I've never used steam before and so far wishing I never did. I preloaded the game two nights ago to get ready for the 11th. I got up this morning at a little after 6:00 am to play. I clicked play and it said something about decrypting and then nothing happened. I hit play again and now it says game is currently unavailable. I tried restarting and that didn't work either. Is there anything I'm missing here? I live on the east coast btw. Steam says it's available.

Try downloading it again.

Mine took about 10 minutes to decrypt. Are you giving it enough time?

If hitting the play button again too soon is what caused it to become unavailable then I'm sure I didn't give it enough time. I'll try restarting again and just waiting after it says that.

Try verifying the game cache...right click the game in your library>properties>local files>verify game cache.

I had this issue just now too, while it worked fine several hours ago. So it's most likely steam being the issue here. Restarting didn't fix it for me, what does work for me is the following:

Go to your skyrim folder in steam, so: Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim
Then run TESV.exe
TESV.exe worked fine for me, while SkyrimLauncher.exe, which steam uses by default, resulted in steam saying the game isn't available at this time.

Of course you might not be able to set your settings that way if this is the first time you're starting the game, but you can at least set your resolution manually for now by doing the following:

Go to: My Documents\My Games\Skyrim (you need to start the game at least once for this map to be created)
Then open the file: SkyrimPrefs.ini
set bFull Screen=0 to =1
and set iSize H and iSze W to whatever your resolution is.

Hopefully it will work then until steam works properly again.