We’re at birth prep class, holding ice to practice our pain management techniques (ow. Ow. OW!) and Summer the teacher asks us what visualization we used.

R: I was going to use generic ocean imagery, but I ended up using McWay Falls, where there’s this waterfall onto the beach at Big Sur.

J (grinning): Get out of my *head*.

He’d used the exact same image. It’s like the time at Red, White & Blue Beach in Santa Cruz, where I picked up an interestingly shaped stone, and we walked on another 25 yards or so, and he picked up another stone and said “Is this the other half?” and it was.

A perfect Sunday. Waking up at Kat and Ian’s country estate. Sitting in the sunshine, drinking coffee, reading the New York Times and petting Bunny the cat. Brunch in Burlingame with Bryan, Shannon and Cian the Giant Baby. After brunch, Bryan’s friend Nat regaled us with poo stories.

“My son William comes bouncing out of the toilet saying ‘Daddy, Daddy, come and see what I made!’ And I thought, ‘This’ll be good.’ So we go in and he says, ‘Look, I made a bridge poo!’ Sure enough, there’s a turd that starts on one side of the bowl, arches over the water and lands on the other side.

“So I’m thinking, Share the joy, and I say to William, ‘Let’s call Granddad at work!’ It’s 9:30am and my father gets called out of a meeting to talk to his grandson, who still has a sound grasp of New Zealand slang. And William says ‘Granddad, I made a bridge grogan!'”

I asked Nat if I could have Bridge Grogan as a character name for my Nanowrimo novel, and he kindly agreed.

Today’s precious marketroid kept interrupting her CTO, who was also on the call, so that she could paraphrase the answer he’d already given.

R: God, I hate these people.

Jim: It’s the hormones.

R: So how long do I get to be this rampaging bitch? (pause) Oh yeah, all my life.

Jim: But for the next three months, you have an excuse.

I dreamed that Goldman Sachs defaulted on some loans and went under, rather like Argentina. What made this especially tragic was that Colin had finally made some money off his Sun stock, only to invest it in Goldman. Someone mentioned that Morgan Stanley had already failed, so I guess Matt was feeling Colin’s pain.

As these events unfolded, a group of us, including Colin, my father and Emer the donkey rescuer, watched CNN on a huge screen on the roof of an apartment in Soma. We drank Corona. The sun set behind us, and the Bay Bridge was cast into twilight.

Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white
Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose
Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night,
A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose.

The legions of cruel inquisitive They
Were so many and big like dogs: he was upset
By Germans and boats; affection was miles away:
But guided by tears he successfully reached his Regret.

How prodigious the welcome was. Flowers took his hat
And bore him off to introduce him to the tongs;
The demon’s false nose made the table laugh; a cat
Soon had him waltzing madly, let him squeeze her hand;
Words pushed him to the piano to sing comic songs;

And children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.

Me (scolding, to belly): Stop kicking me in the bladder! You’ll never get to Stanford at this rate.

Jeremy: That’s her football scholarship, right there.

Kat’s making me pavlova. She is my new favorite person in the whole entire world.

You’ve got to love marketing folk, they’re so damn smart. Like when I tell them, “I’ve read the documents you sent me, let’s talk about something else,” and they figure out that what I really want is to have those exact same documents read aloud to me. Preferably three times! Why not? What else would I be doing?

“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.

“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”

Oh, I forgot. Mark was washing his RV outside the Moonbase when a woman stopped and asked for directions.

M: I’m not from around here.

Biella: Oh! You’re Australian? You must know Rachel then.

I get out of my chair and do a little dance. My colleagues look at me quizzically.

R: I just finished the XML databases report and sent it to Nick. So I had to do a little dance.

Greg: I can respect that.

R: Don’t ask me anything about XML databases, ever. They’re tedious beyond the dreams of tedium.

Jim: Scary thing is, you know how you listen to classical music to stimulate the baby’s brain? Well –

R: No! No! No! Let’s not go there. You’re a very bad man.

When I got to work this morning, a small, incredibly glossy bronze starling with ink-black spots was pecking delightedly at a red grape the size of his head.

Later I was jaywalking to the BART station, when:

Me: Hey. HEY! Hello? Idiot!

Guy in the SUV speeding past me: Crosswalk! CROSSWALK!

Feisty passer-by to SUV driver, now stopped at light: It’s California! She can cross wherever she likes!

Me: Thank you.

Jeremy is washing up.

R: You have a nice butt.

J: It’s my wallet.

Jonathan: Tell Rachel your dream about Mark Bennett.

Recheng: No, I can’t!

Jonathan: All right then, I will. Mark was having sex with bananas.

Me: Bananas?

Recheng: He was a stripper, and he stripped right down to his electric yellow underpants.

Me: Yellow?

J: Did I mention that the sheep were unnaturally smooth?

J: Why do you have your screen at work high-res?

R: Fits more words on that way.

J: Why don’t you just make the text smaller?

Pause.

R (flailing helplessly): Jedi mind tricks!

J: So what you’re saying is, it goes to eleven.

We never used to say that Vordo could spin with one arm tied behind his back, but if we had, we’d be looking pretty smart right about now. Still in a sling after an unfortunate kite-flying incident at BM, Vordo opened 111 Minna for the inauagural North American Sofa Sessions last night.

There followed the delicious Mister Christopher Fraser, whose set reminded me that dance music does not bore me in the least when it incorporates melody and soaring vocals. It was *beautiful*, and so reminiscent of Melbourne DJ Kate Monroe circa 1996 that I went back in time and found myself falling madly in love with Jeremy. That’s always nice.

Chris, the last of our house guests, is off home to England today, and Burning Man is well and truly over for another year.

J (kiss): I am not uxorious. (kiss) It’s not excessive.

I love the word “uxorious”, which means “excessively fond of one’s wife”. If there were equivalent terms for “husband” and “cat”, I’d be both.

Why yes I am feeling chatty today, as a matter of fact.

Hot damn, I’m having my own little Bastille Day here. Pain au chocolat for breakfast, Luna Park steak frites for lunch with a stop at Tartine afterwards for a blackberry tart and coffee.

Sadly, though, it was a farewell. Regret to inform that Mister Bennett is no longer in the house.

Did I mention I love food? Transcripts of interviews with David Karp, fruit detective. I must have a Halawy date.

Spencer Day as Enrique Iglesias, Trixie Carr as Pink (“Don’t let me get me”) and Brandon Burell as Beyonce Knowles (“Bootylicious”, in falsetto).

I laughed so hard I thought I’d fall off my stool.

Crimson Club, The Stud, 9th and Harrison, second Wednesday of every month. I shouldn’t even be telling you, I barely managed to get a stool as it was.