I think I might put a Stanley Hammer in Charlie Ravioli. He’ll be married to Lily, and their son’s name will be Maxwell Silver.

I think there will also be an exotic dancer called Tacoma Narrows.

“You’re not bad with money. No. No. I mean honestly, I think you’re the only person I know around here who isn’t living paycheck to paycheck. And you’re buying cars and paying for her freakin’ education and living in the highest cost-of-living… Yeah, but you do what you want, right? … I mean, Katy, she made like eighty thousand a year, and every month she’s like Oh, my credit card, and everyone says, Where does the money go? and she says It just goes away, I don’t know. So we sat down and made a budget. She buys a lot of clothes, she takes a lot of trips, Portland, Mexico, Europe. It all adds up. And she’s a high maintenance girl, she gets her hair done, nails done. And then she has to make payments on her car because she wants a nicer, newer car. Cleaning lady, dry cleaning – she gets tons of things dry cleaned. And I’m like, I don’t do half those things. And then she starts to realize…

“I mean, I totally was living above my means, my credit card, but then it all evened out because this settlement I got, the disability, it paid off the whole amount.”

We put all the Ikea furniture together using a cheap pair of pliers to bang in the nails. I’d try to do this, then hit my thumb and whine, so Jeremy ended up having to do most of it. That’s why, after my doctor’s appointment today, I stopped by Soko Hardware in Japantown and bought their very finest hammer: the Stanley AntiVibe One-Piece Forged Steel Curved Claw Nail Hammer. As Faith the Evil Slayer once said, It’s a thing of beauty, chief.

The elderly Japanese lady who helped me with my purchase asked when I’m due, and when I said two weeks, she narrowed her eyes and said:

“She’s moved down already though, yes?”

…which, seeing as the doctor had just told me so, impressed me greatly. In accordance with proverb, they Know Things, these Old Wives.

Back to the hammer. I tied it with a cheery bow. Jeremy’s decided to keep the bow until it gets annoying, which will probably be the first time he tries to bang a thing.

Yay for Ikea, anyway. After six months spent trailing the other pregnant and freshly infanted couples around the Emeryville store, we finally have our custom array of ingenious Swedish storage solutions installed. There are now designated places for ten years’ worth of photographs, five years’ worth of New Scientist, Jeremy’s techno-trousers, my endlessly accumulating books, all Claire’s worldly goods. There’s a shelf to hang our stainless steel cookware from and an ickle dishwasher that is the joy of my heart. The apartment is tidy and highly functional. It feels… shipshape.

Gotta hand it to Bush, the man is full of surprises. What the independent commission on 9/11 needed at its head was a statesman, an honest man with a reputation for decency and compassion. Someone whose probity would be unquestioned by all parties. Someone like… Kissinger.

“I can’t remember — when Kissinger signs a U.S. Government paycheck, does he use a ballpoint pen, or the bloody, severed limb of an East Timorese child?”

Meanwhile the Australian prime minister John Coward is floating the idea of a change to the UN Charter to permit pre-emptive strikes against terrorist targets, for conspicuously undefined definitions of the word “terrorist”. 40 million people around the world are infected with HIV and infection rates are accelerating. Vast dust clouds swallow up rural Australian towns. War, famine, pestilence: what sort of sick individual would bring a child into a world like this?

In other news, the cat is scaling hitherto undreamt-of heights of cuteness, sitting in the crook of my arm and nuzzling my cheek, her whiskers tickling me as she purrs. Somehow she senses that the days of child-substitute-as-cushy-sinecure are numbered.