Christmas Six in Canada: 2025

Holiday Season 2025

Recently, one of my favorite students asked me if I had any regrets in life. At the time I thought, no. What is there to regret? Live, love, laugh and pass along as much of your good fortune as possible. Now though, at the holiday season I realize I do regret having spent my entire life away from my family, specifically my parents. Early on in my career, I applied for jobs in Alabama, but no one there wanted me. Fortunately, others did. So I spent my adult life as an itinerate scientist moving across the North American continent five times to date from Raleigh to Richland to Pohatcong Township to Seattle to Baltimore to Victoria. That makes twenty-six Christmas Holidays spent in the rain soaked Pacific Northwest since we married in 1987. 

Five moves across continent with one more to come when we retire to Moulton only serves to highlight that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. My maternal Mississippi born grandfather, Richard LaFayette Robinson, was for years an itinerate laborer. Eventually empirically mastering the basics of engineering to become an “iron worker”, which helped him finally settle-down in Sheffield, Alabama working at an aluminum plant. By the time he retired, forcibly due to a piece of “rebar” piercing his left eye, he had mastered nearly all trades as he continuously upgraded their small home with electrical, plumbing and brick work. Mom says they moved so often that my Grandmother, Reba Mae Roberts Robinson also Mississippi born, became a skilled but reluctant mover. They tried to keep Mom in the same school for an entire school year, but still moved a lot. She recalled once how they lived in a gas station where PaPa worked as a mechanic. Proudly she said they lived in the front room with a window whereas the other family that worked the station lived without one in the back. PaPa – born in 1900 - had learned the trade of automobile repair from his Dad who learned it like they learned everything back then, from first hand experience. 

My love of cooking is pretty much all learned first hand, inspired by watching my Mother and grandmothers. Being a sickly child I was at times more often in the kitchen than other boys. My love of ad hoc soup comes from Saturday lunch where my Mom would make a left over tomato based soup. Always delicious and often soaked up with a grilled cheese sandwich, these soups seemed to come together like magic. They were never the same twice as she used whatever she had left over from the week. The base however was always tomatoes canned by my paternal Grandmother, Sarah Elizabeth Holland Goodlett, a process we often witnessed while on the farm in Moulton during our “vacations” in the sweltering Summers. On special occasions this Grandmother made a meat-onion dish poured over hot biscuits that the family simply called “hash”. Interestingly, I just found a French recipe called Fricot de Barques that I made recently, which despite the anchovies not in my Grandmother’s dish, tasted just as luxurious probably due to the extra fat on the cheap cut of beef that is used. Perhaps my paternal grandfather, David Kyle Goodlett, tasted the French version of our family’s hash in France during World War I? No idea where this came from but like chess pie, it is a meal of simplicity. Notably, the anchovies in the French version melted away unnoticed save for some added umami flavor. My Grandmother Goodlett also made chess pies, a Southern classic made from basic ingredients during times of scarcity: milk, eggs, sugar and butter. In this year’s version I substituted ¼ coconut milk instead of milk with 4 eggs, 1.5 cups sugar, 1 tablespoon cornmeal, 1teaspoon vanilla, 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar.

For Christmas day I made a whipped cream a la orange made with some buttermilk for a hint of tanginess to accompany the French toast. Apparently, I made this once before and Graham liked it enough to write it down, something I, who rarely uses recipes, did; by the way it had an orange creamsicle flavor. I also made salmon for Donna and a porchetta for me and Graham. Stuffed with a combination of pancetta, parsley, rosemary, citrus zest and garlic blended in a food processor to make a paste, the porchetta dried overnight on the cool back porch to insure the skin was dry for roasting. This was served with basic blanched green beans, sweet potatoes and stuffing of the boxed variety that Graham loves with gravy made for the porchetta drippings. My cranberry sauce - always different - was sweetened this time with a pear ginger jam, apple sauce and orange juice while my polenta sous vide was made with turkey bone broth canned at Thanksgiving. And no holiday meal here would be allowed without Donna’s deviled eggs. Breakfast began with French toast made from an Italian focaccia dolce served with orange “creamsicle" icing and bacon. 2026 will begin with a similar culinary start that of course includes black eyed peas but made Italian style with a sofrito and some tomato sauce base. 

Five of my seven graduate students will graduate in 2026. The first, Linda Nartey, is a Ghanaian microbiologist par excellence. She probably didn’t understand fully what she as a microbiologist was getting into doing a PhD with an analytical chemist, but she has persevered. Focused on developing a faster way to diagnose urinary tract infections directly from urine, she has gotten a lot of publicity. Rightfully so given her method can diagnose a UTI from 1 microliter of urine as soon as it is produced. Bo Ren, aka Ren Bo given he is Chinese, will also finish his Ph.D. Focused on the effects of bacterial infections in mammalian cells, he has developed methods to improve the detection of their proteomes in the presence of an overwhelming background of host proteomes and is investigating differences in ascites fluid cells from women dying of ovarian cancer. Kate McMurray, one of three Canadian women pursing Masters degrees in the lab, was born and raised in Victoria. She has developed a nanoscale method to quantify amino acid differences in tumor and immune cells from the same ovarian cancer patient's ascites fluid cells that Bo is studying. Two other students are being supervised by my colleague, Helena Petrosova who is a senior scientist at the Proteomic Centre and without whom having this many students -seven at the moment- would not be viable. Madi Shiyuk, is one of the other Masters students who happens to also be on the Canadian junior powerlifting team, is developing methods to image the tumor microenvironment with our colleagues as part of a Terry Fox Research grant. The question at hand and with Kate’s work as well is how does the TME metabolome differ from normal cells/tissues. Madi, who I met while we briefly had the same powerlifting coach, will take her MS degree to medical school in the Fall. Finally, Sophie Culos is probing the way that bacteria remodel their membranes as a function of growth conditions. Notably, this is important to understand because it lets us mimic in vivo growth conditions that are more likely to reveal susceptibilities for therapeutic development than bacteria grown in the lab, which is the typical way they are studied. All these projects are tied together by methods to study cellular biochemistry directly from the host without ex vivo expansion.

Even though I have an MS degree in chemistry from Auburn, I have never had Masters degree students until coming to the University of Victoria. The Masters path is just not that popular in the States, while here it is common. Also not popular in the States, except with the MAGA cult, is President Trump whose ratings hover in the mid 30% range. There is no rational argument for this incompetent executive, pathological narcissist to be President save for his populist promises to take away privileges from immigrants seeking a new life in the USA as well as those who gained long overdue privileges during the Civil rights movement. It is in fact these people who made America great in the first place. This latent racism harkens back to the quote widely attributed to President Johnson "If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you”. Trump’s Goebbels - Steven Miller - has unleashed a gestapo styled masked, armed and poorly trained group who terrorize non-whites with demands of papers to prove citizenship. All this and more led me to my first protest, a No Kings rally in Vancouver with Donna who is no stranger to protests and misses Baltimore’s proximity to Washington, DC. These rallies held worldwide were a spectacular success, seven million people standing up against his despicable actions. Sadly, the raids on immigrant communities continue with court rulings pushing back, but always at a pace too slow to prevent the continued chaos. The promise of a better economic life that wooed many independents to his side were empty unless you are among the wealthiest American minority. This staggering transfer of wealth to the richest Americans accelerated in recent years. The only promise President Trump kept is the one to hire only the best, but clearly what he meant was best dressed because most of his cabinet choices are spectacularly incompetent. A lawyer to head Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr, is an anti-vaccine propagandist who tops the charts as dangerously incompetent. More people will die because of his ignorance on vaccines alone than should. While one can argue that vaccines are better for the individual than the species, this would not fit with the MAGA cult conspiracies. Fortunately, evolution appears to still be a working theory. Sadly, the deaths of anti-vaxers that we saw in mass during the COVID epidemic will leak over to innocent people trying to survive preventable diseases like measles. It boggles the mind how someone can single handedly destroy so much basic research into infectious disease and cancer. One of the most amazing discoveries of my lifetime, are the anti–PD‑L1 therapies that take the brakes off immune cells (mainly T cells) so they can better see and attack tumor cells. These are literally miracle drugs that have saved tens of thousands of lives. The process of their discovery, founded in the basic research funding that made the USA a power house in medicine since the end of World War II, is now ending due to the combination of anti-immigrant policies and a decrease in basic research funding. Inevitably, China and the EU will take the best and brightest from around the world who are now afraid to come to the US to study or simply have no opportunities due to the decrease in funding. Ultimately, these policies will make China and the EU great again, not the USA. Perversely, Trump's attacks on educational institutions, which have as one aim to give Americans more opportunities at these schools, is the MAGA version of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Americans who are not as bright or hard working as their international counterparts. All my life I have had to compete against the best and brightest from around the world making me and the USA better off for it. This competitive advantage has ended.

There is no end to the ridiculousness and cruelty of the MAGA President’s policies, but there is an end to my patience to give it attention. During the past year Donna has also continued to be exasperated with the cult that supports his policies including the misogynistic machismo that underpins it. Fortunately, she is often distracted with work for Janene Martin, a naturopath outside Baltimore, as she handles as much office work remotely as possible. Donna also keeps busy with the needs of Milo, an American bulldog now in his dotage, and Graham continued convalescence, as well as home repairs. At the moment she is transforming the upstairs bathroom, last updated at least 50 years ago, into one we hope Graham will be able to use. This is one of many projects that did not make it past the original renovations due to the demands of the Canadian Revenue Service. While we do have so-called free healthcare, our tax rate is similar to EU countries or the UK with the same. The good news is that if there is a medical emergency, you get world class care immediately that is "free". However, if you a have a routine problem, then you could be waiting a year to see a specialist. Sadly, financial constraints in all the Western world’s medical systems force medical professionals to practice health “crisis" care, not preventative care. Until this changes, none of the Western world will have affordable healthcare. Of course the barrier to this is that it requires changes to life style which are not easily changed. 

Graham continues treatment with the same specialist, Dr. Mozayeni of Maryland, but without any obvious improvement in his condition loosely described as fibromyalgia resulting from a Lyme infection. He has taken up cigar smoking in the last year – ancient smoke lodge therapy? – and continues to follow changes in his blood vessels using a new microscope that gives him improved resolution. When Graham was young and still in grade school he declared that he would not need to go to University because he could learn all he needed from the internet. While he did make it through a year and half and into engineering school before dropping out due to his medical condition, he has certainly proven his prediction correct as he knows more about the metabolomics of infectious disease than I do proving it is easier than ever to learn online. The challenge though is that this process lacks accountability in the way that in classroom learning challenges students. He is often left with unanswered questions that in a classroom experience could be easily answered. But then he may have been correct in part because even I offer an online option for my advanced course in mass spectrometry in the life sciences. Perhaps the future is a hybrid where students having learned all they can prior to University spend only a year or two debating in the classroom to solidify their education, much as an apprentice plumber spends a few years with a mentor, before receiving a degree. This could be an answer to the rising cost of education.

In preparation for retirement I purchased a program called “Sweet Home 3D” that lets one design residential properties. It is remarkably simple to use. So easy is it that Donna now walks away when she sees me coming with a “what about this?” look in my eyes. Not so easy is to convert the drawings Daddy paid for before building his house in Moulton at one end of the 80 acres left in the family of the original 1840s “plantation". It turns out that the architect drew up a 1500 sq ft home with 500 sq ft garage that the builder and Daddy decided to build a mirror image of. So what was on the right went on the left, etc. Even more challenging is that they just used the drawings as a guide which of course is how it often happens with experienced builders who don’t need architectural drawings. However, where there should have been a proper porch protruding from the front of the house, there is only a narrow strip barely wide enough for a chair. By removing the protruding porch, Daddy cut costs. Straight lines cost less to build and this principle meant that the bay window out back also disappeared. Mom, still living in Montgomery at the time was not present for these decisions or they would likely not have been made! It is a solid build though that we will eventually renovate. Before building the house, Daddy built a “shop". The ”shop” is 900 sq ft, whereas he held my Mom to a 2000 sq ft house, 500 of which is the garage. I realized while home last Spring that this shop is really well insulated. This provides year round climate control in part due to the concrete floor he poured to build it on. So, for the moment I’m considering making this into a carriage house and putting up a new shop that might be more like a barn than the well constructed shop he built. However, to convert the shop to a carriage house requires we solve at least one secret of the dead. I know where the bathroom drain begins and ends, but where did he place the sewer line to the septic tank?

From Victoria, BC we wish you all the best in the new year: Dave, Donna, Graham and Milo

P.S. Mint, who continues in tile sales, also continues to impress his bosses at Morris Tile who increased his territory. He remains in Baltimore with his beautiful, intelligent partner Jasmine Maghari who recently finished her Masters degree in Genetic Counseling and began work at the University of Maryland Medical School across the street from where I worked….NOTE: punctuation for this diatribe was provided by Donna who can only hope to control my run on German style sentences.

christmas geneaology reflections 2024

This is not my usual year end letter but more of an unapologetic reflection on the passing of my Father and our genealogy. 

 

My Dad, David Vaughan Goodlett (1931-2024), was 44 when his Father, David Kyle Goodlett (1894-1975), passed away aged 81. By contrast I was 63 this year when he passed aged 92. Even if I live as long as he did, I will have lived longer with him than without him whereas he spent half his life without his Father. This no doubt changes your perspective. As a child it seemed like every other weekend was spent on the farm helping my grandparents. That experience of “family vacations” certainly shaped me as did my many memorable lessons from Dad. Notably, he saved me from the miniskirt induced malaise of math of my early teens by drilling me on the basics or maybe he was just teaching me how to focus on a goal. 

 

He fell and broke his hip while burning brush in the pasture just weeks away from turning 90 and not far from where he had been born. He had to crawl back toward the house where Mom found him in terrific pain. As a result he spent his 90th birthday in hospital. By then - December 2021 - we were only a few months over a year into our Canadian tenure and still mostly sequestered thanks to the COVID pandemic. I finally got home the next Spring, my usual time for visiting, and by then he had recovered physically. However, he had lost the ability to finish sentences, likely a result hastened by the pain medication that had him ripping out all his tubes in hospital. Older folk don’t metabolize medicine as well as they use to, which can cause all sorts of problems from dementia to simple confusion. So I suspect he was either allergic to the medicine or it was at an effective concentration much higher than intended if he wasn’t metabolizing it well. Regardless, by the time I saw him in Spring of 2022 for the first time since 2020, he shook uncontrollably when he saw me approach the car at the Huntsville airport. Startling, it was the kind of whole body uncontrollable shake when you have an overwhelming emotion come over you. I had not seen him so vulnerable since his brother’s funeral a few years before when he had me sit next to him. Touching as it was, he couldn't really converse much. Just said my name “David” as if relieved, hugged me and then fell fast asleep as soon as we began the 45 min drive toward the farm in Moulton. Prior to this, my weekly phone calls with Mom and Dad had become simply one on one with Mom as he was too confused to chat, which was worsened by being unable to hear well.

 

We did manage to converse a bit later that week when he was rested, but the prior year’s visit was the last time I recall having a coherent chat with him. We were seated out back of the house looking East out on the pasture that has been farmed by our ancestors since the Trail of Tears ripped the Cherokees away. We talked about the old barn that he and his Dad had built when my Grandfather returned to farm in the 1950s. They had failed to brace the walls properly and as they were working on the roof frame above, the walls bowed out and they sank to the ground. I remember the barn, Sam the mule and a tractor my Grandfather had. Apparently, before the red international my Grandfather had used Sam to plow. Hard to imagine, but he had been born into a very different world without mechanization and even cleared trees by hand in preparation for the Tennessee Valley flooding projects that electrified the South. Until this chat I had no idea that he had helped his Dad dress hogs after slaughter. I knew my Grandfather loved ham, kept pigs and had a smoke house, but I had no idea mine could dress a hog then pack the meat in salt for preservation. There had always been a strange apparatus hanging between two large trees in the pasture near a rock lined well dug in the late 1800s. At this place, between trees and near the well, which had been used for refrigeration of milk and eggs, etc, they killed and dressed hogs. Thinking of those two men, this week I made a porchetta for me and Graham to nibble on for Christmas week snacks. My Grandpa would have loved the garlic infused pork belly oozing luscious fat. I can’t eat ham without thinking of him, but my Dad loved fried catfish, chicken livers and oysters. The catfish often came from the pond - aka the cow's waterhole - near where he said he was born or at least lived as an infant in a “house” with no running water. Only the storm shelter dug into the earth remained by the time I roamed the farm in the 60s – 70s.

 

He and Mom retired to the farm when he was 59 and she 54. This was right around the time Donna and I moved to Richland, WA after I finished my Ph.D. in biochemistry at NC state in ’91. Dad, ever a busy body like his Mom, started a lawn service, grew roses and pursued his passion for wood carving. His Mother, Sarah Elizabeth Holland Goodlett (1900-1998) aka Sallie Bet was still alive when they retired. She would soon fall though and spend the rest of her years in the Moulton nursing home where Daddy visited her daily for the 4-5 years that she lingered. A devotion equaled possibly only by my Mother’s devotion to him as he failed over the course of his last two years. No one talks about changing diapers of old folk as they linger, but this is how it goes. Exhausting acts of love. He maintained his health pretty well until his 80s. The radiation treatment for prostate cancer had saved him in his early 60s, but decades later had devastating consequences on his bowels. No one talks about this either I guess because everyone is happy to just have their loved one around and doctors tend to be more focused on saving life than quality of life lived. Regardless, I think his 60s and 70s were good for him. I remember him as robust during these years. Unfortunately, hormone therapy, which he began intermittently in his 70s, is one of the few ways to save someone from androgen-dependent cancer. Without adequate testosterone circulating through your veins, muscle growth is impeded and eventually contributes to confusion, which he had begun to experience in the years before falling. So the medicines and procedures that kept him alive for decades, eventually contributed to his demise. We are all grateful to have had him around for so long allowing him to get to know all of his grandchildren and great grandchildren, a luxury. 

 

The eulogy by family friend, Rev Ken Jackson, was an amusing, thoughtful look back on Dad's life. At times the reflections were hilarious lifting the mood of everyone in the sanctuary. Sometimes lies, uh … I mean embellishments, were told but this is Southern story telling at its best. I have never seen a church so full for a funeral as his was. More like a wedding as there must have been a couple hundred folk present. Dad was extraordinary in his normalcy and decency. Would help anyone who needed it. Built habit for humanity houses. Cut lawns. Grew and gave away hundreds of roses. Grew a massive garden of vegetables just like his Mom and doing so right up through the Summer before breaking his hip. Even at 90 he insisted on going outside to work only to sit down and nap more than he worked. Remarkably, he was born on the same farm he died on and depending on the story you believe these seminal events took place within 10 or 100 yards of each other. Born into what would now be called more of a shack without running water than a house, he grew up in the depression days that forged the determination of his generation. He knitted socks with his Mom for soldiers during WWII and collected scrap metal and rubber. He made it to college thanks to the GI bill and his stint in the navy during the Korean War. As a result, he landed a good job in Montgomery and spent his working life supporting our family assessing loans for farmers for the US government. My sisters and I and our Mother all went to college thanks to this job. In hindsight, Dad and Mom practiced remarkable fiscal discipline to make that happen. In the end it probably wasn’t difficult for him to retire, which is something I am struggling with. Notably, he laid down the truth serum on me once when I complained about traveling the world by reminding me “Son, you don't have a job. I had a job. You travel because you want to, but I had to travel”. True. He had been on the road almost every other week of my childhood traveling the state to assess values for farmers requesting loans. The difficulties presented to farmers during the Carter years and thereafter led to the only time I recall disagreeing with him politically. He was not a fan of President Carter, blaming him for much of the suffering of the farming community during the high inflation period of the early 80s. However, he and President Carter shared one thing though – human decency. Not surprisingly, he was not a fan of Trump, a self-indulged, narcissist. So at least we reconciled around that shared disgust in the populism that gives Trump power and has forced women to carry dead babies until they themselves die. It is an unreconcilable feature of Trump’s supporters who feign Christianity to control the lives of others while hypocritically denouncing Sharia law. Mathew 7:3 "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”.

 

Despite the current punitive political currents, he loved the state of Alabama and thanks to his travel that led him to every county, he knew more than most about its geography. He often lamented the fact that Georgia had grown around Atlanta while Alabama remained a bit of a back water. The same was true he would say for Lawrence county, which remains one of the least educated counties in the state, and relative to the surrounding counties has seen little to no economic growth. For my part this is not a bad thing as it means the area is not yet overrun by “progress”, but Huntsville only 45 minutes from the farm is now the largest city in the state. Our family came to Lawrence county with many other families from Greenville South Carolina in the early 1800s after the Cherokee removal. David Johnson Goodlett (1804-1878), great grandson of the Scottish indentured servant Robert Goodlett (1728-1804), purchased the original land of which 80 acres remains in family. He was part of the plantation society of the time and from that my Dad’s and my small bit of West African DNA is likely derived. I say this knowing he had slaves and because I have had several 4^th cousins, which takes us back to D.J. Goodlett’s generation, who share < 1% of my DNA on Dad’s side and are clearly of African in descent who have reached out to me on 23andme. Surprisingly, even though he easily tanned like his Dad, he had no trace of indigenous DNA like Mom and I share. He did though embrace the tribulations of indigenous culture of the local area eventually carving a statue of the great Cherokee leader Sequoyah that’s located in the Oakville Indian Mounds museum in Danville, Alabama. This may have been the pinnacle of his artistic career. While I struggle understanding three-dimensional space, he easily envisioned it bringing ideas to life in wood. He could not though carry a tune to save his life. When as a young boy I realized this, I could no longer stand next to him in church as he belted out loud and proud praise with no connection to the underlying hymn.  

 

While his retirement must have been a release from a thankless government job, which had served him and the family well, mine is perplexing. Other than odd jobs as a young man - mowing lawns or cleaning out barns of shit for my high school choir director’s husband or annealing aluminum tubing that would become radiators - as he said, I have never had a real job. So how to retire from a profession you love is something I’m struggling with. We have a plan, but to avoid panic in the lab, that plan will remain secret for now. Reflecting back on how I got into science, I realize that Dad’s frugality around repairing rather than replacing was a big part of it. When I first encountered mass spectrometry at NC State, we had to clean and reassemble the ion source that consisted of dozens of small parts. Get it wrong and you had to start over which meant another day or two of waiting to do an experiment. It turns out that Dad prepared me for this by forcing me to help him rebuild lawn mower engines, among other broken things. I hated it at the time, but clearly something about the process of keeping track of all those small parts took hold. I remember trying to explain to him, an Auburn University animal science graduate, what an ion was. Probably I failed, but I did end up working in the same department he had trained in when I became a technician after obtaining my chemistry degree at Auburn in 1982. Buried with an Auburn cap in his hand, he was a rabid Auburn football fan which eventually infected me and even carried over – is it epigenetics? - to my son David Minter Goodlett who has never lived in Alabama and is a University of Maryland graduate, but has the same character building affection or is it an affliction?

 

Notably, while I know my Goodlett ancestry back to the early 1700s when Robert Goodlett arrived from Scotland, I know less about my Mother’s side, but share 49.92% of her DNA and only 47.53% with Dad. Small differences like that 2% are roughly what one shares with a first cousin and such small differences in genomes make all the difference in our uniqueness; we are a remarkably homogenous species genetically. Not to diminish my Dad who could given enough time figure things out from first principles, his Father in law was brilliant in that regard. Whatever cleverness I have can more likely be attributed to Mom and her very clever Father, Richard LaFayette Robinson (1917-1996) who never graduated high school but was more clever by far than most who did. Mom’s family came from Burnsville, Mississippi eventually ending up in Sheffield, Alabama - where she met Dad - due to the consistent jobs available in the area. Like Dad, Mom was also born at home; in her Epperson grandparents house. When they retired she, Peggy Jean Robinson (1936-), taught school in Moulton influencing the lives of many. During one of the hospital stays with Dad, a nurse entered the room and said “Mrs Goodlett you won’t remember me, but your enthusiasm for science a la your NASA lessons inspired me to become a nurse”. As I tell my students, it’s not necessarily about what you do that will make the world better, but what those you help and influence do. Paying it forward without any expectation of reward was something Dad and Mom practiced likely without even thinking about it. No doubt this is a trait of those who grew up in the depression. If you could you helped everyone who asked, because you knew you would likely soon need help as well. 

 

Here in Victoria, BC, which due to its mild weather is one of the most coveted retirement locations in all of Canada, we are counting the days until we retire. Lots to do both here and on the farm before that happens. In the lab we have been working on a Terry Fox Research Institute award to delve into the mysteries of how cancer cell metabolites differ from the surrounding healthy tissue. If you don’t know the Terry Fox story, look him up. He died from cancer while running across Canada on a prosthetic leg to raise funds for cancer research. While prostate cancer is now almost as difficult to die from as HIV is to catch, this is not so with ovarian cancer. The focus of one of our research streams is in fact ovarian cancer where there is much greater need for early detection. In the last 30 years since Dad was diagnosed, and with him as a prime example, early detection and treatment has pushed survival rates above 90%. Not so with ovarian cancer which remains deadly due to our inability to detect it early enough. To try to improve this, we are using mass spectrometry and associated techniques to examine differences in tumor metabolites. Unfortunately, the miracle antibody drugs, called immune checkpoint inhibitors, that turn your immune system back on to kill cancer naturally, do not work well with solid tumors. So we have an associated research theme to understand why this is and if differences in metabolism are responsible. 

 

Twenty years ago, thanks to connections I made when at the University of Washington in the late 1990s while keeping Ruedi Aebersold’s mass spectrometers safe from his untrained horde of well meaning folk, I got my first “job” as a Professor at the University of Washington. Dad also got The Job that he raised our family on in Montgomery at the Farmers Home Administration through a prior connection. Life happens through such connections and I prefer to hire with this crutch more so these days when a single job advert can raise hundreds of enquiries from strangers. Knowing someone who knows someone gives that certain someone an instant stamp of approval that will most often avoid wasting your time. Also 20 years ago my first PhD student, Shawna Mae Hengel, took a chance on me as her advisor and almost certainly my last PhD student, Angela Jackson returning to school at 50 after having raised her daughter, has done so recently. My Mom, who went to college after we were old enough to be home alone after school let out, could have easily obtained a Ph.D. in education, but did manage to fit in an M.S. degree. 

 

Four years into my tenure at the University of Victoria my research in inflammation due to Gram negative bacterial lipids continues with a whole new crop of students. They are amazing each in their own unique ways and will no doubt make contributions to better the world that I will never see. This is fine. This is life. You pay it forward without expectation. If you read this far, sorry, but there is no prize just a few extra family stories. Mint, still in Baltimore, but now living with his lovely partner Jasmine Maghari, continues in tile sales. He is anxiously waiting to finding out where she will work after finishing her M.S. degree in genetic counseling. It seems that much like his Mom he is primed to follow his partner on her professional journey. I hope he can find a satisfying job as well and that like his Grandfather he pursues his artistic talent -  in this case graffiti art - on the side. Having the gift of gab like his Mom means sales is probably his strong suite. For the last year, and still with us, Graham has been under the care of a new physician, B. Robert Mozayeni of Maryland, specializing in vector-borne infections. Still suffering chronic fatigue, Graham has taken up cigar smoking, an expensive habit for someone with no job, but c’est la vie what to do with the 48% or so of my income that the Canadians don’t take but to buy a few cigars? Donna who often wonders out loud why I haven’t retired yet - that is - until holidays where I’m home all day cooking and sassing her, has begun weight lifting again. They say muscle mass and VO2 max are two of the best predictors of healthy aging. Given she continues walking Milo a few miles per day no matter the weather, her VO2 max is I think fine. This hardiness in all conditions is something I admired in her when in the time before children we traveled wilderness areas and she was the only one who could start a fire even in damp rainy conditions.  

 

All the best to you and yours from me and mine.

 

 

Christmas 2023

This time last year there were at least a two feet of snow on the ground. Donna shoveled while I recovered from a surgery that prevented me lifting more than 10 lbs. The deep freeze lasted a couple weeks but it took about six months for me to get back to form in the gym with deadlifts, squats and bench. I don't know why I love power lifting, but I do. Now, ready and waiting on the snow, but there is none to shovel. Sad, as I enjoy it. Almost freezing out though.

 

Christmas Day dinner is planned and the execution begun with cranberry sauce made with apples, orange-lemon juice and lemon-orange zest. The 4lb pork loin prepared by the butcher for a porchetta marinated overnight in a paste of sage, thyme, rosemary, garlic, parsley blended into a base of pancetta. In between working on the porchetta, I prepared the Fagioli all'uccelletto, aka Italian baked beans, to be warmed up Christmas Day. And as usual at the holidays, in a nod to the American South I made a couple of chess pies. Roasted yams and risotto with wild mushroom gravy will accompany the porchetta. Christmas Day will kick off with a frittata and Christmas Eve with biscuits, which I haven't made since coming to BC, but I recall my paternal Grandmother making them daily.

Christmas Day menu:

caprese frittata for breakfast 

hors d'oeuvre of toast with pate and pesto

Donna's deviled eggs

cranberry sauce

dressing with pork gravy

roasted yams

risotto via sous vide

fagioli all'uccelletto

porchetta with pancetta and herbs (0.7 of 4 lbs went to meatloaf with 2 of beef))

chess pie for desert

Cava and Cote d'Rhone

 

For the first time ever I didn't make it to MSBM.ORG. During our week-long mass spectrometry school held annually in Dubrovnik, Croatia the first week of July students are instructed in the fundamentals and applications of mass spectrometry, mostly in the life sciences. Some sort of GI ailment struck just as I was preparing to depart. I made it as far as Seattle, but there was no way to sit on an airplane in such a condition. So, I returned to Victoria to recuperate. During the Summer months afterward Donna and I explored city restaurants all close enough to walk the 30 minutes to the harbor. In fact, I recuperated so well that by Fall I was up to my typical January weight. I know this because I have weighed myself for the last dozen years on a near daily basis using a Withings wireless scale. Surprisingly, on average I gain and lose 10 lbs each year between January and September. Time to start losing again, which means counting calories.

 

I did though make it to the farm twice this year to see my folks in May and June. Mom is busier than ever trying to keep track of my Dad who has struggled to recover from his fall two years ago December. He ended up in the hospital for his 90th birthday after a fall while burning brush. While his cracked hip recovered, as did his strength, his ability to speak was affected most probably from the pain medication in hospital. As we age our ability to metabolize drugs declines. Often old folk seem to take a mental turn for the worse after a surgery involving anesthesia. This is an effect similar to chemo-brain suffered by cancer therapy patients. The younger you are the easier it is to recover. Dad didn't have surgery. So it must have been the pain medications in hospital, which Mom said he reacted badly to, that precipitated this speech impediment. Somehow Mom maintains a positive attitude even though this is the third person in a row she has had to be care taker for at least part time. First it was her Mom Reba Robinson and then her Uncle Hubert Robinson. Both have passed now but she only had a few years of normalcy before Dad's problem arose. 

 

I finally paid for 23&me to tell me that my parents are in fact my genetic parents as they had both already had their genes sequenced. What is interesting is that while the Goodlett family has been in the US since the early 1700s, as have the Robinsons, my genome is still about 88% "British". My parent's % of British is of course a bit higher. What this must mean is that the "Goodlett families" that settled in Greenville South Carolina pre-Revolutionary War and then moved to Moulton Alabama when the Cherokees were removed in the early 1800s, have consistently married within the same ethnic and I would guess protestant religious circles. I say this knowing our Scottish ancestors in South Carolina were Presbyterians. My Mom's side of the family seems to have gone through the same restricted passage of marriage into like ethnic clans for the last two hundred years ending up in Northeast Mississippi and Northwest Alabama. Remarkable. 

 

Notably, our boys have often accused Donna and me of being too close genetically, a common joke in the rural South. However, 23&me put an end to that. We share almost no common genes with me being closer to my myriad 4th and 5th African American cousins genetically than I am to Donna. Not even any interesting genetic predispositions revealed, but then if you really are interested in your genetic susceptibility to disease then a site like Invitae is a better place to start. I was surprised though to find out that I have about 0.3% indigenous American genes and 0.4% Western African genes. The latter wasn't really a surprise as the Goodletts in Moulton and Greenville had slaves. In fact some of their descendants have already reached out to me on 23&me and Ancestry.com.

 

I also finally made an Instagram page for the lab that is mostly a collection of photos that didn't belong any where else. Some of these are a look back at the people who inspired and trained me. This was driven in part by a desire to get away from Twitter and Elon Musk's overt racist leanings. With the new Instagram account comes a Threads account that I can use instead. At least I don't know Mark Zuckerberg's political leanings or I might be out of luck there too. The lab continues to investigate the relationship between microbial membrane lipid structures that contribute to an organism being pathogenic or commensal. Small changes in the structures of these organic molecules in Gram-negative microbes can result in an organism being recognized or not by the host. Those that are recognized are often cleared, but those that aren't may be commensals or simply lead to chronic infections. And this year, thanks to funding from the Terry Fox Foundation, we added examination of the tumor microenvironment in ovarian cancer to our todo list. Not part of the program, my interest is the connection between microbes in our tissues and how they may be turned against us or even drive cancers. Microbes are literally everywhere in and around us. All those COVID masks really did reduce transmission.

 

Speaking of microbes, we got a clue into the cause of Graham's chronic fatigue - now lingering six years. He had previously been diagnosed with a Lyme disease infection, the Gram-negative microbe Borellia is the causative agent, and treated unsuccessfully for this just as he began University. The symptoms worsened though leading him to drop out of engineering school at the University of Maryland by JAN 2018. Recently, he began to suspect a different organism was the root cause and sought testing from a new specialist, B. Robert Mozayeni. Bartonella, another Gram-negative microbe, and Babesia were detected by RNA-based assays. So now we wait on what the possible treatment options are. While Gram-negative bacteria are all related by having a second membrane that aids their causing numerous human maladies, they can respond to therapies in different ways. In fact, many microbes live in biofilms inside us that make targeting them very difficult. The same microbe that is killed in the lab by an antibiotic might not respond in vivo due to the protective barrier of the biofilm. So, we will see where this takes us. Any improvement would be welcomed as it would mean Donna is not a prisoner here to this situation like my Mom is with Dad in Moulton.

 

Back in Baltimore Mint took on a new role in traveling sales at Morris Tile. This puts him on the road a few days a week to visit customers. His partner, Jasmine Maghari, is working on a Masters degree in genetic counseling at my former employer the University of Maryland-Baltimore. Afterward I expect they will stay in the area where her family is but not sure if Mint will continue with tile sales. Not sure where that can take him but it is a solid job for now as people even in the pandemic continued to renovate and build new homes. As part of the sales job he bought a new vehicle which means my soon to be 20 year old Subaru Forester is sitting idle. Perhaps this year we will move it to the farm to have there when I visit and maybe even I'll eventually convert it to electric. More than a few companies offer this service now.

 

As we close on 2023 the political climate around the 2024 Presidential election in the States looms large. While some bemoan that Biden is 80, Trump is only a couple years younger. Would be better to have younger options, but for now this is it. The worst thing people seem to say about Biden is that he has lost a step due to age. Regardless, he has quietly accomplished more than most Presidents slowly turning the economy around from the pandemic induced economic downturn. Meanwhile, Trump seems unapologetic for his Fascist rhetoric saying immigrants are diluting the blood of Americans and that they are vermin. These Fascist phrases are outrageous but then that is how he rolls, shock factor out front to disorient. If he is elected again then it will be by a minority just like the first time, which can happen thanks to the electoral college process that allows minorities to rule. Sad to think that so many Americans follow a cult leader*, but in fact he is playing on their real fears driven by social and economy change which is exactly how notables like Hitler and Mussolini came to power. We should try to find compromise to alleviate their fears but what Trump is selling is a one sided option with no room for that. This rhetoric is accompanied by abortion and book bans running rampant in many states endangering lives and freedom. The former was brought on by the right wing US Supreme Court forcing their religious views on everyone. Shameful, but it has allowed states to move to extreme positions that now threaten the lives of Mothers. In Texas the Supreme Court has acted like a Taliban style Christian court in effect banning abortions even if the Mother's life is at risk. Despicable. This shift to minority rule will not stand, but there may be more pain for the US to endure before control is turned around to more moderate leadership.

 

With all that said we have begun to think about retirement in the US of course. The difficulty will be timing. For now I'm still taking students and given my ad hoc management style, which you can pull off with creative people, there can be a soft landing on that front. So, it will likely be a slow controlled retreat from here, but when is an open question. Not for a few more years. Meanwhile, the crew here at the Proteome Centre are first class scientists and pretty much manage themselves doing scientific work for customers from all over the world. This makes life easier for me than it ever was in Baltimore**. For Donna and Milo, who now walk about 4 miles a day morning, noon and night, not much would change in retirement, but the humidity of Alabama. Well, the cold too will be different as the Winters in North Alabama are much colder than here where we are surrounded by water. 

From Moscow to Melbourne we wish you all the best in the New Year. Sending love and hugs from Victoria to whoever needs them. Dave, Donna, Graham and Milo

* I suppose that in fact it is not that Trump is a Cult Leader but that there is a cult that follows him. He is just playing on this. In her book "Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism" (2023) Rachel Maddow reminds us that the fascist populous picks the fascist leader, not the other way around.

** Over and over again people ask me how I like Victoria. My standard response is that it is pretty quiet almost boring here compared to Baltimore where there are 300 murders a year. I realized after some time here that what I missed about Baltimore, other than the much better food scene than here, is the adrenaline rush. It is similar to the solider who returns from several tours of duty to a quiet a home town only to re-enlist. It's like that here. No adrenaline rush like Baltimore where my 30 minute walk to work had me constantly on alert for danger. After awhile you don't notice this adrenaline but its complete absence here is obvious. Still, it is a wonderful quiet, lovely place here with nearly zero chance of being shot or mugged. And still we love Baltimore for all its quirkiness and lovely people.

 

Christmas 2022

As I sit here recovering from an elective surgery last week that prevents me lifting more than 10 lbs for 6-8 weeks there is more than a foot 🦶🏼of snow ❄️ 🥶 on the ground. When I decided the holiday break would be a good time for this fix, I wasn't counting on a bomb cyclone 💣🌀 coming along or maybe I just wasn't planning. At exactly this time last year there was a similar "freak" snow here. No shoveling for me, but no problem because I have Donna. 💪🏼 She shoveled the side walk in front of the house, which must be about ~ 40 meters (~ 40 yards), and the steps up to the house too and salted it all. Fortunately, the snow was mostly powder and easy to move. With the car snowed in and roads impassable, she also walked two hours round trip downtown (normally only 30 min one way) to meet a friend who came over on the Clipper from Seattle to visit Buchart gardens. At least Lynn Deal is from Chicago originally. So not unaccustomed to so much snow. On day 2, Donna dug the car out from under a frozen mess and went off to the grocery store and on returning home she shoveled more snow!

This year we said goodbye to Trixie, seen here with Donna's BIG rooster in Baltimore. Trixie was a Rottweiler-Mastif mix who was two years old when Donna found her in a shelter at Halloween 2010. Diagnosed with Cushing's disease prior to our leaving Seattle in 2013, Donna kept her healthy much longer than we anticipated including loss of a toe due to cancer. However, the excess cortisol production eventually took its toll. The last year saw her needing to go out to pee every other hour night and day, a consequence of the hormonal imbalance. And in the end, she could only collapse onto the floor with labored breathing due to fluid build up in her lungs. Tortuous to see and hear there was no fix. Faithful to the end Donna lay down with Trixie in the special room at the Vet for such purposes as Trixie drifted off into the next world. I am notably not able to handle this. So, I just cried and hugged Donna when she got home much the same as I had when Dapper, our first dog, slipped away.

Thirty-five years after getting married we spent a couple weeks in Croatia and The Netherlands. Fortunately, this trip was booked prior to arrival of our staggering Canadian tax bill (they apparently need a mid-size car) and the US IRS saying we owed them enough to buy a luxury car. The latter was an IRS miscalculation exacerbated by the Republican refusal to properly fund the IRS. This lack of funding means a lack of qualified people to review returns and also means millionaires are orders of magnitude less likely to be audited than normal people and yet we still wait for the IRS to resolve our issue. But, I digress. We first spent a few days in Cavtat at our favorite resort before going on to Dubrovnik to stay with old friends at the Sesame B&B. The old town has now limited cruise ship disembarkments to one ship per day making the place much more enjoyable. Amazingly, there is always something new to see there and on Lokrum, which is a magical place where Richard the Lionheart was shipwrecked. From there we were on to Korcula, of Marco Polo fame, by Jadrolinija ferry. Korcula at his birth during the era of European city-states was controlled by the Venetians who had failed to take Dubrovnik, but has long been a Croatian island. There we stayed in the old town in Hotel Korcula but drove up island one day to visit some remote beaches. Lovely, quiet place during August. Further up the coast again on the ferry we stayed for a night in Trogir, which is only a few minutes from the airport near Split of Emperor Diocletian fame, and were then off to Amsterdam for a couple days. Not surprisingly we were posting aimlessly on social media and unbeknownst to us our friend and my former choir director, Todd Shively, and his partner were also in A'dam we discovered when they saw our posts, LOL. This led to a lovely evening on the canals with them. Thanks Todd!

Afterward Donna headed back to Victoria where our eldest son Mint (aka David [M] Goodlett VII) had come out to stay the two weeks with his brother Graham so that we could get away. And I was then off to Maastricht to give a lecture at the International Mass Spectrometry Conference on our efforts in single cell proteomics before going to Gdansk to speak at the Medical University of Gdansk about how to integrate a research program into a fee-for service centre. Notably this year Mint finally found a J O B!!! Actually, the job found him, which is often how it works. His housemate already worked at a tile supply company and knew they needed someone. There at Morris tile Mint is putting his Mother's extraordinary organizational skills to use in the warehouse and selling. We are very proud of course that he is finally putting his Kinesiology degree to use, LOL. Honestly though getting a college degree at the least says to an employer that you can accomplish goals in the long run. Well done Mint, seen here with me before leaving Baltimore! Sadly, Graham is no better but fortunately, no worse either. Only a useless fibromyalgia diagnosis to describe his condition. Sigh...

After returning from Croatia, Milo, an American bulldog seen here entered our lives. He is our third dog and second rescue dog. You would never know he hadn't been with us his entire life. Moved in and made himself at home. Mostly aloof. Good at sleeping. Excellent at slobbering. Hates squirrels and raccoons taunting him. Not sure about the neighborhood's peacocks. Not happy about being on a diet. Barks incessantly to go out or to be let into a room. Unlike Trixie he doesn't see other dogs as a threat unless they jump him and then it can get ugly, but at least Donna can walk him. Three times a day now they are out and about. Lucky dog so says the Vet and me. 

The renovations begun in 2021 when we moved in are finally "complete". Not to say that there aren't more renovations needed, but that we are exhausted from a year and half of dust, chaos and trying to communicate with various vendors and trades. So, we'll take a break from the house renovations next year and work more on the yard which when we arrived was covered in ivy obscuring view of the house. Most of that is gone or at least hidden under ground, as it is never really gone, but lots needs to be done to bring the yard up to a level equal to Donna's interior design. The yard was at some point created by putting up a retaining wall and backfilling on top of the rock that is just barely below the veneer of dirt on the entire property. Along with everything else, the retaining wall needs replacing, LOL. Never mind that for now, when we bought the place most rooms, like the dining room, had layers of wall paper tediously removed by Donna so that she could add her paint color schemes. The kitchen with its wood stove for heat had to be gutted and the bathroom also as it had last been remodeled more than 50 years ago. 😩

After ASMS.ORG this year in June I stopped by the farm to see my folks. Seen here with my Dad who will soon be 91, it was good to see that he had physically recovered from the fall last December that had him in the hospital for his 90th birthday. After being in a wheelchair and needing a walker for about six months, he amazingly recovered from the cracked hip he suffered in a fall while burning trash. Why was he burning trash? Because he could, LOL, but no more of that! While he is quite strong for 90, his recovery is likely in large part due to my Mother's support seen here with him a few years ago. Not unexpectedly after the disorientation of such a traumatic event, his short term memory which had begun to fail him before the accident has not gotten better. While chatting he could tell me all about butchering hogs down in the pasture with his Dad, where he was born on the farm by the pond and how his Dad had butchered chickens in the backyard 😆 of the Sheffield home and how their milk cow was stolen after he left it as instructed overnight in a local park to graze. However, he couldn't remember recently where I lived but when I told him Victoria, BC, he said "I've been there!". Indeed, he had when we lived in Seattle. Because he loves to hear me play guitar but rarely has me nearby, I made a YouTube channel so that he can enjoy it whenever my Mom can turn it on for him. Oh dear, not much going on there. I definitely need to carve out more time for this in the new year.

Amazingly, after twenty years in academics I finally taught my first undergraduate course this Fall. Previously, I had been in schools of pharmacy that train students who mostly already have an undergraduate degree. So this was a new experience, but thanks to the lovely students here for taking it easy on me. While it was in the end a delight, I was admittedly worried when at the start they weren't sure about primary amines and condensation reactions drawn on the chalkboard. LOL, we got through it and they as mostly 4th year students will soon get on with their lives knowing a bit about discovery experimentation in the biomedical sciences. 

Seen here is the Proteome Centre staff and my wet lab group at our holiday outing to an escape room. Loads of fun and more so without any obvious risk of catching COVID! Notably, the proteome centre carries out fee-for-service work projects for Canadians and scientists from all over the world, while the wet lab is focused on understanding why lipids in Gram negative bacteria can some times escape immune detection allowing chronic infections (think syphilis and Lyme disease) or turn deadly in under a week (think the black Plague or Tularemia) or in other cases (think Salmonella or E coli) be recognized readily making you ghastly ill in order to clear the infection. All well, but loads to learn. Fortunately, I'm blessed to have a group of amazing people working on this problem and generally at the Centre where the staff are AAA human beings doing solid science day in and out.

In the US it seems like the greatest victim of all time - maybe the greatest ever LOL -@POTUS45 will soon be one with the world he has created for himself. What an absurdity, but now much mimicked and by some who are much smarter - not difficult to achieve - and thus more dangerous. While we may soon shed his clownish facade, the evil of white supremacy and white victimization that he has empowered will not go quietly. Watching President Zelensky speak to Congress last night some 81 years after Churchill made the treacherous North Atlantic crossing to do the same and under similar conditions with a madman raining terror on civilians in Britain, it seems like only yesterday when @POTUS45 was trying to bribe Zelensky resulting in his first impeachment. And then, a second one for emboldening a mob to attack the capitol. And then, the stealing of government documents and finally being recommended - first ever ex-President to have such distinction, so much winning LOL - by Congress to the DOJ for criminal prosecution. It is not enough to chant "lock him", but rather "lock them" up. Lock up all who attempted to overthrow duly elected President Biden. You just can't make this nonsense up, but it is the smart and evil ones that will follow to be wary of as they will not commit their crimes in the light of day. At the least @POTUS45 and his cronies are guilty of seditious conspiracy to overthrow the US government and should pay the penalty for their actions,

Enough of that, but I had to get it off my chest. Hopefully, the US government can cast off this evil that has caught hold and move on to the promised liberté et égalité pour tous. Speaking of French speaking, Canadian immigration finally thought well enough of our application for permanent residency (like a US green card) to grant us this designation. Notably, it means we can come and go across the border with ease and with no need now to carry my work permit. It also means that Graham can finally get on the province's medical service plan. As an adult dependent he was not eligible, FFS! So he has had only emergency medical coverage since we arrived. The basic difference between our experience in the US and here is that while in the US medical service is metered out based on money - we always had the gold plated plan and so only complained about cost, here it is metered out based on time and we and everyone else has to wait and wait and wait for appointments. It's true that many more people have healthcare here than in the US, but it is still a mess of a different sort here. Glad to be here though. All good.

From the appropriately named Rockland neighborhood in Victoria, BC c'est tout jusqu'à l'année prochaine (aka that's all until next year).

Love, hugs and kisses to those of you who might need or just want them: Dave, Donna, Graham and Milo

Christmas 2021 in Victoria BC 

Waking up on Boxing Day to snow on the ground and wildlife in the area. Looks to be frozen over until Tuesday at least here. So the car is probably stuck until then at the top of our steep driveway. Yesterday, missing Tuscany or just the sunny Mediterranean, we feasted on pork roast braised in a Dutch oven in milk with sage and rosemary accompanied by fagiolli all'uccelletto, and tomato cucumber salad with basil. The gravy the roast made was delicious over polenta with parmesan or just about anything for that matter. And of course we had chess pies for desert with fresh whipped cream. I'm pretty happy with my chess pie recipe - finally. In this case I used cream in place of evaporated milk, which produces a firmer pie filling, and half the sugar called for in the original recipe which is way too sweet for me. The day even started with pie: a German style bacon onion pie. The day before Christmas Eve my Dad (seen here 3 years ago), born 90 years ago on 29 DEC on the farm he now lives on, went in hospital after falling outside while burning debris. That meant Mom spent Christmas Eve and Day in hospital in Florence. While he sounded normal when I spoke to him, the fall has revealed or caused - no way to know at the moment - a problem with his right hip meaning he'll require some rehabilitation before he can go home. They hope that can start tomorrow and in Decatur if not Moulton, but regardless the new year will get off to a complicated start for them. 

 

Speaking of complicated, this year got off to quite a start in the US with the first breaching of the capitol since the Brits had a look around during the War of 1812. Before we knew so much about Trump it would have been hard to believe that a sitting President would try to stop the vote count he rightfully lost by sending rioters to the capitol much less by calling the Georgia Secretary of State asking him to find more votes. Incredible (sounds better said with French accent), but sadly all too believable now. And this came after a year of his confused discussions of a deadly virus ravishing the world like none since the 1918 flu pandemic. Remarkable (also sounds better with French accent) that so many still refuse to be vaccinated when all their lives they have been vaccinated just to go to school. Fine for them to express their rights, but I don't think they should receive preference over the vaccinated who need ICU beds. No matter how you spin it, their refusal to be vaccinated has tasked the medical ICU professionals to the point of breaking because now most pandemic victims in ICU beds are not vaccinated. Sadly, it seems that once you believe one conspiracy, the second one is much easier to believe. Something like a third of Republicans don't believe Biden is the duly elected President. So there ya go...

 

As you will have seen on Instagram we bought a house this year in Victoria, British Columbia. Before moving I was admonished by Donna “I’m not doing any renovations in Victoria! We are buying a ready to move in house!!” well, we got the last part right technically at least but my mitre saw is still in a storage unit in Moulton since there was no need for it here, LOL. Renovations are ongoing and likely will be … maybe forever. Kitchen reno is almost done but it took four months for the ventilation hood to arrive and it still needs to be installed. That will happen this week - maybe - and then the backsplash tile can go up. The master bath and walk through closet reno is next. And while the drawings are ready, we need to organize the trades to get started. Not exactly straight forward because they are all in short supply here. Outside the 100 yrs of ivy growth is 99% gone but the 1% lurking out of sight will never be gone because of course you can’t kill that sh*t. Pennsylvania blue stone (quarried on Vancouver island) will be going in soon for the walk way leading up to the house. Double A Painting are coming out early in the new year to assess the situation. While the exterior original wood siding is a mess, it is still salvageable but probably can’t go too many more years without some wood repair, sealing, and painting. Lots more work to do in the yard and the wall out front needs work too....and then developing the yard such that plants can survive the annual Summer drought and Winter wetness requires some thought. Thus, the previously Donna “not goan do no reno” Goodlett has been busy and will be for some time to come. She worked hard removing loads of wall paper, painting and more to get us in the house in July and then redesigning the gutted kitchen, planters and chimney, etc. 

 

Like anyone buying a house recently we found the housing market’s price inflation was  exacerbated by the pandemic’s creation of low inventory here and all over the developed world. While our row house in Baltimore sold seven years after purchase for $100k more than we paid in 2013, our Seattle house, which sold in 2013 for $550k, sold again this past Summer for $1.3M. Yikes! The housing market here is similar to Seattle because - as the locals say Victoria is home of the newly wed and nearly dead - having some of the best weather in all of Canada has people flocking here and at least the nearly dead have loads of expendable cash that they can't take with them. This meant despite our best intentions, we bought a fixer because the inflated prices and sealed bidding process saw us lose out on four houses from $100-300k over asking price before finally finding this 1920 Tudor. And those houses we lost out on were all listed for more than $1M! This Tudor, over run by ivy and with bathrooms last remodeled in 1960, had no other bidders, LOL, but even that would not have lasted long as the market is too tight here. In our case a prior offer fell through and the owners - to our advantage - were desperate to get out of the property. So timing was everything as it always is and there is of course no substitute in life for good old fashioned luck. To conclude I can offer home buying in a hot market tip #1: price is inversely proportional to the amount of ivy on the property. So if you can just barely see the house from the road due to ivy, then it is probably a good deal, LOL. By the way, this is the third property we bought that had parts of it overrun by ivy. So, something is clearly wrong with us, LOL :) 

 

Mint braved the pandemic to come out for a visit in October. Where do you want to go for dinner was one of his first questions. Hmmm? We looked at each other and realized that due to the pandemic we had not been out to eat once in the year we had been here. Ugh%^&*. Normally we would eat out once a week, but COVID restrictions, an old dog with Cushing’s and Ham’s needs meant we had not been out once for an entire year. Argh@#$. So, we made a reservation at the Oak Bay Beach Hotel and sat outside for dinner for the first time since leaving Baltimore. Meanwhile back near Baltimore, Mint graduated in May with a degree in kinesiology from the University of Maryland’s main undergraduate campus in College Park which is right next to WA DA. His girlfriend, who is a delightful, strong Irish-Palestinian genetic blend, has another year to go there leaving him with no interest in moving. Since graduating he has freelanced in the “gig” economy working inventory in a tile warehouse owned by the Father of his Korean-American house mate whose grandmother – who can’t speak English and is slowly losing her fight with dementia - thinks Mint is the family mechanic because she saw him working on a car there one day, LOL. So, if you need a forklift operator trained in kinesiology and possessing a real talent for graffiti art, then he is your guy. Call me! I got to see him again in Philadelphia when I also braved the pandemic to travel to my annual science conference ASMS where I met my PhD advisor for the first time in a few years. Mint worked at the conference for the organizers as a “gopher” aka administrative assistant, something he excels at, for my mate Jennifer Watson. He can thank his Mom – not me - for his organizational skills as I am the traditional artistic type organizing in piles of this and that, LMAO, at best. 

 

Thanks to one of former President Roosevelt’s "socialist" programs known as Medicaid, Mint with no full-time job, managed to get health insurance. Here though, thanks to an incompetent administrator at UVic, Ham still has no health insurance other than for emergencies. Three video calls with this person over the year prior to our move and she insisted each time we explained his situation (can't work or go to school, etc) not to worry. [insert explicatives freely like an Aussie ordering beer or pretty much anything] What she apparently meant was that she was not worried. While it turns out he can get health insurance on his own, this can only happen after I have permanent residence, or he just takes one class at UVic, which we had explained he cannot. Doh! We have applied for PR, but have no idea when it will be granted. For now Ham’s condition is more or less unchanged. An undiagnosed malady - by more than a dozen health professionals over a half dozen years – that leaves him unable to do simple things like open jars or cans, etc. Year five of this starts in the new year. The only thing left to do is whole genome sequencing to look for rare genetic mutations but this won’t solve any problems, just suggest possible origins. Seems almost useless. None of the obvious mutations they checked related to muscular dysfunction were candidates to explain his condition. Sigh.

 

Just before the province closed gyms – again – before Christmas and thanks to omicron this time, I managed – thanks to an amazing trainer named Johnson Nguyen – to get my deadlifts back to my pre-pandemic 225 lbs. My upper range is somewhat limited by a ruptured L5-S1 disc, but a simple cue was all it took to get my "normal" back. While it’s no record for my age-weight class, it is good enough to get your heart pounding. And! He also fixed my bench form. There, despite a hole in my left rotator cuff from a bone spur, which should have been repaired just before the pandemic shut Baltimore down but was not thanks to a ban on nonlife threatening surgeries, has kept me off form for a few years now. With Johnson I’m hopeful I can beat the provincial record of only 155 lbs for my age-weight class by 20-30 lbs. The record seems low but then maybe most guys in my age-weight class have worn out their shoulders. For now though I am packing on the pounds again unable to get to the gym but loving to cook, eat and drink too much 👀… 

Trixie - now 14 - has had to get use to two homes in the last year. Neither having a fence means we have had to get use to taking her out because there is no shortage of beautiful wildlife distractions as well as macabre looking black squirrels, owls looking for squirrels, raccoons and baby deer. And, with Cushing's disease firmly in place she drinks way too much water and is up every night between 1-3 to go outside. So our sleep patterns are more like parents with a toddler than what we would like. That means naps in the afternoon to avoid being like zombies all day. That and the general malaise affecting many brought on by the pandemic means that I have - despite posting my arrangement of a Christmas classic last year - not had much time for my music. I did manage to design a new logo based on a combination of an old "Goodlet" coat of arms from Scotland modified with a book placed on the original "or a fess gules" and the University of Victoria arms. Thanks to DPAK (seen here back row 4th from right) for implementing it! And many thanks to him for his work on the didactic portion of our mass spectrometry focused Summer School, postponed two years now but hopefully on again in July 2022.

That's all for now. I'm still on Twitter and Facebook etc. So feel free to reach out or visit if the pandemic ever eases up! Happy Holidays from Dave, Donna, Ham and Trixie near Government House with an amazing garden in Victoria's Rockland neighborhood where we are minutes from the beach with water too cold year round to swim in without a Finnish sauna nearby!