Events have conspired to endow hyper-topicality upon Light Industrial, my scandalous kiss-and-tell expose of the two weeks I spent working in Australian television in 1993.
This is nice and all, but on the whole I would prefer for Australian television to stop being so hideously embarrassing…
Jeremy came home to find these instructions.
“Clue Book.
“1. You will find us.
“We will help find thus.
“2. Second you look in front of TV.
“You will find clue. Maybe.
“3. Look under the sofa, on the very right.
“It is long, you will find it’s light.
“Claire’s Clue Co. You clue us here!”
The hoard was a snuggle of plush toys in a child-illuminated scroll.
After the recital Jeremy and Claire finished their centipede robot – pics to come – and today I got Light Industrial published. What a talented family! Nerds.
I’ve been shopping at the Webb Ranch farmer’s market, around the corner from the barn. The blue lake beans are just quietly great; crunchy and juicy and sweet.
Jeremy stir-fries them with chicken breast strips, cherry tomatoes from the garden, garlic cloves, peanut oil and soy sauce. Nom.
I steam them with broccoli, zucchini, peas and corn, and then drown everything in too much butter. I call it a butterbath. Nom.
Mission Mission and Burrito Justice are competing to be the best blog on earth.
“Sutro is endlessly scanning for threats on the horizon to our fair city.”
“A gang of Mission hoodlums made a raid last Saturday night upon Hermann’s saloon, on the Mission road, carrying away three barrels of beer, which they secreted in a barn belonging to a man named Bell, on the very summit of Bernal Heights.”
R: “Who’s the nicest person you’ve ever been married to?”
J: “Hmm. The Rach. Who’s the nicest person you’ve ever been married to?”
R: “In the real world, or in Rach world?”
J: “Sigh.”
R: “Johnny Depp would never sigh at me like that. Neither would Simon Schama.”
J: “That’s because they are not real.”
R: “Rory Stewart would never tell me my imaginary boyfriends aren’t real!”
R: “Didn’t sleep very well.”
J: “Why not?”
R: “Well the president came by.”
J: “Oh?”
R: “Yeah and he was all handsome with his sticky-outy ears, and he smelled good. So I was all girlcrushy and starstruck.”
J: “Ah.”
R: “We discussed health insurance reform. I did remember to declare my support for a strong public option; I’m proud of that.”
Reminds me of the time I was pregnant with Julia, and the entire Supreme Court dropped in.
Kind of broke myself hauling water to the new trees at Monroe. It’s too much work for one person, even one ably assisted by Miss Claire. Got home and Jeremy had emptied his office out and there was a ziggurat of recycling at the top of the stairs, so I just sort of burst into tears half way up. “You know we have guests coming in twenty minutes?”
To be fair, it wasn’t random guests, it was Bryan and the boys who are as low maintenance as can be, and Jeremy had already put the chicken on to roast. I made a spinach salad and cut up nectarines and pluots and grapes for dessert. They liked everything and demanded third helpings and played adorably with the girls.
Ruairi: “I love you Daddy.”
Bryan: “I love you, too. You’re awfully cute.”
Ruairi: “You’re awfully cute too.”
Me: “It’s not shocking that the nuns are doing heroin. What’s shocking is that they are proposing to share needles.”
Jeremy: “It was a simpler time.”
A lovely warm lazy quiet summer evening. I want Christmas cake, and the sound of cicadas.
Check out my writeup of last night’s PTA meeting :)
R: “I find myself unexpectedly very sad about Ted Kennedy.”
J: “Yeah, me too.”
*
Claire clocked heads with a kindergartener today and came away with a black eye and some shallow cuts. She spent the afternoon at my office and we wandered over to AG Ferrari for lunch.
R: “That’s the earthquake memorial.”
C, remembering earlier conversations: “Your grandmother was born three days after the Great Earthquake! I bet her mother was glad she wasn’t in San Francisco. Your grandmother’s mother is my great, great… wait, let me gather my greats.”
*
R (as I finish recounting this to Jeremy): “And then I exploded. All over Third Street. A fine red mist.”
(A clarification: I exploded with pride in my daughter, who gathers her greats; and not, as my father assumed, in a temper tantrum.)
She knows wushu. Her bit starts at 2:27. (You can glimpse me at 0:20, dying of pride.)
Brunch at my lovely Mission Beach Cafe with Peter the Rocket Scientist, discussing Lee Smolin’s book The Trouble With Physics. Off to Dolores Park to see an all-women, feminist production of The Taming of the Shrew. I love San Francisco. Home, where Salome and Milo and later Kathy and Martha dropped by. Children playing sweetly. Roast chicken with caramelized carrots and ultralocavore salad – lettuce from the Prospect Street garden. Nerdcore dinner party with three of my favourite nerdcore guests, Danny and Liz and Ada.
Me: “Of course I went to Trinity, which is older than some Oxford colleges.”
Danny: “It’s not as old as mine.”
Me: “I can’t win here, can I?”
Danny: “It’s like some dark side of me takes over.”
Later:
Julia, from the bathroom: “Fire! Fire!”
Me, skeptically: “The bath is on fire?”
Danny: “Fire in the hold!”
Me: “Fire in the hold? Fire in the hole?”
Liz: “Yeah, fire in the hole.”
Me: “What did they teach you at Oxford?”
Danny, loftily: “Nothing practical.”
When Ada and Claire got out of the bath, Ada had anointed Claire queen, and kept accidently-on-purpose pretend-peeing on her and saying “Oops! Sorry, your majesty!”
“Well,” I said, “trouble is her middle name. What did you expect?”
“Trouble,” said Danny darkly: “not treason.”
Jeremy: “So Jimmy Neutron’s parents are going to Burning Duck.”
Rachel: “Our generation? SO OVER.”
J: “Cat? Why are you snappy?”
R: “She needs to go to Burning Cat. And take catnip.”
J: “And there would be laser pointer art. Hey I could do that… Maker project… and choreograph the cats…”
R: “Bebe might have epiphanies on the catnip. She might come to realize there are better ways to express her anger than biting.”
J: “She might start insisting that the catnip comes from outer space.”
R: “I? Am going to kick your ass. Albeit v e r y s l o w l y.”
J (fleeing in slow motion): “It’s okay. Bebe doesn’t even know what redwoods are.”
I had an unexpected week off work. The last time this happened, in the year 2000, I made a godawful mess of it. Couldn’t fill my days, felt useless, cried. It is a measure of how completely different my life is now that this has been one of my best weeks ever. One of the best parts was the fact that I got off my butt and organized riding lessons every other day.
I thought I might blog after each one, but it’s Friday and I haven’t done so. There were bloggable things after each. On Sunday Erin got me riding Seth, the huge dapple-grey Warmblood gelding, in a firm but kind contact with lots of leg. He came through and round and soft and the rest of the lesson gave me everything I asked with the barest hint of an aid. On Monday I was on Bella and tried to ride the same way, but Bella is an adorable little chestnut mare made of cotton candy and moonbeams, and when I used a Seth-strength leg on her she bounded away from me as if she had been stung by a bee. I had to ride whisper-soft through the serpentines and changes, so I did.
Wednesday I rode with Colin and Toni, the barn owners, both Grand Prix riders and very very tough, though nice and fair. They stake out each end of the arena and they both correct you as you ride past, so there is nowhere to flop around and catch your breath. Brutal. The other riders were very good so lesson was very advanced: like an ordinary tough lesson for me, but with no stirrups, meaning everything depended on the correctness and strength of my seat, which is neither very correct nor very strong right now. But Bella, who is the world’s most generous and forgiving horse, kept letting me have lead changes and lovely jump spots entirely free gratis and for nothing. We ended by jumping the wall with two poles stacked on it. Easily the biggest thing I’ve jumped at Mcintosh.
Today I was on Bella again, and again, the best moment was the last line. I lifted up my eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help, and suddenly the little mare was in a steady even rhythm and with the bottom of my eyes I could see the three strides into the fence, and the exact spot where Bella would take off. So I moved with her, balanced over the fence, then sat down and collected her and changed canter leads.
Okay, so maybe I did have a lot to write about. It’s been hard to write about it, though, partly because I have so many other projects on – writing grants for Claire’s school, working on Geek Feminism with Skud and Liz and Sumana and the others. But mostly because I’ve been riding reasonably well all week, and what I feel is this brilliant happy afterglow, and happiness is less conducive to blogging than to staring into space with a vacant grin. At home in my body. All that hard work and discipline and concentration for those few seconds when you are riding a thousand-pound Thoroughbred through the air.
The little side-pleasures, too: being out of doors in gorgeous Northern California August weather. Cool breezes in the plane trees. Bella’s irresistible copper coat, like close-grained satin under your hand.
preoccupations
