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.
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!
