By year three of Robot Friday I had sort of settled into the way I make the comic. The character designs were as good as they were going to get for a while. My style of drawing in general had developed to a point where I was happy with it. I started to reintroduce bit characters from the first 50 strips or so in much larger roles within the main character line up and I also started to push my writing style farther as well.

For the first 100 strips I was doing my best to just come up with a joke or story for one comic, but by year three I was beginning to do storylines that spanned more than one, two or even three strips. I kept the jokes self contained in each comic, but the overall story wouldn't end until a handful of strips down the line, by doing this I found that I was able to say a lot more and develop my thoughts out farther than by confining myself to just one comic at a time, plus the jokes in each comic felt a lot more natural too, which is really helpful in endearing the readers to your characters. I also decided to cut my posting schedule down to three days a week instead of daily. At this point Karen and I had a serious relationship, we both had day jobs and we decided to move in together. My time as a self employed cartoonist, and all the time that afforded me, were coming to a close so I had to adjust my comic around life, and life was about to hit pretty hard.

The logistics of combining two people's homes into one can be pretty tricky, but I think Karen and I did it pretty well for the most part. I spent a good month packing up my stuff into storage and then moving into Karen's tiny apartment for a week as we packed her up to move into out bigger apartment. It was hard labor and a lot of stress and it took a toll on my body that I won't soon forget. At four in the morning the night Karen and I were set to move all of her stuff out of her tiny place into the bigger place I developed a kidney stone that will remain legend in the retelling!

For the sake of brevity I will not go into all of the gorey details, but I will say that I cried at four in the morning on my girlfriends apartment floor because I was convinced an alien was tearing it's way out of my bladder! One ER trip later, and about 5 hours into the ordeal, I was pumped full of enough morphine that hitting me squarely in the face with a rock would have made no difference to me. I slept most of that day and for weeks after was in and out of uroligists offices to see what we could do about the stone. Suffice it to say that all production on Robot Friday stopped at this time. A month passed by the time the stone released on its own and I will know no better pain relief than I felt that day, after 30 days of agony. I cried a little bit then too. I was soon very happy to get back to Robot Friday and had forgotten any insecurities or critiques I might have had before about the comic. I was just happy to make art and comics again and happy that I was out of pain, those days after the kidney stone were probably some of the most fun I had making Robot Friday and I really think it shows.

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