The bubble’s back. I suspected as much a few months ago, the day Knownow got funded and I found myself eating Beluga caviar and drinking champagne on Paul Allen’s yacht. I just came off a classic interview with a Canadian software millionaire, about his latest venture.

“We have a waiting list of people who want to work for us, for free,” he said, “just to prove themselves. We’ve spent the last eighteen months cherry-picking the best ideas in the Western world… grid, autonomic computing, utility computing…”

No scientific enlightment or liberation of women for this visionary futurist, nuh-uh. My job, an unending font of comedy gold.

Ellen’s new baby is here, Sadie, a little sister for Madison. Yep. Mad and Sad. She says if she has another girl she’ll call her Gladys.

I parked for two hours at a thirty-minute meter, and didn’t get a ticket. Fear my fu!

The deal is that J takes charge of the progeny on Saturday mornings so that I can spend forty minutes trying to sit to Laz’s big, athletic trot, then Claire and I get out of the house on Sunday afternoons so that J can descend into hacker trance.

My riding lesson was fantastic, by which I mean that I couldn’t even get him to strike off on the right canter lead, but I kept trying. This is new and cool. Pre-Claire I used to get infinitely frustrated with myself over things like this, and give up out of sheer pique. I felt that familiar anger welling up as I failed over and over again, but then a brand new super-ego voice kicked in and said:

“Don’t worry, you’ll get it, or not; just keep trying.”

So I hung on and kept my hands down and my seatbones square and my lower leg as glued to his side as possible, and asked and asked and asked for the transition, and didn’t get it. And behold, David was extremely pleased with me, because it turns out he’s not just teaching me how to strike off on the right canter lead. It was very Zen, and reminded me of labour. Mama-fu, or as Beckett put it: I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

But I digress. To keep up my part of the bargain I did the rounds of the East Bay (it’s pig Latin for beast). Swept the infant to Emeryville Ikea, your designated Sunday-afternoon breeder-homemaker Mecca, where I found the pure wool blankets my heart had yearned for lo these many weeks, in indigo and cream, as well as some wood photo frames and a five-pound bag of Swedish meatballs. To the Oakland hills to play with Fizzgig the Pomeranian and Ignatz the iguana, as well as their human slaves Morrisa and nj. To Elmwood for delicious turkey soup with the Jaffe-Tsangs, then back over the bridge to bake the meatballs and tell J all about our day.

J needs to hack, it’s a physical thing. He gets sort of distant and abstracted when he has spent too long away from code, as though voices are calling him to the Other Place. This was his first chance for a week or so to get very deeply into bug-squishing, and it did wonders, the way a walk in a sunshiney garden will do for a normal person. He was all pink-cheeked and cherubic when we got home. Weird, but so sweet.

When she sleeps her hair goes all skew-whiff so that she looks like a tiny Bill Murray.

J: You’re implying that Claire is a cannibal.

R: ?

J: Tractor trailer, old Macdonald, she has eaten all of these except the horse.

R: Ah.

Pause.

R: I prefer the term ‘flesh enthusiast’.

R: This sweater has a hole in it too! Why do all your sweaters have holes in them?

J: The good ones get worn a lot, and they get holes.

Pause.

R: Salome has persuaded Jack to use moisturizer.

J: I see.

R: Would you use moisturizer?

J: Where? Under the beard?

R: You’ll never be Cary Grant, will you?

J: No.

R: Which is okay, because he’s dead.

J (deadpan): Cary Grant died wishing he was me.

Claire made it across the room on Monday, and since then has been pushing herself a little further every day. Her dedication is a wonder to behold. She staggers a ways, looks up to make sure we are watching, grins all over her face and claps her little fat starfish hands together. Ham.

Robert and Gayu gave her a tractor-trailer for Christmas, with Old Macdonald the farmer and a horse and pig and cow and sheep and chicken. As Jeremy points out, she’s eaten all of these now, except the horse. I have to stop myself naming the horse Boxer and the pig Snowball.

It’s a fabulous toy, but the most surprising thing is that she plays with it the way Jeremy would, not the way I would. I used to line my toy animals up in order of height; later, they’d form parliaments and stage debates. Her chief interest in the animals is flinging them aside, or in more benevolent moods, handing them up to me. The tractor, on the other hand, is a source of continual delight. She loves its heft and growl, and keeps inspecting it to find out what makes it go.

The other news, such as it is, is 987 Alabama’s advanced state of decrepitude. We woke this morning to a cheery cascade of water down the window behind my iMac. My business-sized envelopes and old Linux laptop were already soaked. After several increasingly clipped and precise phone calls, the building manager deigned to send his amiable handypersons around. They looked at the damage, said “Oh yeah, the whole frame is rotted through, see,” and then they just sealed it along the bottom.

We’ll see how well that works out.