2025: Wreckage and Renewal.

When New Year’s Day arrived, this didn’t feel like one of those “clean slate, start fresh” kind of years. The aftermath of hurricane Helene created piles of ruined condo apartment debris that were still in our parking lots, getting rained on, picked at by junk enthusiasts, and rotting away. That scene was replicated all over the area within a mile from the coast.

I continued my campaign with FEMA to request hurricane disaster assistance, filling out form after form, often discovering that I was missing some other form depending on which claim manager I got on any given day; or a signature couldn’t be read by their antiquated web systems; or a document upload had failed and they never received it. I would keep this up for most of 2025, I just didn’t know it yet.

Freelance work for my two main clients was ongoing throughout all this, so at least there was a steady foundation of business; however, I advised both clients that by March of this year, I would be retiring. I submitted my request to the Social Security Administration that I’d be starting my benefits at 62, and everything seemed to be in order. Or was it?

In the background, there was a rustle of interesting developments making a little noise. One of my clients, a 40-year old medium-sized printing company in the midwest was undergoing a change of ownership. It was a family business and the daughter was keen to take it over and relaunch / rebrand the company at a date TBD. She was building a new leadership team, contacting banks and the SBA for expansion capital, and looking for ways to reduce costs and replace bad employees with good ones.

Then the acting CEO called. A week before I was set to officially retire, he offered me a full-time position as the Senior Creative Director.

Given all the stress related to the hurricane damage to our condo and all the volatility of the new/second Trump Administration, this was really good news. Wow. I decided to accept the position, which allowed me to work remotely and carry on with the same duties I was performing as a freelancer.

I cancelled my retirement (which you can only do once, I learned) and agreed to start my employment the first week of April.

Before all that got going, my wife and I booked ourselves on a cruise. We’d never been on one before, and managed to get a late booking on a Celebrity Cruise that would depart from Port of Tampa and take us to Cozumel, Belize City, and Cayman Islands over the course of a week. We got lucky and snagged the last available room with a balcony, and off we went, into the Gulf of Mexico, and onto our vacation destinations.

The cruise was good for my soul and it started me off on the right foot with my new position. I was off to the races.

By the time we’d blazed through summer, I’d learned that my new company had some huge challenges on their hands. They had serious tech issues with which to contend — old Windows systems, outdated servers, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, poor network cabling in their offices, slow internet service, and the list goes on. Fortunately for us, one of my oldest friends from my NYC days who’d been a cybersecurity and network build expert, was available to consult with us and assess what we had. In every sense of the word, my company’s internal technology was a clown show. So, we then began developing a plan and a cost analysis to overhaul everything as soon as possible.

I began development of the company’s rebranding, working with the new owner to create a new name, logo, branding assets, style guidelines, and every type of template imaginable. We’d planned to launch the company in October, but then the government shutdown stalled out the owner’s SBA application process, and the launch was put on hold until the SBA was back online. I continued my efforts to market the legacy company on social media and via email marketing until we got the green light for New Co.

By Thanksgiving, the government had reopened, but we still didn’t have an estimate on when the SBA process would be completed. Yikes.

On the personal side, our condo still hadn’t been renovated, but work had gotten started on units in other buildings in our complex. I’d at least gotten my interior finishes selected through the HOA’s insurance/renovation company’s interior designer, and now it was just a waiting game for the workers to reach our building and begin work.

Thinking it was time to take a break from life in Florida again, my wife and I had made plans to visit her family in Switzerland and Italy for the holidays. We hadn’t visited her brother in Zurich in 12 years, and we’d never spent time in Italy visiting her cousins (from her mom’s side of the family). When departure day arrived, we psyched to get out of our little bubble and leave the stresses behind for a couple weeks.

It turned out to be a beautiful trip, full of great food, good people, cool sites and new scenery, and cheerful gatherings with family that made the holiday very special and memorable.

2024: Helene and Milton

We started the new year off with a return trip from our December stay in Pennsylvania and NYC, driving back to west central Florida in two days. It’s a pretty aggressive haul, but being on the road was good for our minds. We enjoyed seeing the changes in landscape through the eastern states — even if it was only a whatever-you-could-see-from-I-95 tableau passing by.

Freelance work resumed its usual pace, with monthly deliverables to my steady client while my wife and I continued our respective health battles. For her, insomnia and GI dysfunctions. For me, experimenting with new biologics to treat arthritis, which I’d been dealing with since my late 30s, had become a big challenge. Lots of trial-and-error, with pretty terrible flares that could only be calmed by Prednisone. Then finally we got things back to normal by February and March.

Leading up to this year, my wife had begun development of a jewelry business. She’d discovered electroplating and found the whole process fascinating enough to try it on small sand dollars, we began production in small batches, producing a line of pendants and necklaces. It was a lot of fun for her, and I developed a branding kit for her and launched it online on Shopify. We test-marketed it in a few local crafts shows as well, and the response was pretty encouraging. More on that in the 2025 summary blog to come.

In April, my wife took a trip to NYC to visit her mother, who had been slowly deteriorating into dementia for a couple years. She spent 2 weeks there visiting her mom in the hospital every day. It wasn’t anything particularly new, but this time the trip took a toll on her that I hadn’t seen before. She was deeply saddened by her mother’s slide in to senility. In the following days, she developed some worrisome cardiac symptoms that turned out to be “broken heart syndrome" and she underwent a couple months of medications, monitoring, and routine doctor follow-ups. Thankfully, she came out the other side with a full recovery.

Flash forward to summer, and we’re caught up in the pressing challenges of our lives, thinking about retirement plans, where we’d live next, etc. I’d decided to retire in March of 2025, which at that time was about 6 months away. Then in mid-September, a hurricane had spun up in the western Gulf of Mexico, and it tracked into the center of the Gulf. It became Hurricane Helene. It didn’t approach the west coast of Florida, thankfully, but it sent a storm surge into the cove that my condominium complex was built near. That cove is fed by a channel that snakes into the coastal areas of central Florida near Tarpon Springs. The high tide surge brought floodwaters onto the property, invading all 39 of the ground-floor units with about a foot of saltwater and waste water from sewers. We’d made the decision to evacuate to a hotel in Wesley Chapel, FL several days before the flood event, and after the water receded, we returned to an absolutely disgusting, sodden mess of a condo unit. We basically lost everything that was touching the floor.

Then two weeks later, Milton spun up in almost the exact same location, and this time, it came ashore to the St. Petersburg/Clearwater area. We abandoned our demolition and junk-hauling efforts, and again evacuated to a hotel — this time in Gainesville, FL. Milton wasn’t as disastrous to our condo complex, and in fact the heavy rains helped wash down some of the brown water residue of dead fish and other nasty things. We continued the process of documenting, tossing, and storing our belongings while my wife and I temporarily operated out of my mother’s house. Within a couple weeks we’d found an apartment rental that worked for us, and we began the long slog through the rest of the year, processing our PTSD, waiting for FEMA, the HOA’s insurance, my flood insurance, and eventually contractors, to assist and start the demolition and renovation process.

In October, I took on a second retainer client for creative work (a referral from my one steady client) and it was a welcome distraction from all the battles I’d taken on with FEMA claims, and the daily headaches that being displaced from one’s home can create.

By the end of the year, nothing had moved forward at all, and we braced for yet another unpredictable four years with Donald Trump as our president. We certainly were thankful none of us got physically hurt by the hurricane damage. As everyone always says: material things can be replaced. And our two dogs had adapted well to all the moving and upheaval.

Without question, this was our most difficult year, but we knew eventually we’d have an opportunity to rebuild.

2023: Setbacks and speedbumps.

Ok, so I’ve got a lot to catch up on here since my last post in December 2022. Here we go.

I kept my head above water business-wise in 2023 with one steady client who had me on a monthly retainer for their social media posts, email marketing, as well as direct mail campaigns for their customers. I wove in a half-dozen other projects that added some extra billing and it made for a decent year of freelance work.

On the personal side, my wife had one of her worst years. She struggled to find doctors who could help overcome two major health obstacles: chronic insomnia and a dysfunctional GI tract. She also underwent gall bladder surgery, and the recovery was painful and difficult for her. Eventually, she healed up and we turned our focus back to seeking out a diagnostician for her GI issues. We kept striking out, but kept up the search nonetheless.

In October, we experienced rather ugly disruption. One of my wife’s doctors had asked her to stop a medication and start a new/similar one, and it didn’t go well. This happened about a week after the Oct. 7th Hamas attack on Israel. She had a terrible reaction to the sudden medication change, and it landed us in the ER. A few hours into the exam, her personality turned into someone I didn’t recognize, and they transported her to a behavioral health wing at a nearby hospital. It was really hard to watch. Several days later though, she stabilized and I the person I knew reappeared. She eventually returned to her normal, lovely and intelligent self, and we began to put back together the pieces of a shattered month.

November was filled with the inexorable GI doctor searches, and we struck gold with an amazing practice in Largo. One of the rock star doctors there had a hunch, and had her swallow a small Bluetooth capsule that tracked the motility of her stomach and GI tract. The results showed us that she has a condition called gastroparesis, which is basically a super slowly-emptying stomach, and slow intestines. This was a real diagnostic breakthrough, and gave us a new roadmap for diet and medications. The insomnia condition still eluded us, but at least we had one major issue somewhat under control.

By the end of 2023, despite some setbacks and speedbumps, we had a better set of tools for managing my wife’s health. And we even did a little roadtrip from Florida to Pennsylvania to attend a wedding. While in the northeast, we got a chance to scoot into Manhattan afterward and see old friends and family as well.

We ended the year feeling like despite all the hardships, we counted a few wins too.