In October, 2023 a tragedy occurred that sent ripples through our local medical community. I won’t go into details just yet. It was devastating to learn we had lost one of our own. In July, 2023 I retired to part time practice status. However, in the aftermath of this tragedy I was asked to step back into an almost full time position for the first half of 2024 in order to make up for the loss of one of my colleagues. For the last six months of 2023 I had been working diligently to write at least four books a year and to jump head on into promotion for our Hope Again Books. Now, that timeline was thwarted. Yes, I used that word. It’s a good word.

Then, on January 17, 2024 I was in Walt Disney World with Sherry and our daughter, Casey for the International Art Festival. Back in Shreveport, Louisiana we had a rare deep freeze come through the night before. At about 7 PM eastern time I checked our doorbell camera at the house just to see if our electricity had gone out. Power was fine. But water was running AWAY from my front door into the front yard and freezing!

I called my good friend up the street and he went into our house. A pipe had frozen in the attic above my study and had taken out the ceiling and flooded the entire first floor of our house. Panic ensued and we had to fly home the next day costing me thousands of dollars, the first of many thousands of dollars spent tin the subsequent six months.

The last six months have been a nightmare. The clean up team was in our house on Friday morning after the house flooded on Wednesday and we had to move out for about six weeks while everything dried out. The team ripped up carpets and baseboards all over the first floor of our house. In my study we lost Sherry’s desktop iMac and multiple other hardware including hard drives with almost thirty years of personal video footage. I lost a plastic bin filled with comic books and magazines from the 1970’s that are irreplaceable.