chloe the goat

Originally uploaded by artolog

She’s becoming quite the neighborhood celeb.

It’s been crazy. I got that bistro set for the terrace and we’ve had friends over nearly every night to sit out there and drink sauvignon blanc with us. Which has been delightful, except that I am always hungover which makes me even grumpier in the mornings. Hard to imagine but true. On the bright side I got chunky gold streaks in my hair, and between that and the excellent European foundation garments making me feel like a million pounds sterling, I am probably the cutest I have ever been.

On Saturday Claire and I went to Armistead Maupin Elementary for our first garden day. It’s sort of miraculous: there’s this sliver of land between the school and the fence, and it has been planted with corn and lettuce and herbs, peaches and currants and hazelnuts. I met the PTA presidents and a bunch of other parents and Devon the eco volunteer, and Claire met Ivy and Toni who are also going into kinder and might even end up in her class.

We helped build a cob bench, a mix of clay and sand and straw that is sort of like adobe. Claire and a bunch of the other kids mixed it by stomping it with their bare feet, then we all squished it around the stones that make the core of the bench. Very primal to be building with these ancient materials: good villagey bonding experience.

Today I finally paid attention to my car’s loud whiney noise. It was whining every time I turned a corner, which was annoying because I turn corners a lot. Takes a village to fix a car: the cool punk rock bikers who live with lovely old Stan down the street diagnosed it instantly when I parked beside them yesterday as low power steering fluid.

I considered changing it myself until I researched the matter online and found that the wrong kind of fluid will cause your power steering to INSTANTLY EXPLODE or something, so I took it to Jerry’s where they fixed it as part of an oil change. Because this was Sunday and they were shorthanded I was conscripted to help them push an SUV into the garage. I love my mechanic. And my punk rock biker neighbours.

This afternoon Claire and I picked blackberries on Bernal Hill, and made them into pie.

I love my rugrats
I love to read and write
I love my neighborhood
I love the sky at night
I love the whole world
It’s made of particles
Boom de yada boom de yada
Boom de yada boom de yada

I love the calculus
I love my Twitter pals
I love good restaurants
I love the animals
I love the whole world
The solar system too
Boom de yada, boom de yada
Boom de yada, boom de yada

I love Antarctica
I love organic farms
I love the BBC
I love your loving arms
I love the whole world
It’s where I keep my stuff
Boom de yada, boom de yada
Boom de yada, boom de yada

Project-based learning isn’t something you impose on kids; it’s the sea in which they swim. With three months of martial arts under her belt, Claire was mad keen to see Kung Fu Panda. So much so that she painted the panda before we went, insisted on dim sum (Aust: yum cha) for dinner, then improvised what she claimed was Chinese-sounding music during piano practice when we got home.

I had some issues with the film. The character setup was trite, especially in the opening scenes – Po wants to do kung fu you say? But his father wants him to take over the noodle shop? Pardon me while I pass out from boredom. Much worse: the other heroes resent the newcomer in their midst and insult him and are mean to him. What kind of worthless fu is that? Looks like no fu at all to me.

(On a somewhat related note, do American filmmakers really not see what they are doing when they have characters run vertically up through the debris of collapsing buildings? Or have frightened crowds flee from walls of dust? It strikes me as profoundly uncool to work out your 9/11-based traumas in such transparent ways.)

I enjoyed the film a bit more when the it managed to partially-subvert the tedious old Chosen One plot. I’m less violently allergic to Chosen Ones than I used to be, now that I have decided we are all allowed to be the Special Predestined Protagonists of our own lives. (Aren’t I generous.) But it’s a dull trope, undemocratic and unfair. I don’t appreciate heroes like Harry Potter, who are all glowy and adorable Just Because. The rest of us have to work for a living! I like stories where the plain people do the needful by dint of hard work and cooperation. Like, uh, LIFE. Or Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. Or life.

Julia, meanwhile, is making breathtaking cognitive leaps around language. Her speech is clearer and more precise and nuanced every day, and she is on the brink of understanding the relationship between letters and words. The last couple of days it’s been all about Museum ABC. “D is for dances! E is for eggs!”

You want to know my idea of a hero? Two little girls asleep in the next room. I may still be able to bench-press both of them at once, but trust me: not a force in the ‘verse can stop them.

The excellent Spanish class that Claire and Julia attend has its own DVDs and CDs of original music; one of the tracks we all like is about opposites, and ends “Triste, feliz; triste, feliz.” Sad, happy, sad, happy. I’ve taken to singing this to Jeremy when I’m feeling particularly mood-swingy.

And it’s been that kind of a week. I cried with happiness over two newly-announced pregnancies, both hard-won and full of hope. And I cried with the other thing over having to buy flowers for two funerals, one long-expected but still wrenching, the other out of the blue and incomprehensible.

And life just keeps tumbling on. I cook dinner and order school uniforms for Claire and the uniforms arrive and she puts them on and is transformed into a schoolgirl! My baby! Not possible. She has a wobbly tooth!

I am very keen to see Up the Yangtze, the documentary of the last cruise up the Three Gorges before they were dammed. I think a lot about the villagers whose homes were drowned.

Time is a river.

I planted grape vines on my terrace. I’m going to put flowers out there too. The tomatoes Aten’t Dead. I figure if we put a cafe table and chairs out there we’ll have effectively a whole nother room in the house, right? Right?

I miss Cambridge. My commitment to contrariness is the stuff of legend. I particularly miss Grantchester, which is a fairly obvious sublimation of the extent to which I have always missed Grant and Kirsty.

San Francisco, my equal in contrariness, is doing its utmost to win back my affections. On Friday we left the kids with a babysitter and went to the Lumiere to see Werner Herzog’s film Encounters at the End of the World. As we arrived a limo pulled up and a whole bunch of people in fancy dress got out. I regret to say I was quietly sarcastic about this, because they turned out to be the producer/cinematographer and several of the interview subjects.

Encounters is about Antarctica. Unusually for a Antarctic film it was made for no budget under the Artists and Writers program; so there were no minders following Herzog around whitewashing everything, ho ho. This shows, especially in the early scenes, where McMurdo squats on Ross Island like a filthy little mining town, and we spend a good deal of time talking to the service workers who make up 90% of the population.

If you like Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Antarctica, funded by the same program, you’ll love this film. Herzog likes the same misfit-idealists for the same reasons. And it’s not all righteous social anthropology either. You can’t really point a camera anywhere down there without seeing something unimaginably beautiful and strange. Producer Henry Kaiser is a specialist diver who blasts holes in 20-foot-thick ice with TNT, then swims in the ocean underneath.

The footage from those dives is otherworldly. There are aliens down there.

Encounters may be the best science fiction film I have ever seen.

After the excellent Q&A, Jeremy and I headed out into Russian Hill walking randomly. I wanted to try Petit Robert, although I had no idea where it was. We walked briskly up Polk, under a friendly fog, past wine bars with warm laughter spilling out. It all felt very French and lo, there was Petit Robert. Jeremy had rabbit risotto and I had moules frites. We split a bottle of really delicious pinot blanc, and the dessert came with milk jam, a kind of dulce de leche that catapulted me back to the alfajors my sister used to make by boiling cans of condensed milk, when I was a little girl.

On Saturday we went to Spanish class then drove out to the newly-reopened Warming Hut for sandwiches. I was not-quite-subliminally looking for a place as pretty as Grantchester. Crissy Field is not it; it’s striking but not beautiful. Still, I loved seeing one of the Pier 39 sea lions porpoising along right in front of us.

“Sea monster!” Jules cried joyfully.

We spent the afternoon at the Dyke Rally in Dolores Park. It was too crowded for me, I don’t really like human beings en masse, they are strange, unaccountable chimpanzees. But it was lovely drinking chardonnay with Ian and talking about Europe. We agreed that San Francisco looks and feels like a frontier town compared to Paris or London. Ian says that no one is allowed to build anything in Barcelona until they can prove the new building will be much prettier than the old one.

Today we took both kids to see Wall-E. Jules particularly loved it and was able to follow the plot very closely: “Robot! He has lost his friend. Oh! He has found his friend again!” I cried, because I am a big girly wuss, and also because the dystopian beginning – an Earth of garbage – is much more plausible than the hopeful end. I tend to think the future will look more like McMurdo and less like Grantchester or Oz Farm, but I hope I am very wrong.

Oh! I forgot to mention that a neighbour brought his kid to Martha & Bros this morning. Not his human child. His baby goat. An orphan from the herd he keeps down at the Port of San Francisco. She was adorable and soft, and capered about. A goat in the cafe! Maybe I am wrong!

I can’t remember who gave her the medical kit, but it’s the Best Toy Ever, as Doctor Dog is the Optimal Book.

It goes like this. I recline in an attitude of stoic suffering.

J: You VERY sick.

She puts the thermometer under my tongue. I accept it.

J: Very good!

She feels my forehead with the back of her hand.

J: You RILLY hot.

She gives me an injection.

J: There! All better!

Repeat 11,000 times, cuteness undimmed by repetition. My daughter the doctor!

It’s been filthy stinking hot in California for a couple of days but tonight the weather has changed; I can smell the rain coming in on a cool wind through the wide-open bay windows.

The children are asleep. Even though it began with taking Jeremy to the airport for yet another business trip, we had a wonderful day: Talbot’s Toys and Martha’s birthday party.

I feel dislocated, as if my roots go no more than an inch into California soil. I miss my Londoners sorely. And yet the jacaranda we had left for dead is covered in green foliage and flower buds. Hope hurts after such a long absence, like the ache of a muscle long out of use.

C: What are the meds for?

R: For the CRAZY.

C: Is that true?

R: Yup.

C: What does the crazy look like?

R: You can’t see it. It’s something you feel.

C: What does it feel like?

R: It feels like the dark.

C: It feels like the duck?

R: No! Like darkness.

C: Like duckness?

Cambridge already seems like a dream.

The only proofs that we were ever there are my new bras from Marks and Spencers. They are excellent, and improve my posture. So well do they lift and separate that I have nicknamed my boobs Church and State.

The children were perfectly behaved on the flight home; Julia slept on my lap for four hours. The house is much smaller than I remembered. The cat is frenetically overjoyed to see us. Jetlag’s a little bit easier to deal with when you’re flying west and it’s staying up late rather than going to bed early.

I dreamed Veronica Mars had murdered someone and covered it up brilliantly. An odd, depressing dream, set in Oxford.

I’m reading a biography of Rosebery. Little thrills me more than cracking the spine of a new book about a Victorian liberal. Because I am an old coot.

I wonder sometimes where Counting My Blessings shades into outright confabulation. There’s a whole other version of this morning, where Claire had a full-blown tantrum when I turned off the TV to take the girls to the park. I was furious and undercaffeinated and hungry and headachey, so I handled it as badly as you can possibly handle an angry five-year-old. Claire’s tantrum and my fury lasted all the way down the street, until I threw everyone onto an opportunistic number 7 bus into the middle of Cambridge, which is how we came to have coffee at my favourite cafe.

On the bus I held Claire’s hand and we apologized to each other, and then the morning turned into the one described below. All I’m saying is, that first comma there is glossing over rather a lot.

Packed, had coffee at my favourite cafe, walked through Cambridge where these guys were busking; had to stop, arrested by the utter beauty of their singing. Walked to the playground in Jesus Green, where Jeremy met us. Played. Walked home, saying goodbye to the playground, the Green, the ducks, the river, the bridge, the locks, Cambridge. We’ll have to come back, and for longer.

What the trip has taught me: home is my pack now, Jeremy and the girls. We can make a good life for ourselves wherever we happen to be. Makes the future a little less scary. Poor old Michael Finnegan, begin again.

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Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens

…and how was your day?

R: I know this is very nerdy, but I love the end of Diaspora where the Yatima character is relieved that there aren’t going to be any more adventures, so it can get on with teaching itself maths. That’s what I want to do when the girls are off to college. Learn maths properly.

J: Yeah, we can do it together.

On the grounds that if I don’t write this all down, I will probably forget it. Also you are interested in my tiny life! Yes you are.

Our place here is schweet. It’s one of six flats in a newish building on a cul-de-sac. We’re one of two flats on the top level, and we have two floors. Downstairs there’s a twin bedroom, perfect for the girls, with a bathroom next door. Both open onto the hall-and-staircase, which because we leave shoes there and go barefoot in the house Claire calls “the shoe room”.

The hall also opens onto a kitchen/living room/dining room with two big east-facing windows. We’ve festooned the windows with the girls’ drawings and paper dolls. Two sofas in the lounge area mean we can all curl up and read or watch TV or dink. (Dinking is Jeremy’s term of art for noodling around on the Intarwebs.) The kitchen is elaborate enough that we’ve managed two- and three-course meals. There’s a heavy emphasis on sausages (because, yum), white rice (we have a rice cooker), salad and fruit.

The really nice part, though, is upstairs, where the master bedroom occupies most of the garret. Skylights in the angled walls let in masses of light and air. Just like home! We have our own bathroom, very civilized, and there’s a corner where I can work. So yes, I am in Europe, writing in a garret. It’s software industry research, not novels, and Cambridge not Paris, but let’s not split hairs.

Primrose joins Victoria Road next to a farm shop (Radmore, whence the sausages – yum!) There’s also a good co-op grocery two blocks down at Mitcham’s Corner. The fresh produce is a bonus because eating out has been iffy; I haven’t even been specially impressed with the nearby Indian and Bangla places.

A rough thing about traveling is that you lose your knowledge of short cuts to places and the best things to order in cafes. I’ve been enjoying Cambridge more as I have figured things out. So from Primrose and Victoria you cross the street and take a footpath down through housing projects to Carlyle, where there’s a very nice park and playground. Turn left on Carlyle and you get to Chesterton, which runs along the river Cam. Two buses run along here, or you can cross the bridge over the lock to Jesus Green. That sounds far but it’s about thirty seconds from our front door.

Jesus Green has really been the center of our Cambridge world. It’s on the way to everywhere, and the girls go to its playground every day. If you follow the river to the right you get to Quayside and a couple of decent restaurants. And a place to hire punts. If you strike out overland you hit the back of the city center, and can take cunning shortcuts through to the pedestrian zone. The time I haven’t spent sitting in my attic writing, I have spent in the basement of Starbucks on Market Square. Yeah, I know. I am here now. I find splitting my Cambridge days between Starbucks and home makes me slightly less stir crazy than if I did not. What?

Two days a week I go down to London. I prefer it, but the days are very long, and the kids are nearly asleep before I get back. I catch a bus on Victoria which takes me to the station, and then I get an off-peak ticket and take the 10.15 express to Kings Cross. It’s a brisk 15-minute walk from Kings Cross to the office but it really isn’t worth getting on the Tube to Goodge Street; would probably take longer. Not a bad walk anyway since I found the back way past St Pancras and around Gordon and Tavistock Squares.

Our office is in a basement on Gower Street, in the same row of Georgian brick houses that Spike stayed in on his London trip. If we lived here I’d love to live somewhere in Bloomsbury. It’s probably hideously expensive, but I do like the squares and being close to the British Museum. Filmlight, where Jo, Kirsty and Christopher work, used to be practically next door on Bedford Square. It’s moved a little further away but it’s still really easy to meet them for lunch.

My level of happiness was greatly improved by the discovery of Paradiso on Store Street, around the corner from work. They make their own pasta. A hot lunch makes a 12-hour London day much more bearable. The days are so long because the off-peak tickets mean I can’t catch the train before the 7.15 back to Cambridge. Gets in at 8.06, narrowly missing the 8.05 bus home, and leaving me to wait till 8.35 for the next bus. Home by 9. Into bed, catatonic, at ten.

See? You hung on every word! You SO did.

We left Jeremy’s camera in a cab again, and got it returned to us, again. That makes four times now. The kindness of strangers, let me show you it.