Hello. My name is Fernando Crôtte. My family of origin came from Mexico and I grew up speaking Spanish. I was called ‘Fer’ for short, which was difficult for my gringo friends to say. Somewhere along the line, they started calling me ‘Ferd’ and it stuck.
I was born to two loving, well-educated parents who immigrated to the United States from Mexico. They taught me to be not only fluently bilingual but thoroughly bicultural.
In my life, I am most grateful for my four amazing children. They are the very reason for my existence. They each have children of their own now, blessing me yet again with the unexpected joys of being a grandparent.
I am a divorced/remarried person. With my second marriage I acquired a step-son who is on the autism spectrum and opened my eyes to the world of special needs.
We left our home state of Ohio in 2009 and have built a good life in the great state of North Carolina ever since.
Education and a work ethic are strong values in our family. I am grateful for the privilege of serving my communities as a physician. I currently work as an Internal Medicine Hospitalist. What is that? Think of the TV show ‘House.’ That’s my job (without the bad attitude and drug addiction. LOL)
Sports and exercise are an important part of my life. I am older now, so I have seen many activities come and go. There were football, swimming, and track in high school, rugby in college, and a decade of triathlon. There were tennis, soccer, bicycling, and through it all, running. Now it seems like I’m okay with simply walking and hiking, which fit right in with our passionate hobby– birding.
I have been writing since I can remember, but it was mostly the left-brain stuff you do in school and on the job. My right-brain, creative stuff started when I discovered the world of blogging. I started with a small blog I called “Crazy Medical Cases,” written on Apple’s iWeb, hosted on Apple’s primitive cloud services of old– .Mac and MobileMe. I still have a .mac email address. I soon outgrew that platform and built a real, WordPress blog on Oct 29, 2007. It is called ‘The Best Parts’ and you are on it right now as you are reading this. Through this blog, I discovered two things: a large family of like-minded individuals all over the world, and the fact that I enjoy creative writing. Writing on this blog gradually led to the self-publishing of several small books. I did that mainly to figure out how the self-publishing system works. And now, I have recently completed my first novel, Mission 51, earning a publishing contract with the modern publishing company, Inkshares.
Well that’s enough about me for now, though I invite you to connect with me so we can learn more about each other. You can never have too many friends and eFriends! 🙂
Peace!