Hello all of you! It is certainly a bummer, & it does feel a little bit embarrassing, that I have not written in this journal since May 29^th. My focus has always been 100% focused on writing my book forward to completion, but I will do a better job of keeping this journal updated along with writing my new book as well.

Well today is obviously a new day & this offers me a fantastic opportunity to give all of you some development! The most recent activity, which took place on Monday, July 20^th, was that I unfortunately had to go to the Harborview Hospital for some external head surgery that is related to the fluid collection on the left side which has gotten worse.  After some amazing preparation by my primary surgery doctor, both him & another doctor, replaced the prior shunt with a new shunt that is exceptionally better on performing the function of it. What was totally different with this head surgery was that the two doctors also made a very small, & similar, adjustment to the right side of my head, which is now helping me on the liquid removal from having that additional designed structure, for sure!

The second recent thing that happened to my family is that we found our new phenomenal dog that we adopted via the PAWS rescue in Shoreline. With some different thoughts that were debated from our family, Elise & I actually selected to change his full name to Sir Charles Jackson Spencer, but we love to simply call him Charlie! We are so blessed to find Charlie & welcome him into joining our family after I was still having such a tough time dealing with the loss of our last dog Trigger. It is not the factor that motivated us to choose Charlie versus a very young puppy that was the second dog that was in the group for us to evaluate for the decision, but in our chance to meet with both of them, we had learned from PAWS that when they had found him, he was a stray & they had only had him at PAWS for the three days before we meet him.  It was so amazing that Charlie was immediately drawn to us like he had been born in our house given his calm behavior.

Having Charlie join our family & for me to be quickly feeling better faster so that I was able to go back home faster than was I originally expected by the hospital team, have both been discussed in some details, but there are actually two other important things that also happened this month as well. First, our middle-aged daughter Causey graduated from the University of Washington with a primary degree in Communications in mid-June! Even much more amazing than all the other important things that I have talked about, which is the fact that my beautiful wife Elise retired from Microsoft on July 1^st, which is a great thing that has happened for Elise & me, for sure