Hello everyone,
First I want to apologize to everyone for taking so long to update. The show’s last episode was April 18th of 2019 – over a year and a half ago. This makes me truly sad. As tends to happen in life, things change, and while I would love to be paid to podcast fulltime, this is unfortunately my hobby, and work, family and personal health always come first. To that end, I thought I would share what has been going on with me in that time.
Nov 2018, I developed a health issue that effect my ability to swallow. I lost nearly 35 lbs over two months, and was restricted to a diet that consisted almost predominantly of tomato soup, cheesy potato soup and mashed potatoes for almost 12 months, and lost nearly 40 lbs. Numerous doctor visits, scans, and tests all came up with nothing except one brief potential discovery of a minor growth in my esophagus, that was never able to be found again.
This issue has mostly subsided, though I do still have an occasional issue with getting food stuck, but no one has been able to tell me why. I assume at this point it is a motility issue that may resurface or progress as I get older, but at this point it is better and I am happy for it.
At work, I work in a team of 4 with one being a group lead. Over the past two years we have been losing employees in that team and I’ve been taking on more of that work. At one point I was doing the work of 2.5 people, which as you can imagine is a very stressful thing to do for a short time and I held that level of work for nearly 2 years. I am happy to say that that issue is nearly completely resolved at this time.
Personally early 2019 saw the end of a nearly decade long relationship (who also happened to be my cohost). Late 2019 also saw the beginnings of a new relationship, which can be equally chaotic in different ways. In mid 2020, I lost my father, a key person in my life, and one of the few people (friends or family) in which I kept close. It was a traumatic loss that I am still dealing with today.
The best part of 2020 however was the birth of my baby girl in September. My eldest son is 16 coming up on 17. My partners eldest child is 12. It’s been a quick minute since either of us has dealt with a baby, and though this was a happy and deliberate addition to the family, she has taken her toll on my time and energy. We also moved around the children and made a nursery which means I no longer have a dedicated recording space in my home. Probably the best and happiest reason to ever lose your recording space!
So what does this mean going forward? Many of you have probably already forgotten that you gave up on a Dash of Science a long time ago, but let me assure you that I have not. My plan is to build an office in my shop, that will be a dedicated recording space. Unfortunately the cost of materials has sky rocketed over this pandemic, and a job that once would have cost me a little over 1k is now sitting at nearly 3k to complete.
So my plan, should the universe see for to allow such, is to complete the office by January, and to begin releasing episodes of A Dash of Science monthly, along with small pieces of work in conjunction with the Podfix network, who has been so gracious enough to allow me to stay on board as a member, even though I was not producing content. So for those of you still around, thank you so much for your support over the years.
A Dash of Science has been a project from my heart, the idea starting in Jan 2017, with its first official release in July of that same year. While not being consistently released, A Dash of Science is three and a half years old, and I look forward to it lasting many more years to come!