Well gosh… thanks for nothing everyone! 
I have been getting away with uploading to data.sparkfun.com every 15 seconds without issue… but perhaps adding Blynk.setProperty was enough compromise stability. I witnessed sparkfun timing out quite a bit in terminal… maybe the client.stop() after a sparkfun timeout in my code is hosing everything.
At any rate, with no sparkfun uploads all is fine!
Looks like the latest release couldn’t have come at a better time!!!