When is the next podcast?

To kick off the behinds-the-scenes peek at the Grace & Steel podcast, I’ll make excuses for why we’re slow in producing another episode.

First of all, shortly after posting Episode 82 – Rivers of Blood, I was sent off on my bi-annual, week-long forced vacation. This probably demands a bit of explanation. One of my current responsibilities is the primary care of an elderly relative in the mid stages of Alzheimer’s. Twice a year, other relatives, concerned for my mental health, relieve me of that responsibility. They pretty much kick me out of the house and order me to go relax somewhere for a week while they take over the caregiver role.

This time I drove three and a half hours from Edmonton to Meadow Lake Provincial Park just across the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. There I stayed in a rustic cabin, without internet, for five days. When I picked that location I knew there was no internet access in the cabin, but I kinda figured there would be wifi/internet access in the office slash convenience store nearby. Never assume. As it turned out, the internet was a 45-minute drive down a dusty gravel road. Screw that. So I was offline for about 6 days.

While I was off relaxing in non-cyberspace, my co-host in Victoria, Kevin Michael Grace, was undergoing a hernia operation. All went well, Grace reports; guts pushed back in, chicken wire in place. I contacted him when I returned home, about five days following the operation, and he said that he was managing the pain okay, but the painkillers were screwing with his head. His speech was clear, but he kept muddling words, getting his wires crossed, so to speak. For instance, he would say something like, “The white wasn’t anything surprising. Yet she was fired for supporting tweet supremacy.” Actually, it wasn’t exactly like that; it was more like his mind was capable of running in multi-track mode, but his voice would, at unpredictable moments, skip between tracks. It was obvious that any attempt to record a podcast at that time would have produced a less than stellar conversation. And, as our listeners know, we strive for stellar.

Despite his disability, Grace had managed to line up a couple of guests while I was away. However, both guests wanted to upgrade their recording capability so we would have to wait a bit. No problem. When people want to take the time to give us good sound, we’re more than happy to oblige. Besides, a delay would give KMG a couple of extra days to get his brain in order.

The guest Grace decided to interview first had ordered a new mic through Amazon, one-day delivery. It was to arrive on Sunday.

But Amazon failed. And then that guest inexplicably dropped off the radar. So, after giving it a couple of days, Grace turned to the next guest to set something up. That was Wednesday. Nothing firm yet on that front. Today is Thursday.

We decided that if we didn’t have a podcast with a guest recorded by Saturday, we’d do one with the two of us, though we haven’t settled on a topic. It usually takes me a couple of days to do all the clean-up on the audio files, then mix and edit. So that means we’ll have a podcast coming out early next week at the latest. In meantime, we have things to work on, our Patreon projects and getting the blogs working again.