Hi! How are you? Anything big happen lately?

Yeah. That’s kind of how I feel after seeing the last post on this blog. I just really had no clue what the last year held for all of us. For our entire planet.

What happened to me? Why did I stop writing, recording videos, and reading? Well… it was more than just Covid-19 for me.

Let’s see- in December 2019 my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time. Oh, and the day before that diagnosis, she almost went blind due to pressure buildup in her eyes.

We spent most of January 2020 going to surgeon appointments, genetic testing, filling out FMLA forms, visiting her ophthalmologist for her eyes, and pretty much ignoring everything else.

February 2020 was surgery month, where she had a second mastectomy. I spent three weeks working to take care of her during that time. 

My old house.

March 2020 I actually worked on my campus for two days before I was supposed to attend a conference that first week. We then went to Spring Break and never really came back to school due to Covid-19.

April and May 2020 I was all technology all the time for my district. Of course, it was all from home, but that actually made it a bit more difficult. Students were not staying home, so they would submit for assistance, then not be home to actually get the help. Many were working full-time part-time jobs, so they weren’t getting home until well after my “office hours.”

During this time, mom and I realized exactly how cramped it was to do all that I was doing in my house, have her over all day, and not really able to care for two houses, so we decided to seriously start looking at houses to combine our two homes into one. We found the house at the end of May 2020.

Packing the POD.

June, July, and August 2020 were spent packing up mom’s house, selling it, then packing up my house, selling it, and moving into the new house. Oh…some of the packing and selling of my house went through September 2020. If you’ve never packed up a house someone has lived in for 50 years, you just haven’t packed. That was packing my mom’s house. She isn’t exactly a hoarder, she just never had enough house for all of her stuff (although most people would say that she is definitely a hoarder). I lived in my house for almost 20 years, so I can’t say much about having a lot of stuff, because I most definitely do. 

By the end of August 2020, I was back to in person on campus work doing all of the student technology. I guess I should be grateful that our entire building is under construction and I don’t actually have a library right now, because to this day I certainly wouldn’t have time to run a library. Oh, well…for that I guess it is what it is…until it isn’t!

I closed on my house at the beginning of October 2020. I haven’t gone back to the neighborhood since then. I don’t know if I will. I’m still too emotionally attached to the house to be able to do that. 

So, that leaves the rest of October, November and December 2020, which I spent most of the time either unpacking, rearranging, or decorating for the holidays. It turns out, mom and I have a lot of holiday decorations!

The new house in the snow last week.

Around this time I did begin to start thinking about re-tooling the business, which is why I am back. It took me getting to January 2021 to get back on track, but I think I’m getting there. I struggle with the idea that I lost so much time in 2020, but I am reminded by my mother that it was an extraordinary year just with the pandemic and political strife. Add to that her cancer diagnosis and moving two houses to one, and its pretty reasonable to think that sidetracked would be an understatement.

I am back, though, and I plan to incorporate both text and videos to this blog. Just a bit of a hint for now, but it will definitely be something related to writing and books, sprinkled with things I do to relax and have fun, which is pretty much what I've been doing here, anyway. 

I invite you to follow me along on this new journey!