I’ve been sleeping. People ask me “So what did you get up to on the weekend?” and I say “I napped.” Oh, I may slot in the odd competitive yoga class here, a long-anticipated art project there, organic roast chicken with all the trimmings in the other place, but mostly it’s been me and Bebe the unbalanced cat catching our Zs. And very pleasant it has been too.

Releasing the horses was great fun, and produced exactly the reactions I expected: one family from Wisconsin who completely, absolutely got it and thought we were fabulous; and one officious woman who told us we were damaging the delicate ground-cover: “which is here for everyone to enjoy.”

“Thanks for your comments,” I said, “I’ll take it under advisement.” I’m not even sure what that means, but I was very pleased that I had the presence of mind to say it.

Claire and Milo were extraordinarily patient with our shenanigans, until they weren’t. “Most kids would be pleased to have parents like us,” I told them. “Yeah, that’ll work,” said Jeremy.

Pregnancy makes me sooky, so I’ve been eating chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and watching rom-coms: Serendipity was just okay, though much enlivened by the presence of Jeremy Piven and Eugene Levy; Wimbledon was rather sweet. Election doesn’t count as a rom-com of course, but what a great film! Claire’s taste runs mostly to animation these days – The Tick, Cowboy Bebop and most recently Harvey Birdman: Attorney-at-law. Harvey scares me a bit because he looks exactly like my one-time paramour Phil, also now a lawyer. If Phil wore a mask and had wings, that is.

Anyhoo! Jeremy is porting OpenGL to the PlayStation Portable, which makes me love him more than ever. I feel guilty about Seth’s appendix: I was joking about the death of the author, ye over-literal fates! If you’ve invited me to a party and I didn’t come (looks guiltily at Leonard and Sumana) I was probably on the couch eating ice-cream, sorry. Late pregnancy is very distracting, like the end of Tony Kushner’s play Millennium Approaches, or like sitting on the tracks in the path of an oncoming train.

I must stop coming over all Malthusian every time I see Seth. The poor boy’s going to get a complex.

S: The EFF has a fundraising challenge. People don’t like giving money to lawyers.

R: They prefer charismatic megafauna.

S: Exactly.

R: They should put you on the begging letters! You have big neotenous eyes.

S: I don’t think I qualify as megafauna.

R: Maybe not, you’re…

Unison: …too low on the food chain!

C: Twinkle star, how I want you star. Up up up up world so high, like a diamond in the sky…

R: Claire, do you know what a diamond is?

C: Yes.

R: It’s bling-bling!

C: OH!

Pause.

C: Twinkle star bling-bling, how I want you star bling-bling.

I thought pictures like this one had been photoshopped, but it turns out there really is, or was, a street called Humanity in New Orleans.

It’s underwater.

My friends are hot.

The mink bagpipes is feeling a lot better. She was all smoochy and full of purr while she was sick and scared, but the other night I had to lift her off my bed so I could go and attend to a woken-up child, and she tried to rip both my hands off.

Claire can’t quite manage Barnaby’s name. “Nuncle Barbany! Bubble-bee! Bum!” Jeremy says she seems to have standardized on “Bumba-dee.” Whatever his name is, she loves him passionately and insists that he must help her with her octopus puzzle again and again and AGAIN.

We think she must have seen some Katrina footage. “Baby sad,” she told Jeremy. “Why is the baby sad?” “House broken.”

Bebe’s been very sick with vestibular disease. It’s a middle-ear disorder, in her case probably from a ruptured eardrum. It’s destroyed her sense of balance and she falls over a lot. She refuses to let this cramp her style.

Yesterday I was asleep on the couch. She jumped up to sleep beside me and fell over. It was exactly like being smacked across the face with a set of mink-covered bagpipes.

As Quinn would say, there’s probably already a Yahoo! group for that kink.

I’m ashamed, now, that I was worried about the French Quarter, the bookstore in Faulkner House, Cafe du Monde. All seems very frivolous in the face of this suffering and death.

In the interests of not making things worse, here is useful information about charities with sectarian agendas.

After lights out:

“Mummy?”

“Yes Claire?”

“Do you like… chairs?”

“Um. I don’t know. Yeah, I guess.”

“Do you like… how about… pants?”

“Pants?”

“Do you like… how about… flowers? Do you like… poo? Do you like… light? No? Or yay?”

“No more talking, Claire.”

“Yay? Or no? No? Or yay?”

“Shh.”

I forgot to blog the amazing meal we had the other night at Range, the new place where Timo’s used to be on Valencia. We ordered family-style, which was super-smart because we all got to taste everything and it was all outrageously good.

Our appetizers were goat cheese and sorrel ravioli, venison with red peppers, hamachi sashimi with cucumbers and avocado and an incredible chilled carrot soup. For entrees we had glorious roast chicken, perfect steak, delicious chard stuffed with goat cheese and mushrooms with a fried squash flower and the coffee-rubbed pork shoulder, which was out of this world. (And from Niman Ranch, so Salome: shush.) All the desserts were good too, but the standout was the Brillat-Savarin souffle with strawberries and balsamic reduction on the side. We had a cool, light Mendocino Pinot and a big fat syrupy Cotes du Rhone.

The space is gorgeous, all stainless steel and well-designed lighting, and our server Sophia was helpful, enthusiastic and cute. Even the lattes were delicious. Matthew, who has a Morgan Stanley expense account and eats like a feudal king in New York, was blown away: “Excellent, for the provinces.” All for less than half the price of Fifth Floor or La Folie. Very highly recommended.

Reflecting her parents’ indecisiveness: “Baby Julia! No, baby Zoë! No, baby Julia!”

Howling like a coyote: “Aroo!”

Django’s favourite: “Bicycle!”

Pick o’ the bunch: “Aroo!cycle!”

Ada: Ow! Claire! No! No breaking my fingers!

Quinn: She must have not made her numbers.

R: She messes up again, she’s sleeping with the fishes.

A: No sleeping with fishes! Ada sleeping with the horses!

Q: “Dear [potential employer], please hire me.”

D: “I write good one day.”

R: “You are capitalist bastards crushing the rich inner life of the proletariat.”

Q: Oh, I’m okay with that.

D: Quinn doesn’t believe other people have inner lives.

R: That’s because Quinn doesn’t have an inner life.

Q: I do so!

R: You can’t prove it. Unless we dissect you as well.

Q: Being your friend comes at certain costs.

R: Among these costs are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…

Quinn and Annalee swooped down and spirited me away to lunch at Atlas.

Q: Explain your business to Annalee, and why it’s conducted in a crack alley.

R: Oh, okay. We sell private equity research as a front for our cocaine-importation business.

A: Do you have prostitutes too?

R: Yeah, but we outsource on contract, so if they don’t meet quotas, we can smack those bitches up.

A: Tell me more! I’m very interested in the sex vertical.

At Atlas we met various other cowboys from the Electronic Frontier. Seth had written an article about Rusticatio Californiana for Annalee’s magazine Other.

Danny: I liked how the article was pitched to the magazine’s target audience. Lots of Latinate perversion.

A: It’s so cute, I think Seth sees Latin itself as a sort of alternative sexual identity.

S: I –

D: No, shush. I think we should be able to establish this from a closer textual analysis.

R: Let’s inject dye into his brain and dissect him.

Q: Couldn’t we just do an MRI?

R: No, I think any procedure he can survive will leave us with lingering questions.

D: This is a radical new mode in literary criticism. You could totally get funding and tenure.

R: It’s just the death of the author.

S: That’s the funniest joke about my death that anyone’s made today –

There was a lot more, but this margin is too small to contain the proof. Don’t be surprised, though, if you happen to see a geek cabaret featuring dramatic readings of the preamble of the GPL, or a slash-graphic-novel about Helen Keller and Anne Frank. Because Helen is deaf and blind and Anne is hiding in the closet, there’s no dialogue and the pages are all black –

Fifth Floor is so incredibly conservative that the investment bankers and their families politely ignored Kat’s amazing pink and purple braids and dreads and the fact that I wore a cocktail gown over my enormous seven-months belly. The hostess, however, brought jackets for the brothers Fitzhardinge, to smarten them up a bit.

“They’re washed after every use,” she said.

The food was fantastic. Heirloom tomato puree and crab meat on avocado for the amuses-bouches; an extraordinary mussel chowder, with fingerling potatos and infused creme fraiche; apricot-stuffed poullarde with shiitake mushrooms and white corn, so rich and savoury yet light; a “tart” made up of stewed nectarines and a disk of delicate almond pastry, topped with creme brulee. All finished off with tiny berry muffins that the waiter called petits financiers.

We did like the idea of enforcing a dress code at Burning Man – everyone visiting the camp having to wear an x, for various values of x:

“A fur hat.”

“A pee funnel.”

“A merkin!”

“A merkin with a pee funnel attached!”

“Washed after every use.”

I love this city from its foggy head to its heroin-beneedled toes. However, as with other entities I wholly adore (the farting Fitzhardinges, Bebe the bitey cat) I am forced from time to time to acknowledge its slight imperfections.

I just spent forty minutes driving around 16th and Mission looking for parking. A spot finally opened up on Julian Street, and I was halfway through a 3-point turn when a young women in an aged Corolla ducked past me and took the spot. I swore, she swore more, I swore back with interest, and added a vehement gesture.

She got out of the car, slammed the door behind her and came swinging at me with (I swear this is God’s own honest truth) her disabled parking placard.

As Quinn remarks: “BLOG ME, is what that placard really said.”

One cold night last week Bebe wormed her way under the blankets and slept for a while with her head on my shoulder. When she left there was a strongish smell of kibble, but I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until I awoke next morning that I discovered the half-chewed cat biscuit she had left on my clavicle, presumably as a hostess gift.

This morning she was curled up on my lap when Julia aimed a mighty kick at her. Bebe gave a cross mrowl, turned around and bit my belly.

It’s a good thing she’s pretty.

Nat: I should bet William $10 that he’ll need to go to sleep by a certain time, and he can have $10 to bet as well. I believe the market knows what time he’ll go to sleep! I sure as hell don’t.

D: Bedtime futures.

J: Bedtime instruments.

D: Bedtime options.

J: Thirty-year government-backed bedtime bonds.

R: Jesus, men, do you want these kids to grow up to be economists?

R: So who here likes ferns?

Q: Take my meteor! Please!

J: That joke was old in the Cretaceous.

D: Now I have nothing against mammals…

J: Some of my best meals were mammals!

D: …so, ladies and gents, I want you all to give a very special welcome to our next act… he’s a little bit nervous because… he’s a shrew!

R: Oh god no, I hate shrewish humour.

Last night after work I went to a guided tour of the birth center at St Luke’s. I got there late and only just managed to squeeze into the lift with the two dozen other pregnant women. Then as we were walking around I almost fainted. My thyroid meds ran out three days ago and it has taken me most of the last two weeks to get it through the Walgreens pharmacist’s head that YES, I CHANGED PROVIDERS. So between the heat and the huge belly and the fatigue and achiness of low thyroxine levels, I had to sit quietly for a minute and be the great big cliche pregnant woman until my ears stopped roaring and my peripheral vision came back.

On the whole, though, the provider-changing experience has been a large and brightly coloured plus. I got wonderful care at Cal Pacific, where I had Claire to much fanfare: they called me the hippy mama because I was the only one of 29 women who gave birth there that night who didn’t opt for an epidural (I begged for one at 10cm, but by then it’s too late!) I got even better care at UCSF, where a twinkly-eyed elderly Australian man diagnosed my hypothyroidism, probably saved Julia’s life by doing so, then brushed away all efforts at heartfelt thanks.

(“Do you miss Australia?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, “do you?”

“No.” And we both laughed.)

But I am overjoyed to be at St Luke’s. My midwives are legends in their field; the birth center is almost equally renowned. It’s tiny, and chances are I will be one of only two or three women there when Julia is born. The c-section and episiotomy rates are among the lowest in the city. The whole experience of being monitored for gastroenteritis was remarkable for all the unpleasant things that might have happened but did not: a six-hour wait in the ER at SF General; a fruitless battle with insurance. And St Luke’s is my neighbourhood hospital. You can see it from my bedroom window. I walk past it on my way to work.

On the tour I started chatting with a first-time mom who is tossing up between Cal Pacific and St Luke’s. Once other moms overheard that I’d already had one kid, they surrounded me and started peppering me with questions. Did I have a natural birth? Who was my doula? What’s it, y’know, like? I kept wanting to say “I’ve only had one!” but of course one is infinitely more than none.

What I did try to say is how lucky we are here in San Francisco. You can have your silver-spoon birth at Cal, your birth with a view at UCSF, your midwife-attended birth at SF General or St Luke’s, or a home birth. They’re all excellent options. In every case you’re likely to have a healthy mom and a live baby, which is all that really matters when you get down to it.

All women everywhere should have so many choices.

Oh, and I picked up the thyroid meds on the way home. Those little pills work so fast, I’m already back up to 90% of normal speed.