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.”

At Coastal Camp Claire made friends with Audrey, Ingrid, Jessica, Olivia and Vivian. Apparently it was the reincarnation of Golden Age Hollywood up there.

dsc_0553.jpg

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens

It is a Princess Clock.

I drove Claire out to Coastal Camp this morning.

Some explanation for the non-USonians may be called for: school is out, and thanks to the weird counterintuitive school calendar around here this means we rejoice in our graduating-kindergartener’s company for the next eleven weeks. Fortunately everyone else is in the same boat, so there are many options for parking your beloved short person with responsible adults during the working day. I went a bit mad with credit cards back in February, and Claire got the classic career mom’s overcompensatory holidays: spring break at Acrosports, then this camp, a science camp in Noe and a Mandarin immersion program over the summer.

My God, but Rodeo Lagoon is beautiful in the morning. It’s a green-grey, steep-sided valley, full of wildflowers, that opens out to the green-grey Pacific. Flocks of turkeys walked around gobbling; Claire found them hilarious. I left her with the very sweet and competent camp counselors, and she grinned and gave me two thumbs up as I drove away. It felt like ripping my heart out. These days my separation anxiety is worse than hers. I suspect that trend will continue.

Three deer walked in front of my car and stopped and looked at me with their lovely inhuman expressionless faces, like models. One had a scruffy little fawn, white spots still bright on its rump.

How come grownups don’t get summer camp?

“Look, mummy!”

Julia has her dress pulled up like an apron. It is full of sand.

“It is my baby belly,” she explains.

“You’re having a baby?”

“Yes.”

“A boy or a girl?”

“A girl.”

“What’s her name?”

Julia looks thoughtfully into her dress.

“Sandy.”

Claire’s choice for bedtime reading was the Cartoon Shakespeare Twelfth Night.

JULIA: Tell me a story! Tell me a story about MERMAIDS!

RACHEL: Well. Hundreds of years ago when the British were exploring the oceans in huge wooden ships, sometimes the sailors would be months and months away from land and they would start to miss women. Because the sailors were nearly all men. And sometimes when they were in the waters around say Australia or Florida they would see dugongs or manatees and think that they were women with the tails of fish. And that is where mermaids came from. Look, here is a picture of a manatee. Isn’t she lovely? Doesn’t she look like a mermaid?

JULIA: Yes!

RACHEL: Manatees like to be thought of as very big. So when you meet a manatee, the polite way to greet her is to say “Oh, the huge manatee!”

JULIA: “Oh, the huge manatee!”

RACHEL: Excellent. Go and tell your daddy.

ME: …my old riding instructor, David.

CLAIRE (uncertainly): His name was Day-vid?

ME: Yes, that’s right, David.

CLAIRE (scornfully): That’s not a real name.

ME: Whuh?

CLAIRE: I’ve never heard of it!

ME: *wibble*

CLAIRE (with finality): *I* don’t know anyone called David.

ME: Well. No. I guess you don’t.

JULIA: Mama, copy me!

ME, OBEDIENTLY: Mama, copy me!

JULIA: Good!

ME: Good!

JULIA: Julia, would you like some ice cream?

ME: Julia, would you like – hey! Wait a minute!

At YO’S SUSHI, soaking up Asahi beer and SUNSHINE. The children are fed MISO. IDYLLIC, it is.

ME: Hey Claire, there’s a position coming open on the Supreme Court.

CLAIRE: Hmm?

ME: Do you think you could finish your law degree by, oh, say June?

CLAIRE: But I’m just a kid.

ME: But I’ve always wanted to say “my daughter, the Supreme Court justice.”

CLAIRE, PRAGMATICALLY: Well, you just said it.

There is a PAUSE.

ME: I’ve dreamed of this moment for so long.

JEREMY: At least we know she has the right kind of legalistic mind.

My goodness but I made myself ill last week. I got on a plane on Wednesday sort-of-knowing that I was coming down with something nasty, and when I got to my destination I could neither swallow nor hear. My ears popped about twelve hours later, at which point EVERYTHING BECAME VERY LOUD; then I got on another plane to come home and the same thing happened again.

But my throat stayed raw and horrible for days and days. Talking hurt, breathing hurt and swallowing my own saliva felt like choking down a small roll of rusty barbwire. Every. Damn. Time. I do not think I am particularly wimpy, despite my brothers’ longstanding characterization of me as such; I have had broken ankle bones and ribs and gotten back on the fool horses that gave them to me, and I gave birth to my two babies without any epidurals. Beat that, boyos! But I trudged up to the Emergency Room on Saturday and described my throat pain, unironically, as “severe.” The doctors were very nice but it was viral, which I sort of knew. Nothing to be done. I went home and went to bed.

By Saturday night I was having fever dreams of striking originality. There was a sort of architectural quality to them. It was rather like watching a freight train pass, with its cars made of large pale pastel blocks of light. I tried to harness these dreams and was given various insights, among which was the in-retrospect-blindingly-obvious fact that working myself into exhaustion and subsequent viral pharyngitis is self-defeating behaviour on a number of levels. I set to changing my priorities, which felt like a physical process of lifting giant perspex concentric circles and clicking them back into place in a different order. When I got it right it was deeply satisfying, like solving a puzzle, and I finally went to sleep.

I was somewhat better the next morning and have been feeling profoundly happy ever since. Still sick enough to cancel riding, but well enough to take great pleasure in seeing friends and going to a little movie and hanging with my best girls. Tonight I threw Claire and Jules in the bath, and made dinner for them with strawberries for dessert, and walked Claire through piano practice while Julia sang along, and brushed their teeth and read them the Dragons pop-up book and put them to bed. A perfectly ordinary evening shot through with pure golden joy.

[09:35] FurHordinge: As we were going down castro, so I said that milk was nicknamed the mayor of castro st
[09:35] FurHordinge: “Does evey street have a mayor?”
[09:35] mizchalmers: awww
[09:35] FurHordinge: No, but milk helped organize the gay men and women politically
[09:36] FurHordinge: “Like martin luther king did for the black people?”

American Kookaburra

I’ve been volunteering at Claire’s school on Friday afternoons, and have somehow earned a reputation as the lady who makes the kookaburra sound. Seeking to outsource the love, I said “Who here watches American Idol?” and pulled Abraham, Sarah and Ivy up the front to do their versions of the laughing jackass. Sarah won narrowly, seven votes to the others’ six and six.

My Bloody Valentine

Lemming-like behaviour on the part of the USonians never fails to drive me batshit. Valentine’s Day is an excellent example. All I ask of a Saturday evening is inexpensive childcare, a passable flick and a bowl of noodles with my sweetie. This week the Kabuki annex parking lot was full, meaning I had to park in the main garage! Our seats were not ideal! The film, Slumdog Millionaire, was pretty great, but then we had to wait almost five minutes for a table at a nearby noodlery! The trouble with Valentine’s Day is everyone else trying to shoehorn in on my regular Saturday night, and getting in my way!

This is, I have been assured, a very First World problem to have.

The Feast of the Lonely Sausage

Jeremy was in charge of making a hot lunch today. He presented us with – a single hot sausage. No vegetable, no bread. Just sausage. It was, as he pointed out, very good sausage. Kathy was reminded of the time she was served pizza on the head of a pin. Francis made the point that no one could mistake the gender of the preparer of this meal, not for one single second. I propose making February 15 an annual Feast of the Sausage. As it’s also Fraser’s birthday, the choice of anthem is a no-brainer.

Fluffy the Seagull the Horse the Bicycle

This is my foldie, named for Julia’s pet horse Fluffy the Seagull the Horse, who is named for Julia’s seagull, Fluffy. I rode Fluffy the Seagull the Horse the Bicycle back from her safety service at Valencia Cyclery this evening, in the rain, and raced the 14 Mission up the hill. And I won. This crazy scheme just might work after all…

Public Service Announcement

In the wake of Race Fail 2009 I’ve joined the 50 Books by People of Colour LJ community and will be posting there from time to time. So far the project has been amazing, making me feel like I read fiction for a reason again, and to learn things I couldn’t possibly figure out for myself.

I’m seriously annoyed with President My Boyfriend for perpetuating the Bush Administrations self-serving position on state secrets. It’s bumming me out. Our first real fight. C’mon, big O, why you even got to do a thing?

I jumped Cassie on Sunday! It was like an eighteen inch crossbar, sure, but a Taste of Things to Come!

Claire’s been all up on stage lately. Last week it was her first wushu demonstration. I would be very surprised if there is anything on earth cuter than my six-year-old’s kicks and punches, except possibly the expression on her face while she’s doing them. “WE R SRS NNJAS.” In January she and her classmates sang “Chickadee” at the school music recital. That was beyond hilarious: crowded cafeteria; tuneless kindergarteners; doting parents; phone cameras aloft.

Speaking of that cafeteria I am pursuing funding for a new school building that would include a proper auditorium. Ideally we’d like solar energy, grey water reclamation, the whole shebang. I am having a ridiculous amount of fun finding clues on the Internet and brazenly calling people at their places of work with naive questions. Last Friday I discovered $3.6m earmarked for it in the SFUSD facilities budget and tonight I talked to the head of facilities. The plot thickens! It’s not going to be easy by any means, but it is actually possible! I bounced into Kappy’s office and said:

“I love research!”

“I’ve heard that about you,” she said.

More: I’m off Zoloft; everything seems a bit colder and brighter. I loved Thrumpton Hall, The Arrival, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The First Part Last and Stories of Your Life. Frost/Nixon was pretty good too. Claire wanted to come with us, but when I said “Great idea! It’s the story of the confrontation of two huge mediated egos over foreign policy at the cusp of the electronic age!” she decided she’d rather hang with McKenze instead. Julia, and now this is going to astonish you, remains delightful.

Julia is given a trophy. Her acceptance speech: “Yes I will do that and I got this cup. Now go!”

Claire is mad at me: “I will give you NOTHING for Mother’s Day. NOTHING but SNAILS!”

Fitzchalmers family shoot 09

Originally uploaded by quinnums

Thanks Q!