Cloudcroft

Happy birthday.

Last I knew him, he was living in Cloudcroft, but I haven't heard from him in a while.

We used to keep in touch with him, but yeah.

He's celebrating tomorrow.

But happy birthday, Don, if you're happy to be listening this morning.

Don was listening.

He was living in the Cloudcroft last I knew.

Yeah.

I was born in El Paso, Texas, and had a wonderful childhood growing up.

My grandfather was an old cowboy and had an apple orchard up in the New Mexico mountains near Cloudcroft.

So I spent my growing up years up in an apple tree most of the time.

Then my parents moved to Dallas and I ended up going to SMU and majoring in theater.

And yeah, and so I just worked with him for a long time.

And then I went to an ERP conference in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and I met Thomas Easley, who is my current colleague and he, what happened? He gave some ridiculous speech.

I think he was doing a sock sled extraction.

And I had like, I loved working with Howie, but wildcrafting is really personal to me.

A little frost, a little paperwork, and preferably a decent cup of coffee.

Then she gets sent to Cloudcroft.

There's a butcher shop with a room that shouldn't be there, a missing man who looks younger than he should, and a phone call telling her to go home.

Anna doesn't go home because she's beginning to suspect the killer isn't finished collecting what he needs.

Now the drug cartels can have goons with super strength, invisibility, and lord knows what else.

We stop the labs when we can, but it gets worse every year.

I'm on the road to Cloudcroft, New Mexico, a resort town of fewer than 900 people.

Standard operating procedure is to send one enhanced person to investigate, evaluate, and call in backup if necessary.

It's really our second longer road trip over Labor Day.

We went to New Mexico and to Cloudcroft and this trip where he's, driving with me, riding with me, but mostly he's doing the driving, or Ruby's doing the driving, our Tesla, to a retreat that I'll be teaching at this weekend and doing some breakout sessions on, it's a healing creative retreat, and I'll be doing an afternoon session on painting your prayers using Psalm 23, and then an afternoon breakout session on journaling, your grief or your pain to receive more healing from god so i'm very excited to be able to release those sessions that God will show up really for his voice to be kind and gentle and a whisper to those that'll be in my sessions.

So I'm excited about that.

And it's just been a blessing for Earl and I to do this road trip.

I actually told this story last night, just talking about deer.

I was talking about Cloudcroft, New Mexico, where one day we'll put East Banana Land whenever I get paid for a movie I wrote in 2018.

That's crazy, dude.

Can you not sue them? They re-up the option

Yeah.

like maybe I could buy a bad used car for what the option is.

So I was up in Cloudcroft the first time exploring it because I thought it was a beautiful name.

The photos looked amazing.

I think we just were a really close-knit bunch.

And even though I moved to Bryan, Texas, and some of them are in Cloudcroft, Artesia, all over the Panhandle-

Mm-hmm

... you know, I probably talk to them more than I talk to anybody here except for my husband-