As spooky season descends upon us like a fog machine at a middle school dance, my nonprofit world has been wide awake. It has been energizing to introduce ourselves to more emergency management folks, especially since adding Thomas Gioello, who is an active emergency manager himself. Guilford County gave us a chance to finally shake hands with people I had only known from coordinating relief after Chantal. We will keep showing up at LEPC conferences across the state, and later this month we will attend NCEMA. These are the moments to build trust before the next storm hits, and trust is what makes the work possible when the skies turn grey.
So, how about you? Are you in the Halloween spirit yet? Or still recovering from the last twelve months of chaos where autumn barely had time to show off before everything went sideways? Either way, I hope you are finding a little space to enjoy it this year. Also, these emails are replyable. That's right, you can hit “reply” and your words will not be sucked into a black hole of the internet. We do read them, even if we cannot always respond.
And now, on a less serious note, my other venture Haunts of Hendo is in full swing. Yes, the ghost stories are back, and oddly they have not stolen too much time from disaster relief. Even my trip to Guilford County turned into a two-for-one deal: disaster meetings by day, spooky content filming by very early morning. Multitasking is fun if you define “fun” as being fueled by coffee and Newton’s side-eye at 4 a.m. Thanks for sticking with us in this first year of learning, stretching, and showing up. We will keep putting boots on the ground, coffee in the thermoses, and hopefully a little less fog in the gym.
