Fresh Crimson Club! Highlight of the night was Keely, Brian and Spencer reading actual excerpts from their journals at the time they met.

Keely: I have made a commitment to the Lord to keep myself pure until marriage. Oh, and Brian has fallen in love with Spencer.

Brian: How is it that I live in the gay capital of the world and can’t find anyone, then I come to a cowtown in Northern Arizona and meet the perfect man?

Spencer: Now that he’s gone, I have three words to say. Fuck. Brian. Knecht. That asshole.

Keely: I did coke for the first time! How ironic that I am recording my drug exploits in what used to be my prayer journal.

My brother pointed out that my husband is still the number one Google hit for the search string “endearing personal touches”.

Pleased at his continuing ascendancy, Jeremy danced around the bathroom this morning, wearing a towel and singing: “Endearing personal touches! Endearing personal touches!”

Other things that make me happy –

Sunday was a good day. Woke up early, dragged my best boy out of bed, drove Hedwig the wonder car to the bakery behind Liberty Cafe on Cortland, breakfasted on coffee and brioche. Drove to Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park, wandered homesickly through the Eastern Australian garden, settled beside a duck pond and read. Jeremy had Dan Savage’s The Kid, I was reading Janet Browne’s biography of Darwin. Same thing really. Several squirrels came down to drink at the pond. The ducks socialized and grazed. Just before we left, a red-tailed hawk darted through the clearing, no more than ten feet away from us.

I was leaning against a tree that turned out to be exuding sap. It glued me to its bark for a while. Jeremy helped pick the globs of sticky amber off the back of my shirt. For the rest of the day, we both smelt deliciously like tea-tree oil.

I said to Jeremy: “Don’t you feel these are the last days? The calm before the storm?” “Of course,” he said. But the gardens were full of breeders, human and otherwise, and it’s not impossible that we looked longingly at other peoples’ chimpanzee cubs. “It’ll be a nice place to bring the sprog,” he said eventually. “My parents used to bring us places like this all the time.”

Lego makes me happy. (Link via the null device.)

It’s hot, I’m heavy and so I slept more or less all weekend. On Saturday afternoon I had a weird, gross dream. They’d changed the zoning laws for Bluegum Crescent, where I grew up, so that there was a newsagent selling sweets – lollies – candies – on the corner. I tried to buy milk bottles and kool mints, but the owner said they’d rotted, and sent me away with this nasty little strawberry cake.

I stuffed it in my mouth but it was disgusting, and I had to spit it out. When I woke up I was still spitting. There was saliva running down my chin and a puddle of drool on the pillow.

What? I told you it was gross.

Lawrence of Arabia, 2002. Five hours on the iron maidens the Castro is pleased to call seats.

Peter the rocket scientist: It’s just the most wonderful film in terms of cinematography and scale.

R: It’s riddled with historical inaccuracies. (Stamps foot petulantly. Then, relenting) But the horses were pretty.

Signed up for Nanowrimo. Working title: Charlie Ravioli. Now I’m thinking of buying ViaVoice for Mac OS X.

It’s useful to be reminded every now and then that I am a stranger in a strange land, whose people and customs are alien to me.

I was joking around with a couple of cool work contacts on the phone. They both have kids, and they were trying to describe the shambles my life is about to become.

Guy 1: You’ll be thrilled when they get up and make their own breakfast.

R: I’ll be more thrilled when they get up and make my breakfast.

Guy 2: Kids don’t cook so well.

R: The plan is to live near a French bakery, so they can bring me perfect pain au chocolat. And they will learn to make good coffee, oh yes. Y’see, I don’t think of them as kids, so much as tiny slaves.

DEAD silence. Then eventually…

Guy 1: We’ll see how that works out for you.

Bryan’s friend Jsam, also Australian, has a business card that reads: “In my country, my behaviour is considered normal.”

Claire’s growing her brain, and also packing on many layers of fat. For brain growth, she needs to generate a lot of myelin, which is the fatty tissue that covers your axons. Myelin loss is a feature of some particularly nasty genetic and acquired diseases like leukodystrophy and MS. The rest of the fat is just so she doesn’t look too much like a spider monkey when she’s born.

The upshot is that right now I am craving fat. What I particularly need to eat are omega-3 fatty acids (found in green leafy vegetables and cold-water, high-fat fish like salmon) and omega-6 fatty acids (plentiful in meat and dairy).

This is not at all bad news, and has renewed my obsession with my favourite fat source in all the world: French cooking. We’ve been dropping by Absinthe for lunch on the way back from regular prenatal visits. On Monday night, to my joy, we discovered Le Zinc, a perfect little Parisian cafe just around the corner from our birth prep class.

And last night we made our first, absolutely splendid tarte tatin. Except to stock up on apples, flour, butter and cream, I need never leave the house again.