2025 Review
The year that was 2025 was filled with quite a few ups and downs to say the least.
I have not spent any time in my workshop during the entirety of 2025. By the end of the previous year, I’d made up my mind that I wanted to spend much more time exploring writing my novel versus the workshop. With the prospect of possibly moving my workshop to a large shed or other structure in our back yard in the near future (seems like distant future right now), I didn’t want to start up on anything new. On top of that, I’ve still not felt particularly inspired to make anything, although I know Lisa has a ton of picture frames that need constructing for all of her finished cross stitch projects (with more constantly on the way).
Later in the year, however, I did make a purchase geared towards my workshop. Andy Klein, a gifted maker and entrepreneur, made one final run of his pencil-making kits, including a closeout on a ton of various pencil leads, both different shades of graphite and colors. For the price, I just couldn’t pass up such an opportunity. While I won’t be making any pencils in the immediate future, once I’ve got my new workshop up and running again I’ll have something I can sit down and pursue at a much slower pace during those days that I don’t feel confident in using the big tools. Another reason for not working in the shop this year stems from a totally unrelated chain of events that happened in late August/early September.
I was going out for my usual morning walk. As I was going down the driveway to the street, I glanced over to the right at my truck sitting parked in front of the two-car garage. On the ground, in front of the front passenger tire, was what looked like a baby animal. It was completely hairless and its eyes were still not able to open yet and it appeared to be alive. Knowing that a squirrel once built a nest in my truck’s engine compartment once before in December of 2017, and chewed through the main wiring harness, I immediately ran back inside to grab my keys and check under the hood. Upon my return, I gave a quick look and I didn’t immediately see anything out of place. I closed the hood and went about starting and finishing my walk. The baby animal was likely a squirrel, but I was not going to touch or disturb it should the mother be about and come for it, my scent on it possibly causing it to be abandoned.
As I completed my lap around the neighborhood, I was coming around the curve a few houses up from our house. With my truck now in view, I saw at the corner of my left eye that there was a hawk sitting atop the gable peak on a house three lots up from ours. I watched as the hawk silently glided down and landed right in front of my truck’s tire, where the suspected baby squirrel was. I watched the hawk grab the fallen creature and fly away with it. My mouth was agape having witnessed that. I paid no more mind of the incident after that.
A couple of days later, I went to make a regular trip to the nearest recycling center. When I went to start my truck, it did absolutely nothing. The lights came on the instrument panel, but that’s it. With 2017 still firmly in my mind, I knew EXACTLY what this meant. I opened the hood again and looked where the main wiring harness was to see what the damage was. What I saw absolutely shocked me.
Baby squirrels in my Tundra’s engine compartment.
I was in utter shock at what I saw. Not only was there ANOTHER squirrel nest, but this one had babies in it! Well, needless to say, I immediately was on the phone with my insurance company to file another claim for rodent damage. Lisa also got on the phone to have someone come out and safely remove the squirrels from the engine. By the time the guy came for the squirrels, the mother had already moved the babies and abandoned her old nest. Apparently squirrels tend to have more than one nest at a time.
The damage left in the wake of the latest squirrel nest.
With that out of the way, my truck was towed up to the Toyota dealership to assess the damage. Back in 2017, when my truck was only seven years old, the grand total was almost $7,000 for the repair (including our deductible). With my truck now 15 years old, the price to replace that same part had almost doubled. Given the age of my truck, and not knowing the full extent of the damage under the hood, my truck was totaled and I had to say goodbye to my trusty Toyota Tundra for the last time.
The last hurrah for my old truck at the dealership as it waits to be towed away one final time…such a sad day :(
In the meanwhile, between waiting for the estimate and my ultimate settlement with the insurance, I started looking for another truck for the first time since Halloween 2010. I wasn’t really feeling the need for a big truck anymore, especially not a 4WD one like my now old one was. I’d bought it in Maryland, so having 4WD for the wintertime was kind of a necessity…not so much now that I live in Florida.
The more I looked, though, the more I came to the realization that buying a NEW truck was not going to happen. The prices were absolutely outrageous, especially for a bigger truck like a Tundra. For a comparable new one, minus the 4WD, it would be STARTING at like $60,000! No. Fucking. Way.
Before this whole chain of events happened, I’d already caught wind of a new electric truck called the Telo that was drumming up a lot of interest. The more I looked into it, the more that I liked its smaller size but comparable hauling capacity to a Toyota Tacoma. It wasn’t in full production yet, but it was something to look into down the road if they should come to fruition. I just needed something to tide me over until that electric truck was available.
With a smaller truck now in mind, I started searching for a Toyota Tacoma instead. I owned a Tacoma for about eight years before I got the Tundra, so I knew they were decent trucks. I was able to find a great used one with a clean record that was only two years old with low miles. It would be a marked improvement features-wise, plus it would still be MUCH newer than my old one. After getting a surprisingly high payout from the insurance for my Tundra, we went to the dealership and I drove home in my new (to me) 2023 Toyota Tacoma.
I always said I’d never by a used vehicle again…it was too good a deal to pass up.
Now, keeping in mind what’s happened to my Tundra (twice), I decided to take some steps to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again. The main factor in leading to the squirrel nests was the fact that I would leave my truck out in the driveway for up to two weeks or more at a time without it moving. I simply was not driving as much as I used to with staying at home most of the time. That coupled with it being higher mileage and trying to save it for as long as possible (how’d that work out?), we tended to use Lisa’s RAV4 for most of the “daily” driving.
With all that being said, I decided to bite the bullet and move my entire workshop into the small one-bay section of our three-car garage so that I can park my truck safely and securely in the garage at all times.
After some time working things out in Sketchup (because, OF COURSE, I did that), I figured I’d have to move everything except for the miter saw station that’s sitting along the back wall (the dust collector is on the adjacent wall already out of the way). In order to move my two-part workbench, I wound up buying a used pallet jack so that I didn’t have to empty and disassemble both units. It was only $250 for the pallet jack, and I’ll have much more use for it in the future anyway, so it was worth the relatively small investment.
Now, my shop looks like this:
With the miter saw station along the back wall, and the Tacoma parked inside, I have maybe 10 inches of space in both the front and the back so that I can close the garage door. I probably could have moved the miter saw station to clear up more space, but it would have made the one-car bay REALLY tight.
In the end, I’m very happy with my “new” truck, and I haven’t really missed my workshop at all. If I need to use any of the big tools in the meanwhile, they’re all on wheels so I could easily move my truck out into the driveway and move my tools back into their old space temporarily.
For the first time since 2009, Lisa and I went on a vacation outside of the state of Florida. Our last out-of-state trip was when we lived in Maryland and went to Las Vegas together for like the third time. In fact, until this most recent trip, we hadn’t flown on a plane together since that very same Vegas trip. Lisa traveled for work things a number of times between then and now, plus I went to Colorado for my BFF Jill’s Air Force retirement ceremony in 2018, and then to Seattle for my big cross-country road trip in 2022.
I’ve been wanting to visit more baseball parks than just the ones here in Florida and Camden Yards in Baltimore, plus I wanted us to go to a place neither of us had been to before. I found an Orioles game that was in a good time frame and we settled on Minneapolis. We’d both always wanted to see Mall of America for a long time anyway, so this would be a perfect trip. On top of that, one of my long-time friends from Instagram, Lindsay, lived not far from Minneapolis, so it would be a great opportunity to finally get to meet her face to face (if she had the time to spare).
For accommodations, we opted for an AirBNB instead of a regular hotel. For the price of hotels in and around Minneapolis, it was cheaper to go with AirBNB, plus we’d have access to a kitchen for those nights we didn’t want to eat out (eating out constantly on vacation gets old after a while). I had a mixed experience with the first AirBNB I stayed at in Connecticut in 2024, but the place we found was exactly as advertised and was definitely the right choice.
We had an absolutely wonderful time in Minneapolis. The city was a joy to walk around and to see.
We wound up making multiple trips to Mall of America since it was just too big to see all in one day. What caught my eye the most were all of the gigantic Lego items on display.
We did get the opportunity to meet up with Lindsay for lunch in the small town of Stillwater, not too far from where she lives. It was awesome to meet her face to face for the first time and we had a great lunch. Thanks Lindsay!!
The other part of our vacation involved driving back to Florida from Minnesota so that we could make a couple of stops along the way. The first was St. Louis so we could see the Gateway Arch. That was an awesome experience with taking the tram ride all the way to the top. I got the chance to take a couple of really nice pictures, my favorite being this one:
The shadow of the arch on the ground from up above is just so cool.
I was hoping to maybe get the chance to meet up with my friend Nicole as well, but she wasn’t feeling up to it at that time. I was a little disappointed in not getting to see her again, but I totally understood.
The final leg of the trip was a stop in Georgia to the site where part of my favorite movie, My Cousin Vinny, was filmed. We made our way to Monticello, Georgia, to visit the Sac-O-Suds in person.
The place had been closed for some time, unfortunately, so we couldn’t go inside. Nonetheless, it was really cool to see the actual building from the movie.
With that, we finally made our way home after a week and a half away. It was a much needed break for both of us.
The one thing that caused the most stress throughout 2025, was the whole work situation involving Lisa. Because of her government job and having been working from home (since 2013, I might add), she was ordered to have to return driving to work every day. Now, her “home base” is in Maryland, and there was NO WAY we wanted to move back to Maryland after over 13 years in Florida. The prospect of having to sell our house and moving to a colder climate again was not something either of us preferred, especially me. If it came to that, we would have lived in separate states because I didn’t want to leave all the great doctors and nurses I’d been working with since my MS diagnosis and treatment, not to mention my workshop and all of that stuff. It sounds terribly selfish, but Lisa understood my feelings on the whole situation.
Lisa submitted a bunch of locations within a certain mileage range to our house for possible approval for her to work from. There were plenty that were fairly close by, but not of those would be feasible for a variety of reasons. It was finally decided to have her work from a National Guard office about a 30-minute drive away…not terrible, but not great either.
The kicker with having to work from there, is the fact that she would have to work on THEIR schedule, meaning she wouldn’t be given outright access to the building (you know, the whole armory of guns thing). The work day would start at 0900. For some context, Lisa’s been starting work every morning for the last over 20 years at like 0730 or so, even when we lived in Maryland. Having to go in that late would absolutely suck.
Lisa met up with the commander at the National Guard office and it was pretty much set in stone…except that it wasn’t. All of these decisions happened before we went on vacation in May. The people who ultimately made the final decisions on this whole process were in, I think, North Carolina. It was getting to be impossible for Lisa’s boss in Maryland to get in touch with them to finalize things, so that location was ultimately abandoned.
Finally, right around Thanksgiving, Lisa had to drive over an hour away to meet with another person at another location for a possible place to work. It’s located at a bombing range over a hour away! I wasn’t pleased with this location, but it was definitely better than having to move back to Maryland.
Lisa went to the location and it didn’t turn out to be too bad. She’d be given a key to the building, her own office (with a key) and be able to work whatever hours she wanted. It turned out to be a decent facility in the end. So, the week prior to us going on Christmas vacation to Maryland, Lisa started driving to work again. It was weird not having her in the house all day. It’s definitely going to take some getting used to moving forward.
Let me be clear that her superiors back in Maryland have had absolutely NO issues with her working from home since she started 13 or so years ago. It was merely the brilliant “powers that be” that decided that everyone who worked from home was “not doing their jobs and going out golfing all the time.” I’ll say no more about this situation and leave it at that.
The other stressful situation I personally had to deal with was around the beginning of November. It started with getting a letter in the mail from Truist bank. Now, I’ve never had an account with Truist bank. In fact, I’ve never visited their website or stepped foot in one my entire life. I opened the letter and was shocked at what I read. They were telling me that an account I’d opened was being flagged for suspicious activity. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I figured I would go down to the nearest truist bank the following day and talk to someone there.
Well, the very next day at around lunchtime, right after I’d had my latest Tysabri infusion, I got a fraud alert from the identity theft program I subscribe to informing me of multiple accounts created at….Truist bank. I knew immediately that something was seriously wrong, so we went to Truist straight away to talk with someone. I don’t care for talking on the phone, especially when it’s something like this.
I informed and showed the gentleman at the bank the letter I received and he was shocked. He called up the fraud department immediately in an attempt to get more information. Apparently, someone had used my name and social security number to obtain a fake driver’s license from the state of Georgia, then went to North Carolina to open a checking account at a Truist bank and THEN secured a $40,000 personal loan. The amounts and timeframe of the withdrawals tipped off the bank that something was wrong.
With all of that information, we went home and I started locking down ALL of my information with the three credit bureaus. I made sure to double-check all of my bank and credit card accounts to ensure there was nothing shady going on there either (there wasn’t, thankfully). I then filed an online report with the Federal Trade Commission’s identity theft division AND I filed a police report with the local sheriff’s office (as per the instructions on the FTC’s site).
Eventually, I was contacted by a fraud specialist with Truist bank who stepped me through all of the information I needed to provide so they could verify that the accounts in question were, indeed, fraudulent. I faxed everything to them and left everything to them to work on from their end. I hadn’t heard anything from them in response so I figured everything was good…WRONG!!
I couple of weeks later, mere days before we were supposed to leave for Christmas vacation, I got a letter in the mail stating that my fraud case was being closed as they had not received any documentation from me concerning the case…WHAT?!?!
I got in touch with the person handling my case again and, come to find out, faxing things to them takes infinitely more time than if I’d simply e-mailed them the information (or snail mail for that matter), something I was not explicitly told in the beginning. Needless to say, I quickly e-mailed the exact same documents (with their original dates). I never heard anything back (again).
Meanwhile, while we were on vacation, I had a hold placed on our mail at the post office so that there wasn’t a stack of mail sitting in there for over two weeks. While we were away, I had a bad feeling that all of our mail was still sitting in the mailbox. A few days into our trip, I saw that there were a number of letters from Truist waiting for me upon my return (I get daily e-mails with what is expected to be delivered). Well, once we got back home, the first thing I did was check the mailbox and, low and behold, there was ALL of our mail just sitting there waiting to be stolen by someone (not that likely around here, but still a thing that can happen). Needless to say, I was PISSED!! They got a complaint from me about that and it’s already been addressed.
I opened the letters from Truist to find overdue notices about the missing loan payments. The final one I checked was from the fraud specialist stating that the accounts have been confirmed to be fraudulent and that they have since been closed and removed from my credit report (I’d already had that done anyway). That saga is now, hopefully, behind me.
As far as my health is concerned, there isn’t a great deal to report. My MS is still in remission, with only the faint reminders of Lhermitte’s sign still present.
During what turned out to be my last office visit with him, my neurologist, Dr. G, informed me that he was retiring at the end of 2025. It was kind of sudden and I wasn’t sure what that meant for me. He gave me a list of neurologists in the local area to call so that I’m not left without coverage given that I’m on Tysabri and need a doctor’s approval every six months to continue the treatments.
After a bit of trouble, I was able to get an appointment with another local neurologist, whose name is also Dr. G (Dr. G v2 for our purposes here). Lisa and I met with him and really liked him. He seems to know his stuff when it comes to MS and he didn’t recommend any changes to what’s already been working for me thus far.
I also have an appointment scheduled with a neurologist in Gainesville in May, but I might wind up just cancelling that as I’ll have one more appointment with Dr. G v2 in a couple of months. I don’t want to travel all the way to Gainesville if I don’t have to. The timing of the calls for the appointments overlapped, and the one in Gainesville ws actually made first…long story there.
My only real concern right now has been that my JCV numbers have been steadily rising throughout the year. On the last blood test I had through Dr. G, I was almost at the level of a positive test, which would mean my days on Tysabri would be over. However, on my next one with Dr. G v2, my numbers went back down…what a relief. I have another blood test in February, so I have a stay of execution until then.
I’ve always known that I wouldn’t be able to stay on Tysabri forever. The prospect of changing treatments is still worrisome as I don’t know how I’ll react to another medication. Until that time, though, there really isn’t much sense in worrying about it.
On a final note, there was one thing that put me on the absolute highest of highs this past year, and that is my novel.
I started trying to write more after I got home from Christmas vacation 2024, where I was able to pen the first chapter, and expound upon my story further. I was making a little bit of headway, but I was getting bogged down with constantly rereading and revising what I’d already written, to the point that I was beginning to lose interest again.
Being a subscriber to the Writing Mastery Academy, I stumbled on a course called the Novel Fast Drafting Course. This was a total game-changer for me. The basic concept is to set a schedule that I know I can keep to write and just, simply, write…write whatever comes to mind that day for my story and never look back at what I’ve written. It can be some of the messiest drivel I could come up with, but I just had to keep moving forward until the end.
This course opened my mind so much. I was suffering from SO MANY of the same problems nearly every other writer experienced.
With a firm plan in hand, I decided to start the new leg of my novel-writing journey on, of all days, June 2, my birthday. My belated birthday present to myself would be three months from that date with a finished first draft and hopefully my goal of 100,000 additional words (on top of the 2,000 or so I’d already written).
My story was already mapped out pretty well, so I was confident I’d be able to accomplish my goal. My schedule to write would be Monday through Friday from 0900 to 1100. On my very first day, I blasted out almost 3,000 words, well above what my average needed to be to reach my goal. I got on such a roll nearly every day. Sure, there were a few days where I simply wasn’t feeling it and/or didn’t have much sleep, but I still continued to write. My worst day I barely made it past 1,000 words. On my best day, I was close to 7,000.
In the end, I was able to finish the first draft of my novel on August 27, 2025, with a total of 168,676 words and nearly 600 double-spaced pages. There was still a fair bit of work to be done, but I’d finally finished it!! Never in my life did I ever imagine I’d write a novel, and certainly not one this long.
I took off a few weeks, as suggested in the Complete Novel Revision Course that followed the Fast Drafting Course, and I’ve since completed the first revision of my novel, the story-level revision. I’ve passed my novel off to a few friends to read (beta readers) and am currently awaiting their feedback. Lisa’s read through my book twice and has already written down notes/feedback, although I’ve not looked at it since we got back from vacation (I’ll see it on January 5, 2026).
It was certainly a topsy-turvy 2025, with far more going on than the previous year. I know that in last year’s review article I mentioned a goal of finishing my novel’s first draft by the time I turned 50. Now that I’ve already accomplished that, I’m not sure I really want to set another long-term goal like that. I think, for now, I need to go through the feedback on the story-level revision I’ve already received and get back into my writing rhythm again so that I can focus on the next level of revision, the scene-level one.
Regardless of what’s said by my beta readers, I’m exceedingly proud of what I’ve accomplished. Whether it’s ever published or not, how many people can say that they’ve written a novel? It’s going to be difficult to face any kind of criticism of the story that I hold so close and dear to my heart, but I know it is necessary so that I can ultimately end up with something that will hopefully touch others like it’s touched me.
