You Deserve an Explanation

I am a work-hard/play-hard kind of person. When I show up in the morning at my day job, I try to show up caffeinated and ready to go with a game plan for the day. I put my phone away, focus on the work, and try to give it 100% to deliver the best quality I can. As a result, I expect the same when I spend my money. I will not spend my hard-earned cash on crap products or service. For this reason, I feel compelled to explain recent weeks to our paying patrons.

For the last few weeks, I have been battling a combination of factors working against me. I've been traveling out of town (and sometimes even out of state) for four of five consecutive weeks. The last four weeks straight have included overtime. Additionally, I have been battling chronic pain that seems to only be getting worse, the kind of pain where it's impossible to sit (or stand) in front of a computer and focus on things like editing videos. All that on top of trying (and lately failing) to run a house with things like cooking, cleaning, and all the stuff I didn't get to do during the week that got pushed off to the weekend due to overtime (checking the PO Box, grocery shopping, etc).

To be clear, I don't for one second consider myself tough, but I'm not a total wuss either. I'm not the kind of person to call the ambulance because I stubbed my toe. In boot camp my arm swelled up to the size of a baseball and I still tried to argue when I was sent to medical. (I still have the scar where they spent two weeks ensuring the massive abscess in my arm healed up correctly.) So when I say I went to the ER this weekend, you know it was bad. I was there from 11pm to 5am Saturday night/Sunday morning. The morphine barely dulled the pain, though the single Oxy they gave me before leaving did wonders and allowed me to sleep finally when I got home. As such, the entire weekend was spent either lying in bed in pain or sleeping the pain away. Unfortunately this has been my normal state of being for the last couple weeks: get home after getting off work, lie in bed in pain unable to do anything, likely miss sleep due to said pain, rinse and repeat. It was only this past weekend that it finally got bad enough that I broke down and went to ER.

I will be okay. I should be on a good plan to manage the pain for now, though surgery will be required in the (hopefully) near future. I'm not asking for sympathy, but being that you guys are spending your hard earned money on supporting us and have not been getting what we promised lately (namely timely publications and last week's Q&A), I felt like you deserved an explanation. This week's episode is finally out (two days late), and I hope to have the Q&A out either tomorrow or Thursday. Hopefully once I get caught up this week we can keep things back on schedule. I really apologize for all the delays and thank you all for your patience and support.

-Nate