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.

Wading through the flood waters of insurance coverage was a challenge. We had to move out of our home until the cleaning was done. Fortunately, a relative had a house for rent and we moved into it for the duration of the “drying out”. Then came the onerous task of reconstruction. After the tryout process, we were able to move back into our house for about six weeks with bare concrete floors and gaping holes in the walls. Then on Good Friday, March 29th, we moved back into the rent house while reconstruction began.

The recon company moved everything out of the first floor into storage. Everything! Our house has two stories and I was able to move my study (where my radiology computer now exists so I can continue to work) into a large storage closet on the second floor.

To say this was the most stressful time of our lives is an understatement. Those of you familiar with our family know that Casey suffers from epilepsy and the past twenty years have been terribly stressful on her and on us in our efforts to diagnose and control her seizures. The irony is as of November, 2023 after starting a new medication, Casey’s seizures had almost completely stopped! For the first time in 28 years her seizures were controlled. And then, this happened! My point is as bad as those stressful times were, the house situation was a different level of stress. We were at the mercy of powers over which the had no control!

My son, Sean, turned 40 on May 31 and we had planned a big party at our house for all of his local friends. He and his family live in Abilene, Texas. The recon was not complete but the floors were mostly done so we had couches and our beds moved back into the house by that weekend. No table. No chairs but we could sit and sleep.

In the following three weeks we able to move everything back into our house. Now, rooms and a POD are filled with boxes packed up by the movers. It will take us months to get our home back to a comfortable, living condition. And we still have a few minor things to get done!

This is why I have written NOTHING in the past seven or eight months. I am so behind on my books. And I am so angry and stressed out and disillusioned by this whole process I cannot begin to connect with my creative side. Mostly I am connected to my angry Hulk side!

I am now convinced I will not get a book out by the end of 2024. I am beginning the next to last book in the Chronicles of Jonathan Steel, “The 2nd Demon: Tales of the Grimvox” and I am roughly 1/3 finished.

Now you know, if you are even still interested, in why I have been silent the past few months. Thank you for being interested in my books. I will get back to them. I have many more stories to tell. The only positive development of the past few months is I have had to work more at my day job and that extra money has been necessary to finish the house reconstruction. As of July 1 I will return to my part time status and that will give me more time to devote to my writing and publishing.

In a later post, I will stop whining and share the good things that came out of this process. Yes, good has come out of it. Wait for it! I had to!