Bebe is forgiven. I’ve been a bit on the cold-and-witholding side lately, what with the her-sending-me-to-the-ER and so forth. But this morning Julia had crunchy snot in her eyes again, so I put on the soothing ointment, and she was perturbed. I pointed her at the cat for comfort.

Julia threw her arms around Bebe and rested her white head against the cat’s black fur. They snuggled like this for a good minute or two. Julia kept turning her head because she was fascinated by Bebe’s purr.

Also today: Salome and I rode the Morgan lady’s stallion and colt up and over the Marin headlands to where the sunlight turns silver and pours into the open blue eye of the sea, and you can see the Farallons out on the horizon and the Golden Gate Bridge and the white city of San Francisco through a gap in the hills. You can see the curvature of the globe. It was so impossibly gorgeous that it made Narnia look like Pyongyang.

C: But I don’t want to!

R: Excuse me, Claire?

C: Yes mummy?

R: What is Rule One?

C (thinks): Yeah whining?

R: I think not. I think Rule One is in fact, No whining.

C: But I want Yeah whining!

R: But I want No whining!

C (cunningly): How about Medium whining?

Claire challenges my authority about something.

R: No!

C: Why?

R: Because I said no! And my word is… ?

C: What?

R: Law! My word is law!

C: My word is why.

Last week she figured out how to stand on her own. She lines up her lovely fat thighs under her center of gravity, then very deliberately lets go of the sofa or whatever else she is using as her prop. Last night was the best yet. She released the arm of the Poang and wobbled on her feet for almost a minute, trying to will her back foot up so she could take a step towards her daddy.

Jeremy held his breath, I held my breath, the Milky Way held its breath; then with a smile like the light of ten thousand suns she folded back onto her round bottom.

How we cheered!

Yay, a woman is House Speaker Elect. The first one. In 2006. Sigh.

Don’t get me wrong: I am very grateful for the gains, especially McCaskill who seems right on, and Casey who is awful but better than Santorum. And I am glad Rumsfeld is off to do his harm somewhere else. But this Congress needs to address the deficit, find a way out of the quagmire and reboot international diplomacy. This is not going to be a picnic. This is umpty-tum years of difficult, dangerous and thankless work, that if it succeeds, will take us to… where Clinton left us in 2001.

Sigh. Anyway, I’m kind of beating myself up because I made a bad mistake last week. I don’t usually second-guess my choices as a mother, but that’s because those choices matter to me more than anything else, and so I usually get them right, or right enough.

But Friday’s call – to take Julia to the ER instead of the pediatrician – was the wrong one, and it was Julia who suffered for it. The doctor prescribed stinging eyedrops every three hours while she was awake. It was horrible – Jeremy and I both holding her down and squeezing open her sore eyes to drop liquid in them that made them burn. The pediatrician, when I finally got through on Monday, gave us a soothing ointment instead, that we apply while she is sleeping.

Her eyes are better and she’s perfectly blickety now. But after we did the eyedrops on Monday morning, she stood on my lap and leaned her whole weight against my shoulder, taking shuddering breaths; and I can still feel her little body trembling in my arms.

A day in LA for work. Things it is not interesting to observe about LA: there are freeways, there is smog, it is hot. These things have been said. You might as well say “Shut up, Ann Coulter.” Things it may or may not be interesting to observe about LA: the palm trees float like jauntily upturned mops; the planes hem-stitch the evening. A final observation: spending a day in another city leaves me as drained as a nosebleed.

Jeremy: I downloaded this ancient Persian font – you know, sticks pressed in clay tablets. Cuneiform?

Jamey: Cool!

Rachel: I love a man in cuneiform.

I had hoped to leave for Oz at about noon, but Julia woke up with conjunctivitis. I tossed up whether to call her pediatrician or take her to St Luke’s. My good experience on Thursday tipped the scales in favour of St Luke’s, and…

…it took three hours to get the prescription. And another three hours to work through five pharmacies to find one that had the right eye drops in stock. We left just in time to catch the commuter traffic. That stopped. And started. From Sausalito. To Santa. Fucking. Rosa.

It’s seventy miles to Cloverdale. It took us three hours. My God, how I wanted to be somewhere else.

The blessed wonderful kids slept from about five to about seven-thirty, and we reached the Oz turnoff at about eight. After being on the verge of tears all day, I actually cried with happiness as we came down to the farm.

After that of course, everything was magical.

Bebe has literally bitten the hand that feeds her. Last night she was perched on my hip in bed, and I needed to turn over to drain the snot from one nostril to another. (What?) So I tipped her gently from her perch and onto the soft blankets. This enraged her. She brooded darkly upon her sense of wrong, then darted in and savaged the soft underbelly of my left arm.

So far, so perfectly normal domestic scene in this house of the cantankerous cat. This morning, though, there was a hard red coin-shape around one of the toothmarks. I traced its outline at 9am, and a much larger outline – a biscuit-shape, perhaps – again at 3pm, which is when I left work to go to the ER.

I shouldn’t say this in a public forum, but St Luke’s, the local hospital where Julia was born, offers what is by US standards superb emergency care. Today I arrived at 4pm, where the admitting nurses were very sympathetic and called me “sweetheart”. My sexy boy doctor was seeing me by 4.40pm.

“You’ve done this before,” he said when he saw my outlines around the infection.

“Last time I got a cat bite I spent three nights in hospital,” I confessed.

“What, do you torture them?”

“No, but I’m going to start.”

I have ten days’ worth of broad-spectrum antibiotic horse pills, but that’s the least of it; they gave me a shot in the backside as well. As the needle was going in, the nurse said (sympathetically): “A lot of people find that this hurts. There’s no lidocaine in it.”

I gasped and though more-than-several tears came to my eyes, I bravely did not cry. I am limping, though. You would be too if you’d been skewered with caustic chemicals right next to your sciatic nerve.

Of course I get no sympathy from anyone, because all my friends are afraid of Bebe and think I should probably have her killed. I have to admit, this episode does show her to be a very, very stupid cat.

That’s National Do Nothing Month. I’ll try to get some stuff done, but based on my performance so far this year? Things are gonna be late, deadlines missed, chocolate eaten, windows stared out of. Thanks for your attention to this matter.

R: I miss you, Claire.

C: I know.

R: I love you!

C: I know!

R: Would you like a present from Boston?

C: Yes! I would like a kangaroo!

R: They don’t have kangaroos in Boston!

C: Then I would like a cat.

R: I’ll get you one if I can find one.

C: Okay! Byee!

I finished Brenda Maddox’s biography of Rosalind Franklin on the plane, having devoured it over a couple of days. One caveat: I would have liked more explanation of how x-ray crystallographic photographs relate to the structure of crystals themselves. I’ve read Watson on this but I still gaze baffled upon Franklin’s beautiful pictures, unable to visualize the way the light bounces off molecules to make the images on the film. I guess this is why I am not a physical chemist.

I’m going to assume that my readers, all five of you, are familiar with the bones of the controversy: that Crick, Watson and Wilkins based their Nobel-prize-winning discovery of the helical structure of DNA on Franklin’s matchless experimental work, with very little in the way of attribution. While Maddox is fastidious about establishing who saw what when, she rejects the boring doomed-victim myth of Franklin as “the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology.” As a result everyone comes off far better than you might expect, including Wilkins, who was awful but going through a very bad patch, and Watson, a vile man yet appreciative of Franklin’s work and later her friend and defender.

(I do like Crick’s lofty dismissal of The Double Helix as “Jim’s novel.” I hadn’t heard that before and it is wonderfully apt, especially when you consider that earlier drafts were titled Honest Jim – as in Lucky Jim – and the equally ironic Base Pairs.)

Maddox’s great achievement, though, is to lift Franklin out of the mire of that now thoroughly-picked-over dogfight and to celebrate her marvellous science. Franklin comes off best of all. Before she ever tackled DNA, she established that the crystalline structure of different types of coal was what determined whether they would become graphitic when heated. After she escaped from King’s and Wilkins’ baleful presence she demonstrated the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), another helical molecule with an RNA spiral around a hollow inner core. At Birkbeck she nurtured a group of madly gifted younger scientists, one of whom, Aaron Klug, went on to win a Nobel of his own.

Without overdoing it, I think, Maddox connects Franklin’s prickly, stubborn intelligence with the extraordinary quality of her painstaking experimental approach. DNA (like Franklin) could be difficult to work with, requiring large reserves of patience, physical intuition and a deft touch. Maddox also shows that Franklin’s personality was many-faceted (yes, like a crystal, sigh.) For everyone who remembers the brusque, intimidating dark lady haunting the corridors at King’s, there are five people who recall the intrepid traveller and mountain climber, the fluent intellectual in Paris or the merry spinster aunt who brought wonderful gifts and instigated endless games.

I put the book down feeling that I knew Franklin and her work a little better and liking her very much indeed. The tragedy of her life is not that she missed out on the Nobel Prize but that she died at 37. To cancer I say: bah.

Have I mentioned that I am the San Francisco Public Library’s helpless fangirl? I moved my whole Amazon wishlist over there about six months ago, read everything on it, now routinely borrow whatever is well-reviewed in Bookslut and Defective Yeti and other blogs of wit and discrimination and enjoy myself beyond the singing of it. The intersection of public libraries with the Internet, like effective contraception and antibiotics, make now the best of all times for a bookish woman to be alive and raising her iron-willed little girls.

La Perdida is the story of a Mexican American woman from Chicago who spends a year in Mexico City. The book’s greatest achievement, I think, is its evocation of place. There’s a lovely panel where the protagonist is looking up into the minimally-rendered leaves and flowers of jacaranda trees; you can almost feel the dappled sunlight on your face. There’s some terrific character work, too – in particular one argument where both parties are making excellent points about colonialism and the privileged distance of the expatriate. As Michael Frayn puts it: “In a good play, everyone is right.” The denouement felt a bit – not exactly forced, to me, but telegraphed and not entirely satisfying. Didn’t stop me devouring the whole thing in a day.

I expected to like Epileptic more than I did. Its reputation precedes it and my sister has epilepsy, although hers is nothing like as severe as that of David B’s brother. I don’t think the problem is in the book – the drawings are brilliant and beautiful and the writing is subtle – but in the anxieties I brought to it as a reader. The mother haring off down dead-end after dead-end in search of a cure for her incurable son, the fever-dream pictures that reminded me of how epileptics describe their aura, the repetition without resolution – practically everything in the book was calculated to upset me. It’s a work of genius, but a depressing one.

Pyongyang is another masterpiece and it may be even darker than Epileptic. How could it not be? It’s about the worst place on earth. Yet I found Guy Delisle’s memoir of his two months in North Korea the least self-conscious and the most effective of these books. Delisle’s sketch of that foul regime is at once spare and unsparing; the calm accumulation of precise detail adds up to an implacable condemnation of the Kims and their puppets. For all its clean lines and quiet voice, Pyongyang is righteously angry, exposing the cynical economic complicity of the West (and the Middle East, for that matter) in the soul-annihilating cruelty of the state.

North Korea is the USA’s shadow self. It is utterly isolated where the USA is rampantly global; hypocritically communist where the USA is hypocritically capitalist; starving where the USA is obese; totalitarian where the USA encourages lively debate and independent thinking; sabre-rattling where the USA is a meek diplomat and stalwart supporter of the United Nations. Okay, maybe my dichotomy got a little decalibrated there at the end. I will leave you with the nightmare image of the Ryugyong Hotel, the world’s seventh largest building, an empty shell without power or windows and perhaps especially disturbing to San Franciscans as a Dantean alternate-universe doppelganger of our beloved Transamerica.

One of the things Salome and I have in common is that when we were children, we dreamed and prayed and yearned for any walk in the park to end with us meeting someone who bred beautiful horses, who gave us a ride and offered to let us compete on their best stallion.

We took the husbands and kids to Golden Gate Park today. Salome said there was a dressage show and I wanted to go looking for it. I’ve been missing horses more and more, the reins in your ring fingers, the sway of your hip when you pick up the canter lead.

“I saw three people riding Arabs on the trail,” I said to Salome. “They broke into a canter and it broke my heart.”

“I know! Doesn’t it make you ache?”

So we found the arena. No dressage show, just one trailer and five Morgan mares tied to the fence and forty pounds of carrots. The horses made my eyes glad, so I went over to sit down.

“Hello!” said the woman in charge.

“I’m just admiring,” I said.

“Admire and give carrots!” she said. “I did a pony party, and I posted to Craigslist that people could come and give carrots to the horses until four.”

We gave carrots and got talking. Her name is Joan Zeleny and she breeds Morgans. Her stallion can jump four-foot coops for eight hours at a time, and she’d love someone to take him eventing. I said that Salome had come second in her last ride at Woodside, and that my one-and-only three day was on a half-Morgan mare.

“Do you want to take the kids for a ride?” she asked. We did. We walked around the arena with Claire and Milo on the front of the saddle.

“Do you want to take a couple of the mares out for half an hour?” she asked. I think we embarrassed her with our gratitude. “It’s nice to see them with people who can ride,” she said gruffly.

We left the kids with their fathers and rode into the woods like overgrown twelve-year-olds whose childhood dreams have come true. Our mares, Jasmine and Rosie, stepped out, goggled at everything they saw and responded to the lightest aids.

On the way, we passed the three riders on their Arab horses; and my broken heart was healed.

See, this is why you should always always wear riding boots, wherever you are going, whatever you think you are going to do.

So we move out of our dot-com slum in the barrio and into this much nicer neighbourhood, and then a bullet falls through the kitchen skylight and onto my shoulder, and then the entire block and their dog get into a fight.

So! Last night when Julia was swarming over me and swearing never to sleep again, we heard shouts in the street. Jeremy and I went to the bay window in our bedroom, which is like a box seat onto the opera that is Eugenia Avenue. A woman clattered up the hill on high heels. A man yelled after her: “Puta!” He seemed disconsolate.

He got into his black truck and sped up the street, right through the intersection and straight into the kitty-corner house.

It happened so fast it was kind of hard to believe. I was saying “Oh no, oh no” and dialing 911 from our bedroom phone. “Is anyone hurt?” said the dispatcher. “I don’t know, the driver maybe, he must have been drunk.” “I’ll send the police.”

Gilbert drove up and parked the Prius where the black truck had been. That family has some devastating parking karma.

Jeremy picked up some more details from the crowd that was still gathered when he took Miz Jules out for her evening constitutional. Apparently the driver was ok (drunk people tend to bounce). The house was basically ok too, just a ding in the stairs. All hail redwood construction. The truck, not so much, and Jeremy reported that the cabin reeked of alcohol.

Mum, Dad: it really is a much nicer neighbourhood. I think I tell these stories because it’s kinda surprising when this stuff happens in Bernal, whereas in the Mission you’d hear street fights with or without fireworks-or-gunfire, and you’d just sort of shrug and get on with whatever you were doing.

Saturday morning after a cursory breakfast at the Dog, I dragged Quinn, Danny, Ada and Claire along to a seminar on choosing an elementary school in San Francisco. The high point was the parent panel, which included our old neighbour Eos from Alabama Street (thrilled with the immersion program at Marshall, which is one of the schools on my list) and a nerdcore superstar called, I am not making this up, Adam Studly.

Adam Studly is a doctor (of course he is.) In fact, he’s on the faculty at UCSF; his area of expertise is in measuring health care services, so he turned his geektastic superpowers onto the elementary school problem. If he hadn’t already had me at “I am Adam Studly,” his casual dismissal of test scores – “they mean nothing” – would have won my undying love. He pointed out that your choice of a school eventually boils down to three considerations: the physical plant, “enrichments” and how well it fits into your life. This makes me feel much better about enrolling the girls at one of the raffish local Spanish immersion schools.

In fact the whole experience made me feel better about San Francisco public schools. I like the hackish kinds of parents who seem to populate Parents for Public Schools and the PTAs of the small but ambitious neighbourhood schools that are called the “diamonds in the rough”; not only do I like these parents, but I can see making smalltalk with them at the field trips.

Oh, and Adam Studly has built a spreadsheet that helps you calculate your chances of getting accepted into a given school (of course he has.)

Childcare was provided, and was a success. Ada and Claire had to be dragged away by force. Danny seemed pretty engaged with the seminar, but Quinn had an attack of post-scholastic stress disorder. “Schools are prisons, you know.”

“My idea of talking to the principal,” she explained, “would be using krav maga to rip his head off, then telling the seven-year-olds ‘Run for it! I have made you free!'”

Not an idle threat, by the way; Quinn really is learning krav maga (of course she is.)

Cian: Look Daddy, I have a piece of toilet paper. It’s for mummy.

Bryan: Oh really? What are you going to do with that piece of toilet paper for mummy?

Cian: Oh, I’m just going to remember her with it.

We call Julia “the baby”, as in the phrases: “Poor the baby!” and “I love you, the baby.”

Claire still says “yester-today” and “Lookit!”

Ada still says “her” for “she”. Thus:

C: Lookit the baby!

A: Her is happy!

This morning Claire brought pen and paper to where I was lolling in bed.

C: This is a cat. These are whiskers. It’s a happy, scared cat.

R: Can you write cat next to it?

C: Yes. C A T. That’s for Janny. She’s my grandma. I have two grandmas.

R: She’ll love that.

C: It’s Janny’s picture. Here is a different cat. It’s called a goose.

R: I see. A goose is a kind of cat?

C: It’s a different cat. This is a mama goose. It’s far away.

R: Okay.

C: I want another different cat, it’s called a dog. D O G. Can you draw me a dog?

R: You draw it. I like your drawings.

C: I want you to draw it.

R: Okay, you draw what you want it to look like, and I can draw that.

C: Okay! This is its fluffily fur.

R: Fluffily fur?

C: No, fluffily fur! This is a spot on its bottom. This is another spot on its bottom. This is a spot on its left ear.

R: Is that another spot on its left ear?

C (kindly): Nooo. That’s an arrow pointing to the spot.