My apologies for my silence. Actually, my apologies for what will be a bit more silence than you’re used to here (for those 6 of you that read - thx, btw!). Work has been exceedingly stressful over the past couple weeks as we attempt some work we’ve never done before (and I’m the type to sell it first, figure out how to build it later) - enough so that Jack’s poor little ticker has been beating out of time. It happens sometimes, but lately it’s been enough to be on the debilitating side. Imagine your heart skipping a beat, but like 20,000 times over the course of a day. It can be kinda freaky.

Don’t worry - In the not-so-distant past I’ve had the recorder with electrodes spidering from it, stuck to various points on my chest, and I’ve had the ultrasound jelly liberally applied as they scanned the insides of my cardio plumbing to make sure everything was ok. And it was.

There are a few mystery products that help set my blood-pumping metronome askew (and a few known things, like caffeine and large quantities of chocolate), but mainly, it’s periods of accumulating stress. And the weird thing about stress is it creeps up on you ever so slowly that you really don’t recognize how bad things are until all of a sudden you’re in a chain restaurant with your family and it’s noisy and the kids and all over the place and food is on the floor and a person at the next table drops their glass of foo-foo beverage, shattering everywhere and you’re sitting there, feeling like someone’s playing slap bass in your chest and you’re wondering if you’re going to stroke out right there, in front of everyone and fall face first into your food, dead on the spot.

That’s where I am.

So I’m gonna need to slow some things down for awhile so I can decompress.  I have some posts in the can and I’ll cut them loose periodically so those of you who might worry (and if you do - thanks!  You rock!) can know that I’m still sucking in air.