Now What? V

I wish I had a lot to tell you but honestly, I spend all my time marketing my book and volunteering at the school. Dan is getting ready to head to SE Asia for a month and I've decided to stay home for a few months and just enjoy all the work I put into the book...and I do feel really burnt out from airports and security, delays and all that good stuff.

My son finally met a girl, she is absolutely lovely. They remind me of Dan and me and it makes me smile and look back over the last sixteen years...what an incredible journey we have taken and I couldn't love Dan more. I think they are in love and I imagine she will soon be a fixture in my home...one that I am more than happy to have. Isn't that what we all want, our children to be happy and with people they love and that love them?

Now What? IV

I've started booking signings for my book and even scheduled a meet and greet with a book club that chose mine for one of their reads. I still feel exhausted from the writing process and find it difficult to stay motivated on the marketing front. This coming weekend I intend to produce as many social media pages as possible to get the word out. I ordered and received my banner as well as hundreds of bookmarks to hand out at signings and it still takes my breath away when I see my book cover. The process is slow but so was the writing...all in good time.

Now that the holidays have come and gone I'm hoping to start a new routine for myself. A week of traveling with the family to Houston and New Orleans followed by a week with Joseph in Vegas has filled me with inspiration and stories I can hardly wait to tell.

Now What? III

I want to go back to something, something I spoke about a while back regarding my neighbours. I wasn't completely honest about the situation, partly because it feels so surreal and partly because I didn't want to acknowledge what happened Christmas Day, 2017. If I back up a year to New Year's Eve 2016 the eight of us were all in Los Angeles enjoying a family vacation we gifted to ourselves that year for Christmas. Six months after the vacation everything deteriorated between our families to the point of them agreeing to move after the assault on our family took place. It was difficult having to live next door to them but we knew something had changed in their home, we just didn't know what it was. The house became quiet to the point of days going by without a light on or a car in the driveway.

Then Christmas rolled around and things got worse.

It was just after 3 pm when cops rushed through my doors and made my family head to the basement. My neighbour was holding himself hostage in his home with a gun and firing off rounds randomly. We sat in the basement for over eight hours listening to them trying to get him out of the house, he was too far gone. Dan and I finally crawled up two flights of stairs to look out the window and try and see what was going on. The street looked like a ghost town except for one armoured truck, then a SWAT team slowly walks behind what looked like a robot...their going in after him. It was less than 2 full minutes from the time they entered the house to the time he was wheeled out on a stretcher.

We ran down the stairs to the police but they couldn't offer us any information other than he would be taken to a hospital.

I called his wife the next day.

He's on life support waiting for the recipients of his organs. They had issues in their own lives and he refused to move on, I didn't get into it with her, we're not friends anymore and it's none of my business.

She invited us to the hospital to say goodbye one last time before they took him off life support. I held his hand and apologized for cutting all ties. I hugged his family and spoke with his wife. She couldn't bear to even come back to the house and I can't say I blame her, that would be traumatic not just for herself but for their twins as well as my own family.

After failing to sell her house she was forced to move back in and it feels like we will always be stuck in this nightmare together. Initially, I was so mad I was vibrating, and then I thought about her and her children and I can't imagine having no other choice than to step into your own nightmare and be forced to live in it.

They finally took him off of life support on December 28th after 14 people benefitted from his tissue and organs.

We'e decided to move this year, maybe then both families can move on and let the past stay where it belongs.