I don't know anything. I just work here.
Interesting day here at the 'park. Usually, when we are gearing up for a run of episodes, we'll put some time into an episode that won't make air until midway through the run. The thought being that with an episode half done, we'll be able to take a few days off and recharge for the last part of the run. This run's "breather" episode, E_905, got scrapped in favor of the episode we aired, The Losing Edge, also named E_905. We did get one day off just because we had been working on E_904 till 10am Weds. morning and everyone was whupped... So, the old E_905 became E_916, which meant it was in limbo, as we are only planning on doing 15 episodes for Season 09. Last night, our Animation Producer, Frank Agnone comes back and tells me that the episode we are working on for next Weds. is now E_907 and E_916 is now E_906. Brain hurting yet?
On the upside, we are now working on an episode we've already gotten a decent amount of work done on with almost 7 minutes of animation approved (which is usually where we are on a Sunday night). Hopefully this means that this episode will be fairly smooth sailing, and I will NOT break 100 hours for the week. It would be the first time this run that has happened... Here's hoping!
On a more technical note, I've been gather some stats for the Exec. Prod. about how much work we do for one episode. Here's an example. For E_905, The Losing Edge, we rendered 90219 frames of animation, which at the 24 frames per second we animate at, equals about 62 minutes. It took a little under 44 hours of rendering to generate that much footage. We rendered 612 shots, including multiple revisions of many shots. 323 of those shots were rendered between the hours of 10am Tues morning and 10am Weds. morning. The total number of shots in the final cut? 302. As you can see, we follow an almost exponential curve for rendering, with very little being done early in the production of an episode, and almost half being done on the last day. I plan on gethering these kinds of stats from now on. It should be interesting to see how they compare against the overall complexity of a show...
One "perk" of working our tail ends off is that they feed us. Usually pretty well. Catering, snacks, coffee, etc. Anything to keep us from leaving the building. 
I bring that up because they just announced that dinner is ready. So, I will leave off here for now. G'day!
J^2