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.