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
