Rick Schwartz
Re-connecting
Soooo, How Ya Been?
It’s SUMMER already! Time to blow the dust off this old blog, say hello and get back to some weekly writing on this blog!

Here it is the very end of June and already it feels like it has been a full year. Last time I posted, I was signing off for a while because I was working my full-time job and started teaching part time at Moorpark College again. Yeah, that post was August of last year – sheesh. In that last post I mentioned I would catch back up with the blog in January of 2019. Annnnnd, that clearly didn’t happen.
What exactly has kept me away from the blog? Well, as soon as things wrapped up with the Fall semester at Moorpark College, I took some much-needed time off to be with family during the holidays. I cherish that time off very much because I have spent most of my career working through the holidays. It’s the nature of what we do as animal care professionals. Thus, I will never take for granted being able to take time off during the holidays and am always thankful to those who are working to care for the animals during the holiday season.
As the new year started so did a very big new project at work. We had been in talks with a production company to do our own version of the TV show “The Zoo” for Animal Planet. Long story short, we started filming in late January. And if you have never been part of a production of this scale, let me be the first to tell you, it takes a lot of preparation to get things in order to start a project like this. So, my January was full of meetings and more meetings. And a lot of emails.
Once filming started, we went non-stop 10 to 12 hours a day, 5 days a week. In the evenings and weekends, I was busy with scheduling and coordinating. In other words, a lot of emails. If I was awake, I was working and I was pretty much awake form 4:30 AM until 11:00 PM every day. Our principal photography, or the bulk of the filming done for the show, wrapped up the last week of May. From there we jumped into scheduling pick-up shots and interviews for the end of production. At the same time, the month of June filled up as I was scheduled to give talks and presentations within the organization. Oh yeah, and a lot of emails to catch up on.
*Whew* All of that said - I am not complaining. It is a privilege to be part of all of this. Projects. TV shows. All of it! I just want to share with everyone why there has been such a long period of time between posts on my little blog.
Looking ahead, I have a couple of months where I can get back into writing. I have a book I am working on and I enjoy blogging too. I hope to even get a few more videos posted to my equally ignored YouTube channel, but we’ll see.
Let’s do this summer!