Getting ready for HF20 with a kidney stone!

In my last witness update, I wrote the following:

I am also now spending a portion of my witness earnings to pay someone highly qualified to help run my witness nodes with me ... This is not because I am not capable of, or do not want to run them by myself. Highly critical systems are not often run by a single person, but rather a team. Given how important it is that witness servers are kept up to date and running at all times, it only makes sense to use some of the earnings to get extra help to make sure that happens.

Today is a really good example of why that is important. I spent all night in the hospital in quite a bit of pain. Now I'm doing better but on quite a bit of medication and little sleep. These are still not good excuses for not taking care of the 24x7 responsibilities of being a top Steem witness. Even though I am not in the top 20, I am close enough where backup really means backup, and I can afford to have some help, say, in case I get a kidney stone during a hard fork...

Anyhow, I'm gonna get some rest and try to regenerate my physical resource credits. I will be available as much as possible to make sure everything goes smoothly today, but I just wanted to use this incident to highlight how important it is for top witnesses to have some help and not try to do it all by themselves.

To everyone reading, thank you for your support, and may the forks be with us today!