Friends,

It has been a long time since last we spoke, so I now take pen in hand to write my annual year in review post. I did not go into 2023 with any grand plans or resolutions as I don’t really do much of either of those things. 2023 would end up being an….interesting year, in some ways good and in some ways quite bad.

I was happy when the spring semester started because for the first time since I started teaching full time for the college, all my classes would be on the campus where my office was. The semester passed with little fanfare. We had an epic Saint Patrick’s Day celebration on campus right before Spring Break. It was our second annual event. Of course, I was really looking forward to baseball season starting, though from the way the Red Sox played, I think they forgot the season started.

Then, right before the end of the semester, my wife had a stroke. Strokes are not normally something that happens to health people in their 40s, but here we are. She was at work when it happened and I was also at work, in the complete opposite direction. At first, she seemed to be recovering well, but when the summer set in, it was setback after setback. Thankfully, her speech wasn’t affected by it, but she has (at times) debilitating nerve pain now, some issues with balance, and some short-term memory problems. At first, the doctors assured us that those issues would be temporary, but now, given how long it has been, they are admitting that they will probably be permanent.

They did find that she had previously undiagnosed high blood pressure, but further testing found a hole in her heart. The theory is that this is what allowed the clot to pass through and go to her brain. They did a heart cath procedure in November to try and patch the hole but they were unable to. As of the time I am writing this, on the final weekend of the year, we haven’t heard what the plan going forward will be. No doubt the saga will continue.

Midway through the spring, I inadvertently uncovered a family secret. I did one of those Ancestry DNA tests, but I sent the raw data to GenomeLink as they have a more accurate ethnicity estimate. My whole family is Irish and so I wasn’t expecting anything unusual…welp…that was not to be. Come to find out, a very close ancestor, one only a couple of generations back and one that I knew quite well was, in fact, adopted, unbeknownst to them. (They passed away years ago, but never knew that they were adopted). So, rather than being entirely Irish, I am actually 3/4ths Irish and 1/4^th Serbian. I guess that is fitting enough, since I am already an Orthodox Christian. I have started to learn the language which isn’t too difficult since I already know another Slavic language (Russian). I have also really enjoyed learning to cook some traditional Serbian dishes.

Late in the spring, it was getting close to time for me to consider buying a new truck. There was nothing wrong with the one I had, but it was 6 years old and had a lot of miles on it, plus, given how long of a commute I had, it was only a matter of time before I had to sink a bunch of money into it, so I thought I would go ahead and get a new one. Easier said than done. I had a Chevy Colorado and I wanted to get the same thing. None of the local Chevy dealers had any on the lot, but the dealership closest to my house said that they had some on order. I put a $500 deposit down to hold one and they said it would be there in 6-8 weeks.

I checked at the 6 week mark and they said they had no firm estimate on the delivery date. I asked if they had a way to track it and they said no. I found this a little hard to believe since you can track your Door Dash order up to the minute, but I didn’t think anything of it since they had said it could be 8 weeks. Well, when the 8 week mark came around, I emailed and got no response. I called the salesman and got no response. I ended up emailing and calling multiple times over the course of a week and no one got back to me. So, I contacted the Sales Manager and told him to give me my deposit back. I wasn’t expecting them to necessarily have the truck, but an update would have been nice.

Since I would be unable to get a Colorado anywhere else, I decided to get a Dodge Ram. I found one online at a nearby dealership and contacted them to make sure it was still available. They said yes. I arrived the next morning when they opened only to be told that someone had “just bought it” but they had some more expensive ones they could show me. I told the salesman that I he was full of…excrement….and that I had a check for a down payment and a trade-in and I already had financing. At that point, he said he would “touch base with his manager” to make sure the truck had really sold. What is it with car salesmen always having to “touch base” with someone? I told him no and he was literally chasing after to me trying to get me to stay as I walked to my truck.

My wife suggested we try the dealership where she bought her Jeep the year before. It was a little further away, but we drove up there. They didn’t have a truck in stock that I liked, but while I was sitting there, I started eyeballing the Dodge Challengers. I’ve low key wanted one ever since the George Washington commercial that aired during the US v England game in the 2010 World Cup. The price wasn’t any different than what I was prepared to pay for a truck, cheaper, actually, so I took one for a test drive. It was love at first acceleration. I picked a red one because, when you have a thing for redheads and you are buying a muscle car, red is the only color option. Also, a redhead helped me buy the car. No, I don’t mean my wife. I mean Molly O’Sullivan, the heroine of my second novel. Naturally, the car is named Molly.

The more momentous event came later in the summer. One afternoon, I got a text message from my brother AJP who told me that the college where he and I were teaching at part-time when we met ten years ago had a last minute opening in the history department. Though he and I had both moved on to full-time positions at other colleges, we did enjoy our time there. The only reason I left was that I was offered a full-time position at another college. I had been considering the possibility of looking for a position closer to home after my wife’s stroke. I was commuting 70 miles each way to work five days a week and spending hours upon hours fighting Houston traffic each day. Not only did this mean that I would be a long way away from her should something else happen, but it was also really starting to aggravate my existing spinal injuries. I decided I’d toss my hat in the ring and see what happened.

Most community colleges have a multi-step hiring process which includes a couple of interviews and a teaching demonstration. I kept advancing to the next round and was offered the job. To my shock, I was offered the position. It came with a nice raise and it cut my commute in half! As it turns out, all but one member of the department had either retired or relocated out of state in the previous year, and so they hired four of us. We quickly became pretty close over the course of our first semester. One Friday afternoon each month, we get together off campus for an early supper and happy hour. I am really enjoying my co-workers and it is nice to be back with my homeboy Blue the Dolphin! We had a Halloween Festival on campus and set up a History Department booth. We had a blast.

I really do miss my friends at the college I left. I’d been there full time since January of 2018. We went through a lot together, from me missing my first three weeks of class due to an emergency surgery to going through the Rona Times to hurricanes. We got through it all together. I didn’t leave because I was unhappy. It was more of needing to make the right decision for my family.

I am slowly but surely working on the sequel to Molly’s Song tentatively titled Molly’s War. I was hoping to be finished with it by the first of the year, but it is looking more like it will be the summer before I wrap it up. I have also written a couple of scripts for the All Bad Things podcast. They released one of mine on my birthday, which was a coincidence as they did not know when my birthday was.

I am not one to do the whole New Year, New Me bullshit. I don’t set goals for the new year beyond survival and I don’t make resolutions. I quit smoking for good in 2023, so this New Year’s Eve will be the first in 14 years that I don’t enjoy a fine cigar to ring in the new year. But that’s okay. I will, however, continue with my New Year’s Eve tradition of watching the Twilight Zone marathon on the Scy-Fy Channel and Twittering about it. This has been my tradition since I retired from the FD and no longer have to work holidays.

I hope the new year brings you good health and good luck.

Until next time, friends, take care of yourselves.

And each other.

L.H.