Update

It's been a while since I have written. A lot has happened. Both Amanda and Davis are in college now - Amanda at UVU in Orem, and Davis at BYU-I. Davis has his missionary papers in and is hoping to leave for the mission-field this coming April. Amanda is hoping to graduate from college this summer. She is thinking of going on a mission as well - possibly August. This all begs the question, "Am I old enough to have kids who are college graduates?" Also, "Am I mature enough to have children on missions?" Time will tell.

I was called as branch president in December last year. Scary! There are definitely some challenges in our branch. I hope I can help to make things a little better for people and don't make them any worse. I have two really good counselors and a great branch council - how much damage can I do?

Lynda is teaching at Southport Elementary two days a week - Spanish on Mondays and Music on Wednesdays. She is also our seminary teacher. She really enjoys it, and is making lasting relationships with both students and parents.

Evan is in 5th grade and Daniel is in 2nd grade. They are learning to be friends, complete their homework on time, and contribute in primary. Daniel just had his 8th birthday and was baptized last Sunday. He was well prepared and often comments that he has heard the still, small voice. Evan turns 11 in July, so will become a Boy Scout. Both he and Daniel enjoy Cub Scouts, and are very involved in activities and fund raising.

This is a video I made for and about my son Davis for his Eagle Court of Honor.

See Davis, I do update this blog every once in a while.

I love my kids!

Our beautiful Amanda a few years ago. Isn't she lovely?

I just got off the phone with Amanda. She is doing great! She has learned so much about being an adult this past school year. She returns home to us in Maine the beginning of May - by then she will have just one year of school left. This summer she plans on working days at House of Logan like last year and evenings as a waitress at one of the restaurants down near to pier in Boothbay Harbor. This will giver her enough money to be largely self-sufficient next year so we will have enough money to support she and Davis when he starts school at BYU-I in January. They will both come home in the spring, then he's off on a mission and she'll have her BA and can start saving for a mission herself. If everything works out, she will be able to leave about six months after Davis and they will return home about the same time.

I suppose that this sounds like I've planned it all out for them and that they have not had much of an input. I suppose that's right, but I think they are both thinking about the same thing (correct me if I'm wrong, kids, so I can get it right!). Manda could meet some RM, fall madly in love, and get married in the blink of an eye (Lynda was just over a year older than Amanda is right now when we were married...scary! I'm not old enough to have a married daughter, am I?).

Family Update

I haven't written for a while. Life has been very busy at our house! Lynda is the PTA President - I think I mentioned this earlier - and she just finished hosting Red Ribbon Week at the local elementary school. This is a week devoted to teaching kids that they need to decide not to take drugs, etc. before they are confronted with it. There were activities each day that required her attention, so she spent the entire school day up at school every day of the week. The Saturday after Red Ribbon Week was over she, as Young Womens President in our branch, hosted New Beginnings - also a big deal. More than half of the people who attended New Beginnings this time were not LDS, including both mothers and daughters.

During this same time period, it was a serious period of grant submission. I submitted three grants in nine days - one to the National Institutes of Health, one to National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and one to National Science Foundation - all with very different formats, requirements, and explanatory components. By the time it was over my head was spinning. To top it off, I had a manuscript due for publication right in the middle of this same time period. I met all the deadlines [insert the sound of heavy breathing here and picture my tongue hanging out], and I hope the quality of each is as high as I think they are. On an aside, I was made chairman of the Library Committee at our lab. I have a nice budget for next year to buy periodicals and books. We are shifting to electronic journals, so our small budget will purchase quite a bit. I am pleased. I have also been assigned to the Education Committe which is working to form an official relationship with a local college here in Maine. This will allow me to maintain the Teaching portion of my resume; a very good thing!

Now to catch-up with Davis... He has this new girlfriend (Morgan Howe) that he really likes, but is not LDS. He has been spending a lot of time with her, including time at Youth Conference and parties with other school friends. She also went to New Beginnings with Lynda, so has been sort of indoctrinated, etc. Davis also was just accepted to BYU-Idaho and is very excited to leave home and get on with his life. He just got a letter in the mail today (he hasn't read it yet - I opened it) saying he has been accepted for the Winter/Spring track starting January 2010. This way he can get one semester of college in before he leaves on his mission. This will also allow him an extra four months to earn money before he has to leave for school. I couldn't be more pleased!

Evan and Danny are doing great. We just completed February Break (they have another one in spring, too) on Friday. Sunday evening we had a tremendous snow storm that dropped nearly a foot of the wet, sloppy snow endiginous to Maine. Our power was out when we woke up, and when I ventured out to dig the car out, I found nearly a dozen trees bowed over with masses of wet snow blocking the driveway. School was cancelled and the lab where I work was closed for the day due to the power outage and bad roads. Davis and I had just cut down a half-dozen trees and knocking the snow off of others when the snow plow showed up. We were able to get the van out of the driveway, although hundreds of branches hung down so they hit us half-way up the windshield, so the plow guy could clear everything out of the way. We spent the morning cooking beans on the top of the wood stove and fetching water from the stream so we could flush the toilet. I love Maine! Where else in the US could we have such an experience without leaving civilization? To make a short story long, Evan and Danny enjoyed the extra day of break. They played games by the wood stove with their mother, played with the dog, practiced the piano (Lynda took advantage of the day off too - even Davis practiced!), and generally had a great time. They are now officially ready to go back to school.

By the end of next week we should have a brief period of 40+ degree weather to help melt all our snow. That's the break I'm looking forward to. I'm ready for the green to come back and restore my paradise. We don't have very much longer to wait according to my estimation. The snows melt for good toward the end of March and by May it is shirt-sleave temperature. By the end of June it is full summer until mid-September. Fall lasts until nearly the end of November, then winter again. Four distinct seasons, and each beautiful in its own right. I hope we can stay here for a very long time.

Me and the boys at Pemaquid Point - the lighthouse on the back of the Maine quarter.

New grant proposal: My views on evolution

I recently submitted a new grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how to detect genetic phenomena associated with drug resistance, virulence, and epidemics. Back in 2003 I developed a software package in my laboratory called TreeSAAP (Selection on Amino Acid Properties using phylogenetic trees). Of course it involved nearly a dozen people, but the software was based on a mathematical model I created while a PhD student, used to detect the subtle influences of environmental influences on genes that encode proteins. This past summer I discovered how to apply the model to even more subtle influences, down to the level of a single nucleotide mutation. This may hold a great deal of potential for studying infectious diseases in humans. The proposal I wrote seeks to expand my preliminary research to comprehensively test the model to establish how accurate it is, not only compared to other competing models (actually it blows them out of the water), but how well it actually picks up known viral adaptations and filters out random noise.

I am writing another grant to the National Science Foundation (NSF) that's due a week from Tuesday that will seek to apply a similar approach to the study of population genetics. My hope is to reduce the evolutionary process down to mutational phenomena such that we can tell when organisms may be adapting to a change in the environment. My thesis is that biological organisms are much more adaptable than we give them credit for. This challenges the paradigm that man is causing a mass extinction because if most species are maliable with respect to the environment, then the only ones going extinct are those that are not, reducing the idea of extinction to natures way of making sure the overall gene pool is strong for all of life - just another law of nature. Just like the story of the Garden of Eden - death comes into the world so that life can exist and become more godlike. Evolution, therefore, is merely God's way of filling the earth with the best possible things and eliminating those things that don't fulfill the measure of their creation, much like the process He uses to populate the Celestial Kingdom.

Just thought you would like to know where I stand...

Obama Inauguration From Students' Perspective

The following was printed in the Boothbay Register, our local newspaper, last Thursday:

At Boothbay Region High School, participating students - seniors Morgan Mitchell, Davis McClellan, Josh Tirado and junior Wyatt Colby, Jr. shared insightful commentary and opinions.

A mock-election was held at the high school and Obama reigned victorious there as well.

Mitchell said, "We are in such a dark time right now that any progress will be phenomenal. I think he is coming in at the right time to really make a change.

"President Obama is eloquent, but he also has the smarts, the logic, and the organizational skills to make it work."

"Obama represents change, but it is going to take all of us as a country to bring the change to us," Tirado. "Everyone is going to have to cooperate with the changes that are going to take place.

"And there are probably going to be a lot of them in these first four years that are going to require a lot of sacrifice from the US in order to bring this country back and repay the debt we owe."

Colby noted that when former President Bush began his eight years, then outgoing President Bill Clinton had left the Capital with a surplus - none of the debt that he had inherited remained.

"I think it's good for us to [develop] a new perspective - not that I necessarily agree with any of his policies - but we need change to evolve," said McClellan. "My dad is an evolutionary biologist, [so] I tend to think a lot in those terms.

"Without mutation, without change in the genes of species there is no way to adapt to our [dynamic] environment. The same is true in government; if we don't have the constant struggle between the left and the right, we won't change."

McClellan was enthusiastic about the President's cabinet choices, citing his selection of scientists as scientific advisors in particular. "He is surrounding himself with experience."

"His web site has a blog where you can sign up for email updates on the Obama administration's progress - it keeps us in touch and involved.

"He is taking the technology we all use to inform and talk to each other and is utilizing it to create a line of communication - he is not sticking to the old ways. I think that is amazing. I am not the biggest Obama supporter in the world, but what he has done, for me, is to give me the faith and the hope that what he does he will do well and the United States will come out on top," McClellan said.

"What he is doing is actually changing the world. Racism isn't gone, but our kids and their kids will grow up knowing that there was a problem between blacks and whites in the past, but they will never know the struggle that our grandparents, parents and we have seen in our time," said McClellan.

"Now people of all races can wake up and say, someday I could be the President of the United States."

"When I think of that inauguration, I think of all those people and how he delivered his speech. I see it as the launching pad of a great moment," said Mitchell.

Tirado likened Obama, the president, to past presidents remembered as having effected change - Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

"They weren't just presidents, but presidents really for the people that represented hope and new development, and were people that we trusted."

"Obama feels like an everyday person like us," said Tirado.

"He has good plans for the economy," said Colby. "He is the man with the plan and I think he will do a good job."

"I feel so lucky to be alive right now," said Mitchell. "To be in a time when I am mature enough and engaged enough to follow Obama's journey and political path and to participate in it. I think it is so amazing that there is this whole new spirit of engagement, not just in our country, but the world."

Mitchell describes our new president as "a man of integrity and class who is articulate, but is also so appealing, so cool. I just want to meet him.

"People are starting to feel hopeful, be excited; regardless of how you might feel about him, we've come a long way."

The Love of My Life: Lovely Lynda!

This cutie-pie is my eternal companion, Lynda. I have often said that she is the most intelligent and talented person I have known (then Lynda always says, And beautiful and skinny!). Lynda had had a very full life by the time I met her. She grew up on a potato farm in eastern Idaho. When she was in high school, her father was called as a mission president to serve in Cali, Colombia. The whole family, two parents and five of the kids (Lynda was the oldest of them), picked up and moved to South America.

Lynda finished high school early (in Colombia) and enrolled at BYU a semester early. She was called on a mission at the age of 18 to serve in her father's mission, so off she went, back to South America for a year and a half.

When I met Lynda, I had been home from my mission in Washington, DC for about two months, and she hadn't been home much longer. We were both Resident Assistants in the Helaman Halls dormitories at BYU and had a great deal of contact. We became racquetball buddies, playing several hours each day - she would beat me soundly nearly every game back then.

One memorable time with Lynda near the beginning of our relationship came when I went to Idaho Falls with her for the first time to meet her parents. Lynda had just come off of an engagement that ended negatively, so I think she thought that her parents would not approve of a new boyfriend so quickly - as a result, she neglected to tell them I was coming. When we arrived at her home on East River Road I walked with her to the front door. Her mother met us there and proceeded to thank me for giving Lynda a ride home and nearly shut the door in my face. Needless to say, I was quite confused at these mixed signals. It was then that I learned that it was the man's responsibility to figure out what the woman was thinking. Despite this rocky start, the visit went as well as can be expected and we left to return to Utah with the idea that Lynda and I were officially an item firmly planted in their minds.

Lynda and I at Helaman Halls dormitories at Brigham Young University

We have gone through good times and bad, fat and lean. Over the years we have learned to rely more and more on each other. And, yes, I do believe that I have learned to read her mind every once in a while. She has followed me all over the world and has been a really good sport, participating in my grand adventure.

Lynda harvesting rice near our township, Umegaoka, Kanagawa Prefecture

Today we both have gained a few pounds, me more than she, and gray hairs are found in plenty (again me more than she). Our love grows stronger and stronger. No one ever mistakes me for her son anymore, and she struggles at times to retained her beautiful singing voice. Her diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis make things interesting at times (like this morning), but she remains active; probably more active than when I met her. She is still the most intelligent and talented person I have ever met, and I love her more than life itself. I thank my Heavenly Father every day that he allowed me to find her and make her my bride.