My calves are absurdly hypertrophied from trying to keep my damn heels down, such that the field boots I bought with an already-widest-possible calf are currently at Anthony’s being stretched.

So glad you asked. Impulsively flew to Arizona for a work thing. Stunning resort, right up against Camelback Mountain, with bunny rabbits hopping adorably around the grounds. Flew home. Drove up to Elk Grove, outside Sacramento, for Magpie’s baby shower. Saw Tina and Pat and Noelle and talked about Jen and missed her very much. Where did the year go? (More to the point, where the hell did Jen go? And could we have her back now please?)

I am writing this on a plane over Utah, more or less. New York, here I come. On Tuesday night I will be home, and then I’ll stay still for a little while; at least until the trip to Florida in mid-February…

When you are young and in possession of a shiny new Arts degree, that single word of advice from the film The Graduate – “Plastics” – seems hilariously inapt. When you have children of your own, it seems in retrospect like reasonably sound advice.

We didn’t watch the fireworks last night because Claire accidently gave Julia a nosebleed. Instead we washed everyone off and put them to bed. I chatted to Skud while Melbourne set fire to its spire and Jeremy worked on his LED Nyancat project.

Alain and Sarah and Ross joined us at breakfast. We had a long chat about many things, then we left Sarah playing Fluxx with Claire while Jeremy, Alain, Ross, Julia and I walked down to the Manilla River.

Today it looked like this. We took off our shoes and paddled in the cool water. Ross and Alain skipped stones across the water. Two months ago, after huge rains, the river was almost up to the roadway.

The flood exposed a new wall of rock – mixed serpentine and sandstone, I think. I climbed up to inspect it more closely and got a lot of scratches for my pains. Fifteen feet high, laid down over how many millions of years? Why do we have geologists but not geologians, theologians but not theologists? I think something ought to be done.

When I watch Alain with his nephew and nieces it hurts my heart. He’s brilliant with children and they flock to him like settlers. Saying goodbye is always a wrench. It’s that old should-I-have-moved-so-far-away thing. San Francisco is my delight. And this is my home and my family. I’ll never be all in one piece again. Are other people all in one piece? I don’t even know.

We had a long delicious lunch at the Playhouse, and then we swam at Barraba Station, and then we went to Sarah’s to cuddle the kittens and play mah jongg. Alain’s trip is nearly over. He will go back to Brisbane tomorrow, which is impossible. The years knock me over like a wall of water. Time is a river.

work trip to Seattle Jamey’s graduation party Ada sleepover Randall Museum riding lesson on Archie Cian playdate California Academy Heather’s birthday party *plonk*

I expected to hate the place. I expected to lie low and conceal my politics and edge towards the exit. I was pre-alarmed by the non-ironic Stetsons.

I did not expect a city in Texas to make me catch my breath at its beauty. But for all the corporate touristy shit slathered on it, the San Antonio River Walk is bone-beautiful. Arching trees and ducks paddling on the dappled water, and the cafes nestled in cool grottos.

I didn’t expect it to be so Mexican. Or its Mexicanness to make me feel so at home.

But it was Texas. My taxi driver back to the airport, a gorgeous Hispanic grandfather, fielded a call from his wife, who was in tears. Their son’s childhood friend, Frank Garcia, had lost his last-minute appeal. His execution went ahead as scheduled.

During a 20-minute escape from the conference I found the only bookshop in Vegas, I think. Certainly the only one in the Venetian: Bauman Rare Books. Some lovely really old stuff, seventeenth and eighteenth century, and whole walls of Folio editions, which, eyeroll, and a wall of slightly obvious modern firsts, things like Franzen and Amis.

And a case of children’s classics, which included a clothbound Kipling and The Ship That Sailed To Mars.

The thought of that book usually makes me miss my father, who read it to me when I was small and ill, but this time it made me miss his mother, my grandmother, who died before I was born. She was the bookish one in the family, and for the first time I realized what a loss her death was, not only to me and my Dad, but to her. She was younger when she died than I am now. I bet she would have been as interested in me as I am in her.

The Solar System is a perilous place, is what I’m saying. Case in point: apparently this thing is about to land on our heads. More ruefulness: if I had realized deputy chief of the U.S. Strategic Command’s space situational awareness division was an actual job, I might have tried harder in physics.

Me: “It’s amazing what you can get used to.”

Optimal Husband: “Yes?”

Me: “Today I went riding with my daughter. And tonight I had an all-time top-three meal. I should be euphoric! Instead I am merely very happy.”

(Special commendations to the beet meringue. And the heirloom tomatoes with a tomato water on the side. And the sucking pig. But it was all just beautiful and delicious.)

Can I say again how woefully, how pathetically grateful I am that the kids are such stoic little travellers? Sleeping where they can, soaking up the seat-back video, willing to be entertained at the baggage carousel, enthralled by the spectacle out the window of the Heathrow Express. The night after we arrived was a little Gothic. We had a great dinner with Grant on Store Street – Julia is still head over heels in love with him, and as McKenze said, her irises turn into little cartoon hearts when she looks at him – and we all got to bed at a reasonable hour. Then we all woke up again, and when Julia started crying for food at 3am I had to walk to the nearest 24 hour grocery store, which turned out to be across the street from Kings Cross station, which is about a million billion trillion light years from our hotel.

The Euston Road is different at night; also, it was incredibly hot. I was in a tank top. Apparently I am still, just barely, cute enough for various handsome young Londoners to take a chance on, at least in dim light when there are no other girls around. Every neon light turned out to be a place of business that was closed. The store, when I found it, was twenty yards past where I had already given up once. I caught a black cab home because my feet were a mass of blisters. When the cab driver dropped me at the hotel with my plastic bag full of cornflakes and milk and yogurt and orange juice, he asked “Going to work?” and I had a very complicated reaction of “No my jetlagged kids are in there but as a FEMINIST I totally support all the women who ARE.” Which was probably a bit too nuanced a message for 4am, judging by his expression.

At 8am I was at the Landmark Hotel in Marylebone wearing my new Calvin Klein pleated little black dress and t-strap heels over the blisters. The conference went very well, I thought, although I was flying on empty for most of it. There was an especially nice moment in the bar at the end when I was reminded that (dear God I hope they never read this) I genuinely like and respect several of my colleagues to the point of near-friendship.

Oh! Our fancy schmancy speaker was Professor Brian Cox, of D:Ream keyboard and Manchester physics fame, so Jeremy and Kirsty and the kids came along to join the fun. The girls hid behind my skirt when I introduced them to him, and afterwards Julia said: “That was really cool for you, wasn’t it, mama?” Can we at least PRETEND I am doing this for the sake of the children? No? OKAY THEN. Brian Cox is a great speaker, do hire him, he made us do math, but then he had me at his first slide, which was the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Respect, sir.

We took the girls out for pizza that night and Turkish the next night and altogether too many glasses of Marlborough sauvignon blanc were involved, so that by 3am Thursday I awoke with a mighty hangover as well as jetlag and the standard post-conference loss of the will to live. I couldn’t get back to sleep either, so I slithered into the office at 9am and sat shivering at my desk till 3pm before slithering home to sleep. Jeremy and the girls came home at 5pm, joyous after a day at the science museum, and we all trundled out to Grant’s place for more sauvignon blanc. I thought I would surely die of jetlag, but was revived by meringues and double cream, and came home to sleep a SOLID NINE HOURS and now I feel like a valid and worthwhile human being once again.

For future reference: after the piddling little sleeps on Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon I kept waking up and feeling worse and worse, which confused me because all I wanted was sleep, and it wasn’t until this morning that I realized the problem was I wasn’t getting a long enough sleep in a single go. I needed a couple of REM cycles or whatever to reset my clock.

1. Don’t be a dick to your kids. Don’t be a dick to Optimal Husband. Don’t be a dick to hapless customer service staff. They are human shields for The Man, and deserve your compassion. Channel that anger into constructive change. HULK SMASH.
2. Eat more kale. Eat more apricots. Eat more nuts. Eat more Greek yoghurt. Eat more olives and tomatoes and basil and buffalo mozzarella. Eat more spinach and avocado and pine nuts. Drink more water. Drink more Marlborough sauvignon blanc.
3. Be kinder. Be more curious. Be more aware. Praise more. Laugh more. Be in the moment. Be flexible. Be humble. Be grateful. Be amazed.

1. It turns out that the reason it’s taken me this long to try to download audio books to my phone is because libraries have been tragically afflicted with an evil crippleware proprietary standard! Luckily there is also MP3, but establishing the extreme wrongness of WMA took a couple of hours of my life I will never see again. REVENGE.

2. Finally got off my ass and gave blood this morning. There’s a center right near Montgomery Station, and this morning I was the only donor there. They’ll disqualify you if you’ve ever so much as given the stinkeye to a British cow, which is ridic, but if you are as un-tattooed and monogamous and straight-acting and only-travelling-in-the-First-World, that is to say, if you are as BORING as me, go bleed into a bag. They give you muffins.

3. Last Friday morning I got to have a look at Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard’s offices, preserved exactly as they were when H and P retired, all Mad Men with wood panelling and windows onto a Japanese garden. Then I drove back to the city, where Liz gave me a guided tour of the Noisebridge hackerspace and I examined a Makerbot that was busy making new Makerbots. San Francisco is amazing.

4. The photos of Queen Elizabeth in Ireland are very strange to me for lots of reasons. The Queen looks more and more like my mother as she ages, to the point that the picture of her speaking in Dublin Castle actually raises recognition-hackles on the back of my neck; I have my own very vivid memories of the Book of Kells and Croke Park and the National Stud, and I don’t think I have ever seen the Queen in a place where I have been before; and I know enough history that my entire sympathies are with the protestors, with the security guards and the police, and with the Queen.

5. This week I like this Janelle Monae song, this Janelle Monae song (with a surprise cameo by Claude Debussy), this Olof Arnalds song (with a surprise cameo by Bjork), The Comic Book Guide to the Mission, Inside Wikileaks and, always, the great Ta-Nehisi Coates.

It turns out I am a sucker for little girls who just lost their grandfather. Required to amuse the children for three hours this morning, I took them to Centennial Stables, where they had pony rides on Benji and Bonnie. Afterwards we went to a fantastically well-appointed and well-maintained playground and sat in the sun and ate ice creams. In short, I spoilt them like a freakin’ aunt or something. (Sydney turned into Paradise while my back was turned. One side-effect of the resources boom is a state that can spend mouth-watering amounts of money on its infrastructure. The very bathrooms in Centennial Park are sleek and modern and clean.)

Later, when the clouds rolled in and the wind grew chill, Claire searched the apartment in vain for her favourite striped cardigan. Jeremy, Janny and I joined in the search, but it was nowhere to be found. I get very anxious about lost things these days. In the evening, after I had retrieved my mother from Central Station, I borrowed a [torch|flashlight] from Jan and hiked back to a different playground that we had visited yesterday, after lunch with Kay and Kelso. On my second circuit of the park, the torchlight picked out the cardigan carefully laid out on the brick wall, waiting for me to find it. The world is full of people who are thoughtful and kind.

Since we were last here, Jan has had the awful teal carpet taken up and replaced with golden wooden floors, and has redone the kitchen. We collectively agonized for one million billion years about what colour the kitchen should be, and eventually settled on… white. It looks fantastic. The house is far lighter and more pleasant to hang out in. Net win.

All this work got finished in the last week or so, just in time for the wake on Friday, although this was not part of the plan, and the contractors cut a lot of the wood out on the terraces, which are surrounded by planters. The plants got covered in sawdust and needed to be cleaned before all the people come over…

…which is how I came to spend the last hour dusting a large aspidistra.

Do you want to hear a silly-me story? ‘Course you do, why else would you come here? In January Qantas cancelled its direct flights between Sydney and San Francisco. I took this as a personal affront and sulked for a day and a half. And now Virgin has announced that it is taking over the route, so all the emotional energy I put into that sulk went down the drain and I can have my direct flights anyway. Someone remind me next time, or don’t, since I find that sort of thing annoying.

I loved Richard very much.

That said, I read a book about Bruce Davidson winning the 1974 World Championships on Irish Cap. He was pretty green himself at the time and humble with it, so he watched the great riders of his day to figure out what they did right and he did wrong. He noticed they rode with short stirrups and crouched over fences.

I think I’ve told you that I’ve been riding shorter lately and that my lower leg has greatly improved as a result. It turns out that for human corgis like me, long-bodied and short-legged, the mythical straight line from head to hips to heels just isn’t. Your leg needs to sit further forward. So I wondered what would happen if I tried crouching as well, to get my weight in my heels and stop anticipating fences.

What happened was that Dez said: “Oh my God, I love your position over fences today! What are you doing that’s different?”

It was a brilliant lesson. We ran over the hour and I wanted to keep going. I’ve been in a warm and happy haze ever since, which has made me much more patient with errands and children, which is nice because I was pretty awful to the kids all day yesterday. Got myself caught in that horrible cycle of disliking myself for being snappy, and then immediately turning around and snapping at them again.

I’ve actually been stricter today, giving them only healthy food and refusing to turn on the TV so they have to go do imaginative play. But it’s been mellow because I haven’t felt the need to excuse or defend my hardass-ness. I simply make decisions and refuse any further engagement. A curious game, bickering with the kids; the only winning move is not to play.

I happened to be online when both the Christchurch and Honshu quakes took place. Christchurch was unbearable, of course, but Honshu – I checked quake.usgs.gov and saw the magnitude at 8.9 and thought, nah, that’s gotta be a typo.

If only. Then after I glanced at headlines on Saturday morning that suggested Fukushima was under control I told Claire, with whom I had been discussing the internal design of nuclear reactors, that it was going to be okay. How hard am I kicking myself now? I daren’t even bring it up again. It was another example, and 2011 has been freakin’ full of them, of the sheer hubris of having a kid. You engender these lives that you love past all reason, far better than you love yourself, and you send them out into a world with leukaemia and tsunamis in it. All you can do is bite your knuckles, and hope, and tell them over and over again how perfect they are, how magnificent and unlikely, how whenever you look at them, it feels like the sun is coming out.

You have to set up college funds and lean on them to do their homework and practice their piano and teach them table manners and force them to eat a frickin vegetable at least once in a while: and you must ALSO shower them with your love as if the life they’ve had so far is all they are getting, as if they’re going to walk under a bus tomorrow. Gotta be the ant AND the grasshopper, every second, without fail. Or else.

I ordered an emergency kit off Amazon. I tried to figure out how I can fit NERT training into my already impossible schedule. I kissed them goodbye this morning. But I honestly don’t know how I can do this. I want to grab my little family and run away with them to somewhere safe: but the image I always had in my head of a safe place was -ha! – Christchurch, New Zealand.

I want my mum.

Pretty sure this is what we all have, including Jeremy and Blanca. The girls had bright red cheeks, fever and snot noses. I have the aching joints and malaise, by which I mean I keep leaking tears and feel no hope for anything, ever. I can’t recommend it.

From The Truth About Grief:

Allan Kellehear, the Australian sociologist, wrote in 2005, “Australian ways of grieving… are not logical outcomes of our local experience but are rather socially constructed ways of understanding inherited from a variety of dominant foreign influences.”

From Among Others:

It wasn’t that we didn’t know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We’d been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn’t connect us to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one…

It’s amazing how large the things are that it’s possible to overlook.

I will turn forty. I would describe my state as confused and sad, grateful. Bewildered.

But for all its challenges and sorrows, the present moment is almost infinitely better than the day I turned thirty.

So that’s nice.

Claire, in agony: I CAN’T EVEN FIND MY BOOTS!

Me: Are they near the bookshelf? Where you left them last night? Even though I asked you to put them away? Do you think maybe if we all put stuff back into its place we might be able to find it again the next time we need it? No, that’s crazy talk.

Jeremy: We should ask the Mythbusters.

Homework supervision, piano practice supervision, roast chicken with kale, yams and spinach salad, dinner all sitting up at the table, bedtime at the official house standard bedtime and no later. And then! After reading Claire a chapter of The Little White Horse, then my daily mandated five hundred words on the novel?

Jesus God, this fiction gig is freakin hard! (And parenting’s no picnic either.)

The smugness when I actually hit the word count, though! The meaningless bullshit sense of achievement! The glow.