We celebrated my 50th birthday this year on 2 May at our favorite Sicilian restaurant - Mondellos. About 30 folks showed up to eat, chat and relax. I had told myself I would have six-pack by that day, but only a couple ridges developed. Oh well, as consolation I ended up with a six-pack of scotch. At fifteen years past actuarial middle-age, I’ll keep the unattainable goal just to get me outta bed. The scotch though, I will not keep. Like most my age I am about 10 erh, no 20 uhh, or maybe 30lbs past my svelte high school form. It seems that the trick to removing some of the excess requires a delicate balance between nursing injuries, rest and exercise, but I do not yet want to admit the truth that exercise is not enough. My trainer likes to remind me that “Da Nile” is not just a river in Eygpt, but a state of mind for some of his elderly clients. The lab also gave me a very nice 50th birthday party and as a present a soda stream (http://www.sodastreamusa.com/) carbonated water maker that I love.
Other than my geriatric milestone, the past year seems like a bit more of the same for us ... more school, more music lessons, more travel to the beach and farm in July, more xbox, more complaints about Dad’s cooking, more baseball, more travel for me, more xbox, more complaints about school work, more work for the homeless shelter auction for Donna, more xbox, more gray hair for me, more grants submitted and more manuscripts written and while not bedside reading the latter can be found via a link for publications from our lab webpage http://goodlett.proteomics.washington.edu/. Related to work, we continue to hold the Summer School on Mass Spectrometry in Biotechnology and Medicine each year in July in Dubrovnik, Croatia. This is one of the nicer and more relaxing trips I have made the last few years. Some photos can be found here on the School's website http://picasaweb.google.com/msbm.dubrovnik/. I hope to get the family over there some time as the boys could literally swim all day in the cool clear waters of the Adriatic and Donna could relax in the shade. Only the price of airfare is holding us back.
As mentioned, the boys played baseball again. And once again they complained all the way to the start of the season about being signed up against their will. Teenagers have rights or so they believe. As before they had the chance to sign up for a sport – any sport – but did not. So, we signed them up for the only sport they have ever played. Of course what they are really complaining about is loss of xbox time on the weekends when they can xbox for hours on end as opposed to the school week when they get only one hour per day. As for baseball, they both settled in to the season and did well. For example, Mint was the lead off hitter on his team for the entire year. He learned to wait for the pitcher to throw a first strike before swinging. Make the pitcher beat me was his mantra. He continued his Ichiro style batting style where the ball is whacked down hard to the infield dirt taking an awkward bounce and running the 90 ft. to first base fast enough to get on. However, his throwing arm continued to be a problem from a tear to the pectoral muscle the season before. This injury combined with the intervening off season during which he worked hard, not to rehab the injury, but at “hanging out” and xboxing kept him at second base where even had one spectacular behind the back snag on the run to get the runner out. And Graham too did well, but he is honestly not really in to it like his brother. He did become comfortable in the outfield catching those fly balls that hang in the sky forever. For the first time ever, I coached Mint’s team. I say coached, but this really was back to my high school trainer days as I kept the guys and the dugout organized more than coached.
Mint joined the symphonic band at Ballard High School this year where he is a freshman (www.ballardbeavers.org/) and where they are known as "the Beavers". His photo in the tuxedo above is from one of their performances of which there have been two. In the first he played crash symbols to which Graham snidely remarked “that ain’t hard”. We reminded Graham, who has a bit of a rhythm problem, that in this case timing is everything. The next concert featured Mint as the solo snare drummer performing roll after roll with perfect placement and volume control. Even the conductor gave him an atta-boy afterward. The part that he played brought out for the first time ever - that I can recall - a determination to get the part down. A week before the concert he did not have the part down, but after hours of practice at show time he was his cocky self. Like me he also had a physical milestone this year when half way through the year he was officially taller than me. Not a tall accomplishment by Western standards, but he was happy about it and by Christmas break he had all A’s save for one B in geometry. This is a 180 degree correction from the last several years where he talked more about dropping out of school because it was a useless waste of time. He was fond of saying that there were lots of examples of famous, rich people who had quit school – you know Dad “like Bill Gates and…” – well he didn’t have another example and was confused with that one as Gates dropped out of Harvard not high school. Anyway, all A’s and B’s is good enough for Dad. By the way, Mom and Dad are eagerly awaiting auction night for the Ballard High Beavers, fondly dubbed “Saturday Night Beaver”. Really?
The boys and I made it to the farm again and made a point of going down to Gulf Shores for a few days to see the oil spills and support the economy there. Judging from past years there were half as many tourists. While the water looked pretty clean on the first day, a short walk in the surf left your feet and ankles with an invisible sticky feel. On the second there were work crews out on the beach cleaning up the oil-sand mix with shovels and bags. That morning the boys immediately noticed a scene hearkening back to the Alabama days of my early childhood. A covered wagon full of African-Americans was being pulled on the beach by a tractor driven by a really well fed Caucasian man. It did seem a bit of an odd sight, but I tried to rationalize with them that 1) everyone was being paid – some more than others no doubt - and 2) that there are some jobs that some will not do. A case in point being the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who do the back breaking work to pick fruit in our state that most of us would not or could not do. Thanks to these folk my favorite beach is clean and my fruit is affordable. Speaking of driving, thanks to my Dad the boys have begun to learn the fine art of cow dodging while driving his truck around the pasture. Asking them about the experience, returns teenage boy speak that makes it sound like they have driven for years. Speaking of bragging rights, Mint beat me and Graham two games in a row at putt putt golf and this in the blazing heat at Gulf Shores. That boy has got the trash talk of victory down like none I know. It does not quite work after a symphonic band concert though the same as for baseball. On that note, I have to say that relaying the experience of vacationing with two teenage boys is not really possible in a family letter. There is no distinction between proper dinner table manners and one’s solitary – or what one should keep solitary – thoughts. I will leave this topic with their favorite quip of the year “…that’s what she said” which apparently is appropriate to say after almost anything you can think of, but you’ll have to try it out yourself.
Donna has officially retired as chair of the Shelter board, but will remain on the board to help out the future chair. This means that after eight years someone else will be responsible for planning and executing the board’s annual homeless shelter auction. She will remain though as chair of the Trustees at church to finish repair work she began this year. She also has been busy planning repairs to our home which after fifteen years is in a need of a few face lifts. Trixie kicked this off for us by remodeling the original 1914 front door that had an oval glass pane in it. She had become a bit pathological about greeting the mail man each day to which I remarked to Donna more than few times “...ya know, maybe you should cover that glass with a curtain so she can’t see the him coming up on the porch…” Shortly thereafter, on hearing the mailman come up on the porch but being in the back of the house, she ran to greet him. By the time she went through the glass landing on the porch floor, the mailman – now on the side walk – turned remarking cool as a cucumber, “wow!” and kept on going. She needed a few stitches, but was otherwise fine. She now jumps on the couch and on to the front window pane…hmmm, I'm waiting for the next Trixie prescribed remodel. However, until then the most obvious on the list is the downstairs bathroom that Donna started ripping up back in May of 2009. In June of 2010 I finally demolished the back wall where all the plumbing is and hopefully by Spring of 2011 we will be able to use it again. Oh yeah, Donna - not to be outdone by her eldest at least without a fight - has taken up the drums. In protest to the cost of all these lessons and being results oriented, I am scheduling a family Spring concert at the drum school where we all study (http://www.seattledrumschool.com/). I'll keep you posted .....
By the Monday before Thanksgiving we had enough snow to shut the city down. As usual with some snow here the boys got a couple of extra days off from school. This always leads to sledding down the steep hill in front of our house. On Thanksgiving day there was still enough snow to sled. So up late after a late night of xboxing the boys went out for a few rides before we went to Chandler's for dinner (http://www.schwartzbros.com/chandlers.cfm). Pretty soon I hear Graham come in and go upstairs without a word. "That's odd", I think. So I go up to see why he came in so soon.......it turns out that as Graham headed down the hill on his sled, Mint jumped on top his sled and then on top of Graham riding him - and Graham's sled - to the bottom of the hill. In protest over being ridden so and the subsequent crash, Graham punched Mint in the head, then Mint punched Graham in the head, etc. After a few rounds with no one knocked out or even bloody, they both realized the disadvantages of this type communication - i.e. their heads and fists hurt. So they gave it up for more verbal abuse. Go figure, brotherly love expressed once again. So off we went for our typical all American, happy family Thanksgiving day dinner out.
We once more wish you all Happy Holidays from Seattle: Dave, Donna, Mint, Ham and Trixie. As before we can be found on FaceBook and otherwise reached at david.goodlett@gmail.com, donnamgoodlett@msn.com, minter.goodlett@gmail.com & graham.goodlett@gmail.com and viewed at picasaweb.google.com/david.goodlett/.
