this opportunity to publicly and sincerely apologise to anyone who was enrolled for the cancellation as well as any inconvenience and frustration the long, drawn-out situation caused. Although the circumstances were largely out of my control, I wish I had been able to deal with the situation in a more prompt manner.

I’ve spent a long time building up a lot of goodwill with this little ol’ blog here and it’s unfortunate that it has become tainted by the fallout from my Summer from Hell. So to the two dozen or so people who were affected, please accept my unconditional apology. I hope I can find a way to make it up to you in the future.