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MORNING SCHEDULE

7:00am Wake up and sofa snuggle
7:10am Get dressed for school
7:15am Breakfast, one episode of TV
7:45am Put on shoes
7:50am Brush teeth and hair
8:00am OUT THE DOOR, ON THE BUS

EVENING SCHEDULE

3:00pm Home from school
5:30pm Homework
6:00pm Besos y abrazos por Blanca
6:30pm Piano practice
6:45pm Dinner and one episode of TV
7:05pm Dessert
7:15pm Put pyjamas on
7:20pm Brush teeth
7:30pm BEDTIME

To support the project, aimed primarily at More Sleep For Everyone, Jeremy got a frog alarm clock for Claire and bees for Jules.

…we’ll see how this works out.

Fish tacos. Lemos Farm. Spork. Don Reed’s East 14th. A nice day.

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.

Frickin squee!

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.”