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.

Last night, Jeremy, taking Claire off for a timeout, quotes Futurama: Let’s have a long boring talk about our relationship.

This morning I drive with Claire grumpy in the backseat, think back to last night when The Office’s Jim lured a grumpy Andy into a rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and sing: What’s going to work?

Claire (softly): …team work…

Together: Wonder Pets, Wonder Pets, we’re on our way! To help the baby animals and save the day…

Worst run ever this morning. I decided to try and beat my usual time, so I cranked up Jonathan Coulton’s “Code Monkey” instead of my more usual warmup, “Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks. I was winded half a block up Eugenia, and groaning by the time I reached the owl. Then my earphone connector came loose and as I was trying to reconnect it I skidded, lost my balance and came a cropper on Bernal Heights Boulevard.

Worried onlookers flocked to me. I waved them off, saying:

“No, it’s fine, I’m just an idiot.”

I finished the rest of the run without mishap and came in at exactly the usual pace.

I’ve been reading The Tummy Trilogy, which makes it impossible to stick to any sort of diet that isn’t, you know, delicious. I don’t think I qualify as a serious eater in Trillin’s sense of that term – my tastes run too haute – but I definitely have a level of engagement with food. Luckily and in spite of this morning’s pratfall, the running seems to be sticking. I don’t do it for any particular reason any more. I just run. That should offset at least a little of the half-and-half in my morning coffee.

Every woman has to ask of her partner “Will he love me as much as Calvin loves Alice?” Jessa Crispin, another crush of mine, notes that we all have to admit the negative, because we are less worthy than Alice of love. This thought made me gloomy for a short while, until I came to a pleasing realization: Calvin loves Alice almost as much as I love Jeremy.

“Perception and Realty”

“Homeschooled by Wolves”

Not that we’re going to get a dog, but if we ever do, we thought of the perfect name: Kitty.

Another busy and complicated weekend. Up at horrendous o’clock on Saturday, chivvying poor Jamey, Rowan, Gilbert and Claire to Moscone Elementary for a Parents for Public School Meeting. The first item of business: to create a collage showing our vision for our childrens’ school. We looked at each other in consternation, and walked out. I’m not sure what the exercise was supposed to achieve, and I’m sorely disappointed, because the last PPS meeting I went to was truly excellent.

Claire and I ran errands instead. Took a bunch of old clothes to Buffalo Exchange, which bought exactly one pair of jeans for a store credit of $6.75.

“We can only sell things that are trendy,” explained the worker kindly.

Saturday night Jeremy, because he is of all men the most excellent, made a lasagne with some lamb mince we had in the freezer. He used Julia Child’s bechemal recipe, then layered the noodles and bechemal with a lamb mince, onion, tomato paste, garlic and herb sauce. It was ridiculously good; so was the spinach and pine nut salad he made to go with it.

Sunday I ran and saw the owl, brilliantly camouflaged in the pines. Artolog mentions that the dead owl was a male, so presumably the survivor is a female? Will she stay, find another mate, nest? I can’t believe the California poppies are already done; all the other wildflowers are out now, but it’s those splashes of emergency orange that really spell spring for me.

This reminds me that I was chatting to Dad on Saturday night and he asked about Bernal Heights. It’s the great green barrow tomb that marks the southern boundary of the Mission District, an outcropping of red chert bedrock and thus one of the safest places in the city in case of earthquake. The lower slopes of the hill were settled for this reason after the quake and fire of 1906 (my so-called Victorian dates to 1907), but the grassland on top remained goat paddocks well into living memory and only became a park in the 1970s. It’s maybe the best example of unspoiled native San Francisco habitat within city limits.

I used to look wistfully at the hill from our flat in Alabama Street; then we moved to its lower slopes; now I run around it three times a week and consider it my own personal fiefdom, as do all my neighbours. Red tracks in the chert wind up through the flower-sown grass. As I run I can survey a pretty large swathe of the San Francisco Bay Area, from the San Bruno hills in the south to Twin Peaks in the west to Mount Tamalpais in the north to Mount Diablo in the east. What it is, is heaven.

After my run we all walked to Salome’s house for breakfast, then I dragged Salome over the hill to Glen Park for pastries from Destination, and we shopped ferociously at a garage sale given by a woman of superb taste on the way. Then Salome and I fought the crowds at Ikea. She solved a pressing clothing-storage emergency and I bought Claire a small high-efficiency reading lamp. She’s been reading under the bedcovers at night with a torch, just as I used to do albeit when I was twice her age. Dinner was an outrageously good frittata at the Ramsay-Gormans, with Medjool dates and Rainbow’s cave-aged Swiss gruyere for dessert.

And so to bed.

The girls are blessedly asleep. Jeremy and I are sitting side by side on the sofa with our laptops. He’s answering email, I’m reading blogs. He IMs me something that makes me laugh out loud. I reply:

“LOL!”

We lost one of our owls. Poor Artolog found the body. This being San Francisco, there’s going to be a post-mortem. It was probably rat poison; that’s the usual suspect. People are leaving flowers.

I’ve seen the surviving owl a couple of times. I hope he stays. I hope he lives.

Jeremy’s coming home: hurray! But he’s planning more trips this summer and fall: boo.

ETA: two hours until he’s here.

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That’s why we eat it twice.”

“The Commonwealth: it’s the zombie British Empire.”

“The first rule of Bicker Club is I cannot believe I am having to tell you the rules of Bicker Club, AGAIN.”

None of the following has yielded a post of its own, so it’s my hope that everything thrown together will thicken into a nourishing soup.

I’ve hit a plateau with the running. I’ve been up on the hill in all weathers, but the easy dramatic performance improvements of the first six weeks have ended, and now it seems about equally hard every day. I still like it, though. And I kicked ass in yoga this morning, able to hold quite challenging poses for longer than ever before. Maybe I should do more yoga on my non-running days. In my copious free time.

Having a crush on your yoga instructor: it’s the new having a crush on your midwife.

Decent run of films lately. The Lives of Others is spectacularly good; go see. The Namesake has a fairly clunky script, but is redeemed by astounding performances and cinematography of great beauty. When The Levees Broke and Jesus Camp will break your heart and stiffen your resolve to fight for truth and justice.

Yesterday I lay on my back in Golden Gate Park with Julia spread-eagled asleep on my chest, and I watched the trees move against the blue sky, and I felt very happy.

Oh! And when we were driving to dim sum last week, Jeremy said:

“Bags of soup! They’re like delicious pustules.”

I said very seriously: “I am so glad that I married you.”

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

I forgot to put on my glasses when I went to see the girls yesterday morning. Julia looked at me and went blicketing out, then came back a minute later to give me my glasses and phone.

She’s uncannily competent. She howls if you clip her into her high chair, because she wants to do it herself. When she’s especially pleased she exclaims “EEEE!” in a way that leaves no doubt that she is a young chimpanzee.

The rest of the time she’s just hugely pleased.

Tonight she said “BYE MI-YO” and my heart turned over.

Her hair smells like sunshine and apples. Her hug makes life worth living. She is an intergalactic gamma ray burst of love.

My new favourite yum cha place is unstoppable! We were eleven people – eight adults, three children. We had all the dim sum we could eat. Not kidding. Alien chrysalises, shrimp dumplings, barbequed fork buns (Claire likes the fork buns.) We ate ourselves stupid.

“There is food coming out of my ears,” I said.

“Show me,” said Claire, deadpan.

The check came to $77. How we laughed!

We’re doing a Sunday dinner exchange with the Ramsey Gormans, and this week we were their guests. I must say it’s pleasant to be able to walk to a dinner party without crossing a single street. Kathy used a Jamie Oliver recipe to make us pork chops with potatoes, parsnips and pears. My contribution was a bottle of sticky wine and a sweet potato pie from Mission Pie. Everything was fantastic.

I ran very slowly this morning.