Christmas Letter 2021
“Look with
favour upon a bold beginning.”
Virgil (70 BC
- 19 BC)
This year is unlike anything we’ve experienced, and I’ve pondered the best way to write the 2021 Christmas letter without making it too long. I thought about releasing the stories in 12 chapters, like the 12 days of Christmas because there’s just SO much to tell!” There’s just SO much to tell! Let’s start with the end… we’re very happy living in Tampa, Florida. Boom! Just like that, we went from Oregon to Florida. Well, it wasn’t “just like that,” but we are very happy. Let’s start with some of our shorter stories before diving into the whirlwind of change.
Cheryl's recovery
If you read the last Christmas letter, you’ll recall that Cheryl suffered a traumatic head injury that left her unable to drive, along with some other challenges. You’ll be happy to hear she’s doing amazingly well! She had incredible improvement through acupuncture early in the year. While we were driving across the country, she started experiencing healing with her vision! When we made it to Tampa, she experienced sudden improvements that actually happened during church worship service! It’s a fantastic testimony, which was foretold by a friend in June. There are only a few things she’s still working through, but the improvements are nothing short of a miracle.
Home Group
Before leaving Oregon, we finished hosting nearly a full year of a home church fellowship group. We missed only one of the weekly gatherings across an entire year! Big deal? Yes, I believe it was a very big deal. With the state closing everything down, churches going virtual, and the crazy yo-yo policies around controlling citizens to lessen the curve of the Coronavirus, we continually held a closed-group of folks that very quickly became family. Even though we’re now in Florida, the group successfully transferred to others hosts and continues even to this day.Questions and More Questions
We knew in our hearts that we were supposed to leave
Oregon at some point. So we prayed and asked and prayed and asked, and then it
happened. We asked and God said “Go”. So, of course, we asked again… and again…
and again. Tampa was very clearly the answer. You know the saying, if you do
something over and over expecting different results, that’s insanity.
Neither of us enjoy the idea of being labeled as insane, so we finally said
okay. The fun part was when we asked Sophia to see if God told her anything
about something called “Tampa”. We knew for a fact she didn’t have a clue what
Tampa was. Within 30-seconds of her silent inquiry, she rattled off alarming
specifics about Tampa that she would have NEVER known! This included the
buildings, airport, lizards, beaches, and hay. We were a bit confused by the
fields of hay, but it turns out there’s a significant agricultural region about
20 minutes north.
Crazy, huh? We knew we were supposed to move out of
Oregon at some point, but after repeatedly asking God for direction and
opportunity, it didn’t start to take shape until June, 2021.
SOLD!
We lived in our house in Salem for six years and one
month. We updated most of the house, and even created a master bathroom suite some noted as “sexy,” an assessment I wholeheartedly agree with! Super sexy, really! While other homes in the area had bid wars, ours was SO sexy that there was a delay before the bidders stepped up to play. Before we knew it, everything fell into line and I gave a 3.25-week notice at my job. The good thing about selling at the top of a market is that debt can be erased in a blink of an eye, especially after working our tails off. Good reward, I’d say!
Scooby, the Alpha Male
Pack 'em up, move 'em out
The end of July brought the voluntary end of my job
and the end of our time in Salem, Oregon. After several unpleasant attempts to
find a moving company to do the 3,096 mile trek for us, we found a 26-foot
Budget rental truck with a trailer to haul the Mini Cooper. I sold my car, used
professional and voluntary help to pack the truck like a Tetris Masterclass,
and launched away from our home of six years onto the nation’s wild roads.
The long haul - My wallet out the window in Wyoming, a true tale.
The drive started off easy enough. The truck had a governor that held it to 63 MPH, which is similar to the governor of Oregon (think about it). That derailed my scheduled travel, especially when the truck couldn’t do much more than 40 MPH uphill. In the most rigorous mountain passes, we could only hope to reach a stunning 35 MPH. When the heavy-haul trucks blasted past us going uphill with a strong headwind, we knew our travel schedule faced a serious setback. We anticipated six days of travel… but as you’ll see in a moment, that was derailed even further.
August in Wyoming isn’t terribly hot, so we danced
between open windows and air conditioning. We stayed the night at Little
America, Wyoming, and when we started off the next morning, I unwisely placed
my wallet against the wing-window for “safe keeping.” I hung my water bottle
from the lever of that same wing-window for ease of access, but the bottle
blocked my view of the wallet… which flew out the window when I opened it. Yes,
I lost my wallet in Wyoming, ten miles east of Little America. It has all the
makings of a country song! You might imagine the shock and grieving process
that I had to work through before I got my wits about me, thanks to Cheryl’s
logic and bank cards. So, with no license or bank access, we managed to cancel
everything and determined that the wallet and all the precious contents would
promptly and repeatedly get ground into the asphalt by the non-stop truck
traffic, then baked in the sun and eventually face the deep freeze of Wyoming
winters. If you ever get to cruise past Little America, Wyoming, you’ll note
the absence of pretty much everything. Seriously, there’s nothing but wide,
open plains of sagebrush and dirt… and now there’s a wallet.
The great breakdown
We continued our trek across the great plains, into
corn country, and as we passed into Missouri, an alert appeared on the
dashboard. A strange, orange upside-down triangle, to be exact. Thanks to
technology, our quick-fingered research about International Truck warning
indicators said the transmission was failing and it could be a serious issue.
We found ourselves at a tiny gas station on the outskirts of a place called St.
Joseph, Missouri with a broken truck, waiting for a return call from Budget
Truck roadside assistance. After a couple hours, they said they would have us
stay at a Holiday Inn Express in St. Joseph, and there was actually a repair
shop in town that could help. I don’t recall them saying to NOT drive to the
hotel, so I did just that. They really should be specific about these things.
About 20 minutes later, we found the hotel we’d call home for the next three
nights. The truck and all our belongings were towed to a repair shop, leaving
the Mini Cooper on the trailer in the hotel parking lot.
Budget didn’t do well for us in this circumstance,
although the people on the phone were very nice. The authorization needed by
the repair shop was delayed. The diagnosis was delayed as well, which
ultimately concluded that the transmission was completely dry and needed to be
replaced. Budget said they would find us a replacement truck when one came available
within 200 miles of our location. Sadly, the only major city within that range
was Kansas City, which didn’t have any trucks. To our dismay, Budget Truck
Rental said it could be days or weeks to find us a replacement, and to just
enjoy our stay at the hotel, which they would reimburse us for eventually. In
light of this unfortunate position we found ourselves in, we were together,
healthy, happy, and near restaurants and a shopping center.
We faced a time crunch to get Sophia to a mandatory
in-person orientation for her new school, though. We needed a solution and
Budget Rental wasn’t willing to go outside of their 200-mile policy for us. So,
we came up with an answer: Cheryl and Sophia would fly from Kansas City to
Tampa just in time to make the school orientation, and I would get our stuff
moved into a local storage, abandon Budget completely and drive the Mini the
rest of the way. I explained this to Budget representatives, and as remarkable
as it sounds, they found a truck for us within a couple hours.
Cheryl and Sophia made it to Tampa on time for school,
and to tour the home we made an offer on. Oh, did I forget to mention we were
trying to buy a home this entire time? Yes indeed! Our real estate agent was
actively giving us video tours of prospective homes as we made our way across
the US, and while we were in St. Joseph struggling with our abandonment issues,
we had our offer accepted and home inspections were underway. More about that
later… back to our story.
Busted leftovers
The new truck arrived and was beautiful--with low
miles--promising smooth roads ahead. I waited patiently as a local company
swapped our belongings from the old truck to the new truck. They parked the
back ends of the trucks together and went to work shuffling things around. The
swap crew, sadly, wasn't skilled at the art of Tetris like the guys that packed
our truck in Oregon.
Finally, they asked me to look at the collection of
furniture that didn’t make it into the new truck. “These won’t fit,” their
leader stated. “What do you want to do?” The darkening sky threatened rain and lightning
was a strange reflection of my mood at that moment. I told them to pull
everything out and start over, which didn’t sit well with their leader. He
promptly called his boss and exploded into a tirade of expletives that should
have gotten him fired on the spot. Somehow, the boss got him to agree to remove
and repack some of the items, but not all. On a positive note, their second
attempt was 99% successful, leaving only our ottoman behind with a promise to
ship it, which never happened. Unfortunately, they broke apart several pieces
of furniture and damaged others just to make it all fit. We found out later
that they set aside all our packing blankets and bubble wrap instead of using
it as it had been originally. A lot of our belongings were damaged or outright
destroyed by these guys. Even after all that, I was able to get a few hours on
the road in a nice new truck that actually was capable of freeway speeds. It
was like having a renewed burst of wind beneath my wings!
Flying to paradise, driving through storms
Cheryl and Sophia flew from Kansas City to Tampa just
in time to attend the mandatory meeting at Sophia’s new school and visit the
new home just as the final inspections were done. Sophia’s school is a private
school with only seven kids in her class. She’d never been exposed to cursive
penmanship in Oregon, but in Florida they start before learning to print! She
caught on exceptionally fast and enjoys “fancy writing.”
While Cheryl and Sophia had a few days in Tampa without me, getting to stay at our friends’ condo within a block from the beautiful beaches of St. Pete’s Beach community, I hit the road with a new truck towing the Mini Cooper on a trailer. The drive started off with perfect weather and easy traffic. As it turns out, the perfect weather was suddenly under assault by an enormous weather front that raged across the plains from my left. I looked into the storm and realized that it held so much water that the chaos immediately following it had a beautiful blue haze swirling in the madness of charcoal clouds. So much water that the clouds were blue! In pure amazement I watched this storm move with incredible ferocity along a path that perfectly intersected with mine. Then it hit.
The initial hit from the storm drove the 18-wheeler
ahead of me almost off the road! I slowed down and braced for impact. The large
Budget truck was pushed hard to the right, but I was prepared after witnessing
the big rig in front me get blasted. I slowed to trail the lead truck and could
barely see him through the torrential downpour. Within minutes, I felt my left
leg soaked with rainwater pouring through the truck windshield. It wasn’t cold,
but for a moment I thought I’d lost bladder control, which would have been a
whole different story to tell.
About an hour passed before the storm pushed by, and I
was exhausted from the continual fight to stay on the road and behind the
trucker ahead of me. That was storm number one. Before I made it to Florida, I
hit three equally ferocious storms. Each time my left leg was entirely soaked.
We found out later that the new Budget truck had
several holes in the roof of the cargo area. You can imagine the frustration
when we found our belongings damaged or destroyed from the swap crew in St.
Joseph and further damaged by the water that poured in during the three storms.
New home, New beginnings
Just as we prepared to leave Oregon, I found myself
with a great offer to join a construction material supply company as the
National Business Development Director. It started off as the eastern US, but
soon transitioned into a full national role. The excitement of working with a
company as it expands across the nation is pretty awesome. Unlike my previous
job, this one has no glass walls or glass ceilings... Only upward momentum with
the nation as my playground.
Remember that we were purchasing our next home while
we were stuck in St. Joseph? Cheryl and Sophia toured the home at the end of
the inspection period, and we got everything finalized in short order. We
stayed at an extended stay Marriott for nearly two weeks near Sophia’s school,
which worked out amazingly well because I’d accumulated enough travel rewards
from my years with my old job that it didn’t cost us a dime! The people were
great, and we finally moved into the new house near the end of August.
The house is rather large with a bonus room so big
that Cheryl is teaching ballroom classes during the week! We found the benefit
of a massive lanai, which is a metal-framed structure in the back of the house
that has screens to keep bugs and creatures out. Well, for the most part,
anyhow. Sophia loved chasing and catching the little gecko lizards that
frequented the lanai for a while. We fixed most of the little holes they
squeezed through, but occasionally one will come hang out with us. She did find
out that the little bodies don’t hold up well to human handling, and that when
they’re stiff they aren’t sleeping. Now she directs them into a bowl to catch
them, and gently releases them into the yard to go live a long, exciting life outside
of the lanai.
As of writing this final part, Sophia just celebrated her 9th birthday at the local community pool with 84-degree temperatures and clear skies! December birthday parties outside by the pool are fantastic! She and her friends swam and played, and ate cake, and swam some more…
Living in Florida has been great! We live on the fourth hole of a golf course, and every pond and small lake throughout the golf course has at least one alligator, some of which are stunningly large! We had very tall sand cranes dance for us outside of our lanai and there’s no shortage of lizards, frogs and beautiful birds of all types. We even have a large hawk that frequents our backyard.
Trigger Time
As you read this next section, some of you might not
like my perspective and may outright disagree with what I have to say. You
might get triggered, and I might get “canceled”, which I found out is all too
easy for some to do. I’m okay if that happens. The fun part of living in
America is that we all get a voice. Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to be,
anyway. I’m happy to have a conversation with level minds, so feel free to
reach out for a health chat. To some, these thoughts might come as a surprise.
You see, I’m not one to assert my position without knowing that the persons I’m
talking with have a mature consideration for alternate positions. So, let’s see
how this works, shall we?
We found out rather quickly that the differences between the Oregon and Florida state governments are like night and day. The ongoing, increasing overreach and control grabbed by the Oregon governor at the expense of the citizens in the name of medical necessity is nothing less than a socialist regime jockeying into position with little opposition. The ever-changing rules issued almost weekly by the governor was exhausting! In the middle of all the chaos, the super-majority legislative body announced that the nation's most strict gun control laws were decided on without public input and made law-abiding citizens subject to greater consequences than the worst hard-core drug dealers, pedophiles and felons. Regarding COVID, you weren’t supposed to have more than six people together in one house, but you could stand in line at a big box store with hundreds of people you didn’t know. Children suffered with unprepared online attempts at “education” while the political elites flaunted the fact the rules they set did not apply to them.
The rise of Antifa had been downplayed by the media
and the government, while I personally watched the black & red clothed
thugs assault peaceful assemblies at the state capitol too many times. I worked
downtown Portland and walked by the blocks that were torched and trashed by the
violent “protests” that were clearly intent on burning down police stations or
federal buildings in the name of…. Well, nobody had a clear answer to that,
actually. Racial injustice? Government overreach? Police reform? Police abuse?
Did anyone get prosecuted for this? For the most part, no. Catch and release
until the next night, then simply repeat.
It didn’t take long to see that the Oregon governor
and state legislative body not only abandoned their duties to represent and
protect the people of Oregon, but they worked collectively to impose controls
and restrict rights of the citizens. The oppression is real, and when we moved
to Florida, the release was almost tangible. Florida’s governor and legislative
body serve and protect the rights and freedoms of their citizens, the way
America is supposed to be. The people treat each other with a healthy respect
for individual choices, like masks or the experimental COVID-19 vaccine &
boosters. Interestingly, Florida has the nation’s lowest illness and death rate
while being the most open and free of government restrictions.
“For to be free is not merely to cast off one's
chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
Nelson Mandela (1918 - 2013)