The girls have been waking in the night for some reason. I’ve been lucky to sleep uninterrupted from one till five, the last couple of nights. It’s astounding how hard sleep deprivation can slam you when you’ve fallen out of the habit. I’m practically walking into walls. The kids are tired too; Jules head-butted me by mistake and gave herself a voluminous nosebleed.

I made kale salad with olives and hard boiled eggs, cream of cauliflower soup, a summer fruit salad and banana smoothies. Running is a bit like pregnancy, in that I find myself desperately wanting to eat things like kale and eggplants.

If anyone sees my higher brain function could they ask it to call me please?

“We’re suing Uri Gellar and defending Michelle Malkin.”

“What? WHY?”

“I’m not sure. I was still too feverish to follow the trains of thought.”

“Are you sure the whole thing’s not just a fever dream?”

“Yeah! Uri Gellar, Michelle Malkin and I were in the bath…”

Claire and Ada are playing with the horses.

A: The horsie died.

C: “Mama mama, I don’t want to die!” “Sweetheart, you won’t die.” “Yes I will! I’ll get old and sick and then I’ll die!” “You’re sick? Oh! No!”

A: Then the mama horsie died!

C: “Daddy, daddy! Mama died!” “It’s okay darling, we’ll get another mama.”

I guess technically they were facing my mortality.

Ran my hundredth kilometre. Saw owl.

Grabbed family and drove out to Ocean Beach to see the freshly exposed wreck of the medium clipper King Philip, which foundered there in 1878 with a cargo of guano and the loss of no hands. There’s not much to see, just the weathered planks rooted in the sand and the grey Pacific raking them with its cold. But still, we had to see it, this time traveller, rare visitor from the past, the mahogany ship given form. Then the fog came in like a wet blanket and we scampered away to dinner at Tower Burger.

R: Charles Kingsley is awesome.

Coworkers stare at me blankly.

R: Asked how he could reconcile evolution with Christianity, he said “My friend, God’s orthodoxy is truth. If Darwin speaks truth, he is orthodox.”

This is from A. N. Wilson, who I was interviewing for the position of dotty Brit imaginary boyfriend. Rather impressively, seeings as I’m only halfway through The Victorians, he’s already disqualified himself twice: first for quoting Michael Behe without noting that Michael Behe works on pretend-science at the Discovery Institute; second and far more distressingly, for using the word “abo” to describe a couple of indigenous Australian children, as if that word had no negative connotations when used by a white person. Even Wikipedia knows better. I wrote a ferocious letter to the publisher.

Took a frickin wrong turn in the Walt Stack 5k and came through the finish line backwards! I BE DORK. Nevertheless ran in 33:44, two minutes up on last time for a personal record pace of (6.44 minutes per kilometre | 10.51 minutes per mile).

Jack: Running is the most boring thing in the universe.

Jeremy (morosely): No. The most boring thing in the universe is other peoples’ running stats.

Saw a sealion frolicking in the bay, and two great blue herons in a mating dance. Maybe I’ll run even better next time if I stop looking at all the damn wildlife.

Delicious dim sum lunch and then long lazy afternoon in Precita Park with Danny and Rose, where we collectively came up with this, for which I nevertheless intend to claim all credit.

There’s a whole city beyond the city I know, that I’m only just beginning to explore. This morning I took Jeremy and Claire to the new Flora Grubb for addictive coffee. Jeremy said what I had been thinking:

“It has a very …Burning Man feel.”

Sure, if you can imagine a lush Burning Man with delicious smells, an excellent selection of Japanese maples and no airborne grit. Once we were coffee’d up we headed to the gorgeous, gorgeous India Basin Shoreline Park, in the shadow of the old power station. It’s the parenthesis to Union Point Park in Oakland; Oakland has a sailboat playground, and India Basin has a steamship. With the post-industrial landscape and art studios and recovering shoreline, it felt like Blackwattle Bay and made me and Jeremy a bit homesick. Unaffected by our nostalgia, the girl went cheerfully nuts.

We jazzed up a very routine visit to the Target in Daly City by going in on Third and Geneva, past the MLK Pool and the new T streetcar line and Cow Palace, and coming back over Guadalupe Boulevard, which carves through San Bruno Mountain. Fierce. I wanted to hike, see the butterflies, meet Joan the Morgan Lady and go for a gallop up there. Nine years I’ve been in San Francisco and it feels like I’ve hardly scratched the surface.

Things I’m feeling curmudgeonly about:

1. the stupid, ugly condo development at One Rincon blotting out my beloved views of the Bay Bridge from Coleridge Street and Dolores Park.

2. Homestyle Midwifery having to leave St Luke’s, meaning there will be no more amazing births like Julia’s covered by insurance.

On the bright side, there’s a collective forming to support the Homestyle midwives going into private practice, and I saw the surviving owl this morning. Still, though. Hmmph.

R: What do you want to wear to school today?

C: Umm… blue… and grey.

Later:

J: I asked Claire what she wants to wear to school today, and she said, “You know, blue and grey.”

R (to Claire): You told me, so you thought Daddy knew as well?

C: Yes.

R: You do know we’re different people, right?

C: Well… you’re the same size.

Julia is an early riser. At dawn she is up with the cheerfulness and the cooing and the games. How could this have happened? Please send help.

Man, that was a long and tiring weekend. On Saturday we checked out the pirate ship playground then had delicious lamb and pavlova on the patio at The New Zealander. On the way back we swung by the old naval base – Jeremy wanted to make a pilgrimage to the site of so many Mythbusters explosions – and ended up driving through miles and miles of boarded-up base housing that reminded me of Telstar Logistics, and rightly so. Sunday saw me and Julia at another San Francisco military ruin, the Hunters Point Shipyard, for the Spring Open Studios, followed by a restorative Ritual coffee at the fantastic new Flora Grubb. By Sunday night I was wrecked. Jeremy made another lasagne. There has never been a husband so splendid.