John Hendrix is back with our favorite Redemption podcast: The Threshing Floor! He shares with us what has been going on lately in his life and provides an update on the podcast.

Guys… I have not been happy lately. Now, that is not to say that I have been depressed or even sad. I’ve just been… existing. I’ve simply progressed through my days without much excitement. I know that sounds terrible, but something has just been missing. As the days progressed to weeks to months, I now know what the something missing was. I miss the game of Redemption, the wonderful community of its players and I miss making The Threshing Floor. If you will bear with me, I would like to share some of the circumstances surrounding my life the past several months that led to my unplanned hiatus from recording.

Our New Family

I’ll give some back story from all the way back in June. At end of June/beginning of July, my wife and I opened our home to a single mother friend of ours who was displaced from her home. We allowed her and her two boys to move into our home with us and shared our lives with them from that point until sometime in November. The mobile home they had been renting was struck by lightning and required a complete overhaul of the home’s wiring that the owner refused to pay for leaving them without a truly livable space.

Now, our house is small. If you include the garage, I believe it only comes in at 1400 square feet or so. It is part of a small community of houses known generically as “garden homes”. There isn’t a ton of space in these style houses as they are usually for small families to use as starter homes or for single individuals that want their own place without the huge price tag of a larger home. We were hoping to sell our house by now, but as rates have gone crazy, we have decided to enjoy having a mortgage payment under $750 and use the money we’d spend on a bigger house for other things at this time… like travelling to Redemption tournaments.

The sudden growth of our “family” made coming home a bit of a mixed bag. Some days were better than others, but some days just felt like there was no escape from the “real world”. Three wild boys banging on walls and slamming doors as they pretend wrestle in a small home is not the easiest environment to unwind in. That’s not to say that I regret helping our friend, because I don’t. But, when the peaceful evenings you have grown accustomed to vanish instantly, it can be a tough adjustment.

The New Contract

In addition to the extra family members we gained, work also cranked up after Nationals last year. Shortly after returning to work post-Nationals, I was made aware that we may pick up a new contract for Hughes Network Systems, the company that we serve as a primary distributor for. This new contract would be the biggest yet, and while profitable, it would also demand more of my focus and attention at work than the rest of our lines of business combined. About two weeks after first getting wind of the potential new project, I was advised that HNS gave the then distributor their 90-day notice that they would be ending their contract with them.

That meant my job went from one with defined allocations of my time to various daily tasks to one lacking structure as everything changed and the focus was placed on getting a place carved out for the inventory we would be receiving for this new line of business. The estimated amount of inventory totaled 28 full truckloads of transferred equipment, not counting new inbound equipment from HNS directly. I can’t lie and say it was easy or is easy – it’s still very much a work in progress – but the animal is much closer to being tamed today than it was early on.

Do you know how uncomfortable it is to be told to “order what you need” from the vice president of your company when you need some expensive stuff? I felt uneasy ordering 60k worth of pallet racking because while I have always been told to order what I need and I have done so, the immediate change in what was needed was a bit overwhelming. Now, don’t fret, as I did take care of myself and decide that an M1 Mac was a necessary item for this new adventure, so I did get a little pick-me-up in the middle of all the chaos. But the overwhelming pressing need to get this contract off to a good start was immense.

This new project had me clocking 120-130 hours every two weeks. For a while I was working 7 days each week and doing this without any oversight from people higher up in the company put this all squarely on my shoulders. To put this in perspective, this is the first job I have had where I am “the guy” at the top and make all the decisions, both easy and hard. To say this project coming to life was the biggest work task of my life honestly feels like it’s being undersold. Or at least, the stress of it is being undersold. Heck, this project caused me to have to watch multiple 49ers games on my phone as I worked. For those that know me, that’s a significant indicator of how much dedication this took from me.

At the present, we have this contract in a good spot with just a few odds and ends that need to be nailed down, but we have been shipping parts like crazy to service techs. We ship over 120 orders on average daily for this new contract alone with pending orders sometimes being in the 500-600 range, but it is working itself into a groove that is much less chaotic and stressful.

The Dream Car

If you all recall back in May of last year, I was involved in an accident that totaled my Volkswagen Passat. Man, I absolutely loved that car and all the memories made with it. After all, that was the car Jeremy and I road tripped to Canyon Lake, Texas for my first Nationals experience in 2021. It was comfortable to drive and had some nice options, but it was not my dream car. My absolute dream car is not the kind of car most people would claim as their dream car. My dream car was a car I desperately wanted back when I was in high school and that is a Chevrolet Cobalt SS. As a broke teenager from a poor family, the affordable sports car as it was marketed was still an unattainable goal for me. I had given up on ever owning one as the affordable tag on them meant they were owned by a wide array of people, and most were not valued or taken care of properly leading to less than ideal conditioned cars on the market.

Upon losing my Passat, I decided I wanted to try locating one and finally see if I could make the dream a reality and boy, did I ever! I spent several months looking at trashed out versions before striking pure gold. In Hazel Green, Alabama, a small town in the Huntsville, Alabama area, I located an older couple selling a supercharged 2007 Cobalt SS with only 23k original miles. The couple had purchased the car for their son when he graduated high school (same year I graduated) and he had only driven the car during college. Since then, it had been stored in the father’s climate-controlled shop and was meticulously cared for. They had routine maintenance all done on schedule and it was cranked every once in a while, and it was driven around the block at least once every couple months.

When I arrived to look at the car, it was love at first sight as he backed it out of the garage. This thing looked like it was rolling off the showroom floor for the first time. I was in euphoria. I felt like that high school teenager finally had his dream come true. It was a surreal feeling handing over cash for a car I couldn’t have afforded as a teenager. I took the utmost care of this car, and it was great, for a month or so…

After a few weeks, I had the car suddenly die on me. It tore me apart going from such a high feeling and falling back to earth as I scrambled to try to find what was wrong with the car. The gauges didn’t register, and the car would not turn over. After spending the next couple weeks tearing the car apart trying to blindly locate the problem and/ or solution, I began wondering if I had been conned by the nice older couple or just had terrible luck . I finally decided to order a new PCM engine computer to see if that was the issue as I was at a complete loss. It was! I had my car back and life was great, for a few months…

It was a cold November night that we had been working late. As I usually do when we leave after dark, I waited in my car for all my staff to get their vehicles warmed up and get on the road safely before pulling out and heading home myself. Part of me wishes I had left when I first got in my car and maybe things would’ve turned out differently that night, but that’s not in my nature. Unfortunately, I met a deer on the highway and my car has since been totaled by insurance before ever hitting 27k on the odometer. I was crushed – still am. The dream shattered.

Passive Involvement

There were several key things during this time that I feel like I was involved with but was not so much present with, if that makes sense. Some of those include my son’s fall baseball season, which was the first time he’s ever played that I did not help coach the team. I also set up and managed the Redemption fantasy football league because there were several people interested from where I had been excited to host it earlier in the year. I had fun participating, but I wasn’t as active as I usually am when it comes to that stuff.  Brad and I tried our hand at starting a playgroup. I like to believe I put forth a good effort with that, but truth is, I felt like it happened, and I was just there more so than I was really pushing for it to be groundbreaking.

I also ran the third annual Christmas Card Swap, which I hope it was fun for all the participants, but I did it more so out of obligation than joy. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad I did it in the end, but at the time it was done out of a feeling of owing it to the community rather than excitement to offer it. I felt almost like a ghost through the holidays as I did not get to enjoy that time of year as much as I usually do, which is unfortunate.  

When you pair the stress that I was facing at work with this new project and the amount of time and focus it was pulling from me and the fact that when I went home there was added stress there as well, it’s not hard to see why the community has gone without many podcast episodes in the last several months. Add to it the terrible luck I had with my dream car, and it was a year that I both loved and truly hated. Wrapped up in all of that is the reason that I have been mostly absent from the community compared to my level of involvement prior to these events.

I am not one to want people to feel sorry for me, but I do carry some of the residual stress from all those factors existing in my life simultaneously and am trying to move past it in a healthy way. I was able to keep my car and have plans to rebuild it myself and try to get it back up and running. The family that stayed with us have settled into their new place – in fact, we just had dinner with them over there last night. Things are finally getting to a better spot for me with work and for the first time in quite a while, I feel… like recording!

The Return of the Podcast

Due to the increased workload at work, my office is not a suitable recording space any longer. There are two factors for this. One, it is now shared with my #2 guy at work, and we keep it more cluttered than I’m used to due to a constant train of products being packaged for shipment in the office. And two, the stress level of work being all around while trying to decompress and use podcasting as a valid outlet for my stress is not a good combination. So, where can I record now…

I already mentioned that we live in a small home. Our third bedroom is already being used for our Star Wars themed game room so that isn’t a valid space. The only other option I could think of was to frame up a small room in our garage. Unfortunately, that would require more time and effort than I can dedicate at the moment. I would also have to hire a professional electrician to run outlets and lighting and probably would want some ductwork ran to keep it habitable year-round without being too hot or cold. Knowing how tight we are on space, I had an idea cross my mind that might would work and provide a suitable space without any permanent changes to the structure of the house, except for a few holes of course.

The compromise was simple. I needed a place to keep my gear set up to record that wasn’t going to be too crazy loud. I was sitting in our game room watching a movie with Keegan, my son, one night when I saw the closet. We had stuffed a few board games and such in there, but it was not really used for any real purpose since our friends had lived with us. While they stayed with us, our game room was converted back to a bedroom for them to stay in. But now, the closet looked like it was full of potential.

Now, I’m not going to lie and say this is ideal or anything, because it’s not. But I can only work with what I have, and this was a decent compromise. I started by removing the closet door and removing the few things inside. The space measured 53 inches wide with a depth of 23 ½ inches. That seemed like a decent sized desk for my gear and with that, the creativity started running wild. I could remove the generic wire shelving and replace it with a solid shelf to put my Redemption inspired collectibles on, I could even maybe hang my framed tapestry that I had people sign at Nationals last year – now one of my favorite possessions. I didn’t want to wire anything in permanently so this could be turned back into a standard closet when we get ready to sell, but I needed a light. I went to Lowe’s and purchased a plug-in light and wired that to a light switch and then added a plug from the switch to plug into an outlet. That gave me a crazy bright overhead light.

I have a surge protector that is ran from a nearby plug outside of the closet to the underside of the makeshift desk, although I do still have several things to do to tidy the wiring up a bit. I had hoped to have room to potentially use this space for deckbuilding and maybe mounting an overhead camera to play games via Zoom and such, but the mic takes up way more room than I anticipated. I plan to buy a wall mount arm for it that will free up the desk space it currently occupies and then maybe there will be room for something like that.  

There is an echo to the acoustics currently, and I hope to solve that issue in the coming weeks as I work on getting some materials to help prevent that. So, bear with me as we get back up and running as the quality may not be the greatest, but below you can see the before and after of this project. I did get lazy and choose not to patch holes from the old wire shelving or paint, but it turned out decent and I can always do that later. So, the next time you are listening to The Threshing Floor podcast, just keep in mind all that has happened to bring that episode to you, and I hope that gives you a deeper appreciation for it. I love recording and talking about this wonderful game, but it’s you all that give it purpose by choosing to tune in and listen when new episodes are made. I am truly grateful for the time each of you take to listen to some guy in Alabama with a microphone. I love this game and I love this community. Thanks for letting me continue to be a part of it!

Before

After

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