Oh, God, where did I leave you? Shoreditch? Damn. We struggled back to Cambridge that night and got the girls to sleep by about a million o’clock. Monday they played, we worked. Tuesday I schlepped down to London again for work. I’d booked a hotel for Tuesday night, then changed my mind and tried to cancel, then realized it was already too late to cancel without paying in full, so I lured Jeremy down to the Big Smoke to keep me company. Thanks to confused arrangements I sat in Gower Street for twenty minutes growing increasingly cross, then walked around the corner to Paradiso to find Jeremy and Grant already seated at an outdoor table.

“We were about to call the hotel and ask if there was a woman sitting outside looking VERY ANGRY,” said Grant.

I ordered a bottle of Pinot Grigio. It was an incomparably mild and lovely London night. Miss Ghostwood 2010, the beautiful Tallulah Mockingbird, was gracious enough to join us. We talked about every possible thing: Books (we all worship Hilary Mantel with an unholy passion and have progressed beyond Wolf Hall into her memoir and her earlier novel, A Place of Greater Safety. Edward St Aubyn is clever and bitchy and shallow but fun reading for a middle-aged European trip), People We Know (we love you all and are thrilled you’re doing so well. Except for that one guy, we hate that guy), Marriage And Relationships And Kids And So Forth, and Stuff We Are Planning To Wow The World With (no spoilers, sweetie!)

The hotel was, well, cheap. And close to work. And breakfast was included, and the full English was pretty much a full English, you can’t go far wrong. But the liquid purporting to be coffee was, how shall I say? Regrettable. J and I snuck off to the British Museum for a quick culture-gorge. They’ve planted a Representative South African Garden out the front, with jade plants and agapanthus and rare precious Elephant Foot Plants. J said: “The bees have been visiting all differently-coloured flowers and have stratified pollen sediments on their legs. You can see the different layers.”

Reader, I married him.

We started at the Royal Graves of Ur – irresistible carnelian and lapis lazuli and gold – and walked through rooms and rooms of Sumerian and Assyrian and Lydian and Phrygian art. Walls and walls of cuneiform, part of Assyria’s royal library: sketchy, inaccurate astronomical observations and thousands of words on the meaning of entrails, deformed babies, other omens:

“So many sophisticated civilizations,” said Jeremy, “almost no science.” They were doing pretty well by the standards of their day – fire, agriculture, writing, cities, leisure, art. But how frightening it must have been, the unknowable world; eclipses, fire flood and famine, the world beyond the walls. On to the Oxus Treasure, four horses driven abreast, a chariot worked in gold. Wicked Lord Lytton looted another like it when he was Viceroy of a famished India.

And suddenly we are in Ancient Europe, with the birth of farming in Iran – the garden of Eden, between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Room after room, culture overload. At last, Sutton Hoo. We spent a long time looking at the cloisonne work on the shoulder clasps. You can’t see it, but the blue squares are themselves checkered dark and light blue: it is millefiori glass. The workmanship. Jeremy said he couldn’t figure out how the thing was made. It made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

Too Much British Museum Girl! Work, back to Cambridge, last day in Cambridge, work, lunch with the XenSourcers and their babies. Packing, too much stuff, bags too heavy. Jeremy threw up all night the night before we left. Taxi to the station, train to Stansted, easy well-designed interchange to the terminal, standardly horrible Ryanair flight to Carcassonne. Julia whined all the way: “I want my Janny NOW!” That’ll teach me to call it a short flight. Ninety minutes is long when you are four.

Janny! And Julia’s comical Joy Face. Hiccups with the car rental nobly surmounted, culminating in us pushing away an abandoned rental that was parking us in. A Peugeot 305! Brand new and great fun to drive. The children were each allowed to choose one name for it; they both chose Twinkle; so it is Twinkle Twinkle, Little Car. Les Oliviers and its large cool rooms and breakfasts and dinners on the terrace. It is too hot at lunch time. All the trees came down and now there is a view across a fallow field to a stand of trees with the hills beyond. Oh my God, the food: pistachios and olives and creamy Brie. Apricots and nectarines that you can’t eat without juice running down your chin. Crisp cucumbers, unctuous avocados, sausages, ham, hard boiled eggs, hummus, lashings of rose wine: it is Elizabeth David and Enid Blyton all rolled into one.

Saturday night, a party in the village square. Tomato salad with mozzarella and black olives, roasted leg of duck with green olives. Dancing and dancing and dancing, a smoke machine, lasers, the macarena, conga lines. Three generations of Fitzes getting their funk on. Carrying Julia home, where she fell asleep instantly in my arms. Sunday afternoon, a visit to one of Jan’s friends. Swimming in her pool in a walled garden on a hill surrounded by vineyards. The garden itself, cherry and apple and almond trees, rose rooms, a gate with frog ornaments, a green porcelain lion. The wind farms turning in the distance. This morning, climbing the hill to the ruined castle. The village full of walled gardens. The girls sitting in the window of the curtain wall.

The first time I came to Les Oliviers, a girlfriend, not even a daughter-in-law, I looked at the yellow-walled room with the twin beds in it; and the thought that I might one day fill them with Jan’s grandchildren was too presumptuous even to be allowed to form.

I forgot to say that they were selling little bronze horse votives in the shop at the British Museum; and that Jeremy bought me one.

Oh hi there! How are you? Since we last spoke I have been to New Orleans, returned to San Francisco to collect my family and brought them all to Cambridge, England, except, as Julia keeps pointing out, for Bebe the cat, who is not here. Yesterday was pretty epic, in fact, starting with the old white dude who got all huffy when a guy from India politely asked him not to cut into the queue at the airport – “It’s called having MANNERS!” spat the old white dude, why is it always old white dudes? I mean, some of my best friends are old white dudes, but dudes! ANYWAY – and a decentish flight punctuated only by Claire’s early-morning projectile nosebleed which, what?

Where was I? Other than covered in not-even-my-own-blood I mean. Um, Heathrow, Heathrow Express, Paddington, change at Edgware Road for District and Circle Line, Kings Cross which is where I finally lost my mind – England is so fricken crowded that your personal space is much smaller than it is in San Francisco and after a while this encroachment and the sleep dep and the crowds and noise combined to make me HOMICIDALLY PSYCHOTIC – and had to be consoled with an egg salad sandwich. And so to Cambridge, which is pretty, and our flat, which is smaller than last time but closer to the river and the Co-op. We shall see.

We staggered out for dinner by the river last night and fed the ducks on the way home and the children were out like lights by 7.30pm and you know what that means, don’t you? Yes, it means that they woke promptly at 2am ready for play and it is 6.25am as we speak and I have spent the last four hours and 25 minutes trying to keep them from making more noise than a pair of annoyed parrots with kettledrums attached to their feet, which is unbelievably STILL a less horrible jetlag experience than last time. Next up: Grantchester with Kirsty and the Godfathers. Birds are tweeting. It’s good to be here.

Meaning, I think, comes from doing a full accounting of your limitations and assets, your passions and your weaknesses, your belief system and your fears, and then rubbing up against the things that cause you to panic, like an allergy skin scratch test, and find out what your reactions are. Once you figure out how you can contribute to the greater good, once you’re able even to define that, you take that information and pour yourself into one direction. Regardless of discomfort or regrets or what-ifs. (And then doing that over and over again, until death.) That does not fit on a T-shirt. That to me is more important than bliss, which would really just lead me back into bed, maybe with a bowl of corn flakes, or maybe I would become like an elderly widower, and just Wait for Death. Or become Alice James.

I was not eavesdropping. They were braying. They are both in their fifties.

She: How about this rain? Cold enough for ya?

He: Obama weather.

They snigger.

He: I scored. I took a short position worth 1.5 million, and the whole market went down four points this morning. They’re mad at me at work but I don’t care! I just sent my boss the commission slip. The client said ‘Do you know what you made on that trade?’ and I said ‘Bra…’

(He is a white man.)

He: ‘Bra,’ I said, ‘I always know my commission. That is the first thing I know.’

She (admiringly): You just don’t give a fuck, do you.

He: I don’t give a fuck. They could fire me, I wouldn’t care.

She: Really?

He: Really. I would walk. I got plans. All I want is for someone to give me fifty million dollars.

At a week shy of her four-and-a-halfth birthday, right on schedule, Julia became a sudden and zealous Haver Of Opinions. Her sister also experienced this phase, during which we coined the phrase Four Is Hell.

For example: I’ve been experimenting with wearing things other than jeans and tshirts very occasionally. This morning I walked out of the bedroom in the new Frye Melissa boots Jeremy bought me, a thrifted brown wool skirt, a pink tshirt and a black cardigan. Julia looked me over shrewdly.

“You want to change that jacket,” she said. “You want the sparkly jacket.”

Chagrined, I changed the black cardigan for a chocolate-and-gold one I picked up at Thrift Town last week. I have to admit, it looked a lot better.

As if that weren’t scary enough: We’ve started an ongoing series of stories about Blair and Dahlia, the girls’ interdimensional evil twins. They live in a town called Frank Sarcastor and they always misbehave and are cranky. They don’t eat nice food, just things that taste of snot. At swim class they fill the pool with jello so all the children get stuck.

“Maybe you should go and live with them,” said Julia today. “Since you are always cranky.”

I have no idea how we will get through the next six months. Keep us in your thoughts.

I thought I was going to have some unstructured down time for the first time in a week; and lo, Julia peed her pants. Nobody told me parenting would require endless, inhuman efforts of will. Well, okay, everyone did but even so! I didn’t know they were serious!

And what is more: I would never have fixed the stupid car if I’d known I would spend most of a week stuck in traffic.

Jeremy’s office and the underneath of our bed are purged of e-waste. The kids’ toys and the underneath of their bed are purged of goo. Good baby toys and clothes have been carefully stored for friends’ future babies. Dust and pollen have been carefully stored IN MY NOSE.

Julia sings:

“I love the world.
I love everybody in the whole world
and I love to do anything!
This is my weekend.
Oh the weekend is so-o-o beautiful.
Everything is so beautiful,
so beautiful,
SO-O-O BEAUTIFUL!”

Between the decluttering, the new garden and the fact that I basically had my car rebuilt this week… I guess it’s spring :/

Scottie has been sold, this time for sure maybe (selling horses is a Byzantine process) so yesterday was (probably) my last ride on him. I was a bit meh about it, because Bella is so easy and fun and rewarding and with Scottie I have to be much more disciplined and correct and it’s much harder work. Sydney got to ride Bella, and I must shamefacedly confess to a moment of pure possessive bitchiness when I saw Sydney putting Bella’s bridle on.

It was an inauspicious day anyway. It had been raining all the way down to the barn and the weather was bitterly cold as well as soaking wet. I don’t like riding in the indoor – although I am grateful to have an indoor, and not have to face the unpleasant choice between riding in the rain or not riding at all for two months out of the year. And then Scottie’s bridle had the curb rein on, and I haven’t ridden with a curb rein since I ill-advisedly put a double bridle on Alfie when I was about eighteen.

Technical notes: Scottie’s bridle isn’t a double, because a double bridle isn’t just two reins, it’s two reins attached to two bits. Scottie is still wearing the rubber jointed pelham he likes so much, but the bit converters that handled the bit and curb chain via a single rein had been taken off, and a thinner rein had been buckled to the lower ring to control the curb chain through a lever action.

I walked carefully up to Erin, explained and offered to take the curb rein off. That’s because you need light, consistent hands to ride with a curb chain if you’re not going to jab the horse in the chin unfairly; I don’t think my hands are good enough yet. Erin told me to get over myself. So off we went with me holding the reins as if Scottie’s jaw were made of rare bone china. I’ve had it drummed into me forever that you don’t hang on the horse’s mouth, and you especially don’t do it with a strong bit, and if there’s a curb chain involved as well you don’t do it cubed, times one hundred, with cherries on top.

Turns out Scottie really really likes it when people are respectful of his mouth. And my new improved lower leg helps a lot with getting him moving forward with impulsion. He rounds himself and gives you these amazing cadenced trots and canters, and it feels spectacularly huge. I glanced over at Bella and looked at her skinny little neck and thought ever so slightly rude thoughts about small mares with no forehand.

Erin set up canter poles, and after we’d ridden through a few times, forward and straight, she raised the middle pole to be a low vertical. This worked really well for me because I had to keep my leg on and concentrate on keeping a light strong position two strides in and two strides out of the fence, all while holding the double handful of reins, and not smashing Scottie’s Waterford-crystal lower jaw. This is how I relax, by the way.

Finally, we did a twisty-tight course with sharp turns. Beth and Austin aced it both times. I completely flubbed it the first time and rode it not-prettily the second. But we jumped everything and my position was half-decent over the jumps and best of all, Scottie at no point got anxious or tried to speed up or roar away. His anxiety issue is almost resolved, and he’s like another horse – like Austin, almost! Cheerful and honest and good at his job. But flashier than dear old Austin :)

The main problem was that Scottie kept cross-cantering during the changes of direction, so we finished with some canter circles on the flat until I could keep him united at the canter. This was difficult, but also revelatory, because a disunited canter was Alfie’s biggest problem and I could never figure out how to ride through it. Not only have I improved dramatically since Alfie’s heyday in the late eighties, I have improved a lot since three months ago, when I was afraid to ride Scottie over fences. It was a patchy ride, bad in parts but good in others, and I finished it flushed with happiness and hard physical effort. Completely worth braving the rain for.

Thanks so much, handsome man. You taught me a ton and had the best cadence I have ever ridden. I hope the clover is hock-deep where you are going, and that your new owner loves you crazy.

Just a fragment, really, hopelessly idealized, I mean really, a meadow beside a waterfall, there might as well have been Tom Selleck and a sandwich. What the fragment was really of though was the sunlight shining on, indeed reflecting off, a side view of his white ass and thighs that were always his best features (“What an ass!” heheh) and us being sweet to each other and happy together, as we seldom if ever were in life. And waking to remember that we will probably never speak to each other again, with excellent reason. A reminder as if reminders were needed that I am turning 39 tomorrow. Mothers! Lock up your sons!

And falling asleep again to visit the house, loved house, lost house, changed in dreamlike ways, ways that Richard both would and would not approve. The polished concrete floor half-stripped of red and green paint was beautiful, and all the rough bricks were true to life. But this version had an imperious view of rooftops and the Harbour, and it was not at all clear why Jeremy’s room did not have a door, so that we had to climb through an internal window. And waking to remember that the house has been sold to a half-Scottish half-Danish lover of Sydney School houses, whose three young sons will, I hope, love it as much as I do, although how can they?

No wonder I spent most of yesterday verklempt and listening to depressing songs of youth. I was emo before the word was coined! Last night was a lot better, a very liberal Anglican church up near Coso and Mirabel somewhere, with a friendly (two-humped?) llama eating nasturtiums out of the front garden and chickens wandering around during the service. Thussy would have loved it. We all went, Bryan and the boys, Shannon, Salome and Milo, us Fitzchalmers and even Janny and Gemma when they came to visit; there was a treehouse in a spreading live oak where they could conveniently stay. Testimony took the form of people writing famous mathematical proofs on the whiteboard, with all of us in the congregation chanting along with them. “DIVISION BY ZERO! CONTRADICTION!” A straightforwardly happy San Francisco dream.

Yesterday I rode for the first time in five weeks. Low expectations are my friend! I assumed that I would fall off and be crushed to death beneath Scottie’s iron-shod hooves, so I was quite pleased when instead I managed to more or less keep up with the-other-Erin and Sarah, who are very good, and only make two or three terrible mistakes. Scottie’s in a new bit: a jointed rubber pelham with a curb chain. He was in a slow twist eggbutt snaffle, or something like that. How awesomely English and perverse are the old horse bit names? The rubber mouthpiece makes the pelham a gentler bit, and gives him something to chew, which he loves. The curb chain supplies the emergency brakes.

I was slow to adapt to the change. Scottie’s carrying himself better, because he’s more comfortable in this hardware and happier generally. Just as Bella did last year, he’s spent a few months settling into the barn and putting on weight, and now he’s a mellower and more cheerful horse. You can feel the muscles of his back relaxed and loose and warm. I guess that means I am sitting better, too? I get some undeserved credit for my riding improving on the sale horses when it is the horses themselves that are filling out and calming down in the kind and wise McIntosh program. But that’s quite okay with me!

Anyway, slow to adapt, yes: we were warming up in the dressage arena and I was fussing with his head, when I should have been just getting him to move forward. Bad Rach! I must not fuss with heads! As soon as I kept my hands still he did move forward. A lovely thing about Scottie is that he isn’t lazy, as all my great and perfect chestnut horses, Alfie, Noah and Bella, absolutely were or are. I’ve become so accustomed to nagging at horses and pushing them with my seat that my lower leg swings like a pendulum. This is an appalling fault! I need to keep my leg very still and just apply pressure with my calf. The great pleasure of riding Scottie is that when I do this, when I press him gently into a light but secure contact, he sort of surges forward with a great generous wave. It’s so beautiful it takes your breath away.

So of course the other awful and counterintuitive thing I did was to try to mess with that awesome forwardness. We went into the jumping arena and started an exercise cantering figure-of-eights over a pole on the ground. The other Erin went first on her big hot dark bay, and he tried to run off with her, as he does (he has improved out of sight since I saw him last; he used to go straight up in the air or backwards, and now he is going forwards, which is key.) Apparently while watching this I decided that Scottie was liable to run through it as well, so I rode the exercise hanging on the reins for grim death, thus guaranteeing that he would.

It was instructive. I’ve tried to avoid antagonizing Scottie on the assumption that I wouldn’t be able to cope. He did get shirty, and was well within his rights to do so, given my death grip on the reins, which clearly violates the terms of the international convention on equine rights. But Scottie’s definition of naughty, like his definition of a hard mouth, fall well short of the insane brumbies in twisted wire bits I used to hurtle around on as an immortal teenager (hi, Hawkeye!). So his little cow-hops and evasions were not even particularly frightening, let alone dislodging, and when I did sort myself out and reinstate an appropriate contact, he cantered with his big rocking-horse cadence again and I remembered that riding properly is nicer in every way.

And then he was spooked by a person behind the hedge and did a teleport to the left, but I stayed on him, and we went to chat to the person behind the hedge, and Scottie snorted disgustedly a few times and went back to being a cow pony ridden on the buckle. All in all it was a splendid Sunday afternoon.

This morning was the second last time I woke in the bedroom with the glass wall, listening to the lorikeets screaming in the trees outside. The second last time I showered in the downstairs bathroom with the sunlight shining through the bricks. The second last time it all reminded me of my wedding day.

I don’t think I’ll ever love a house as I have loved this one.

Met a friend in a park in Birchgrove. “Dude, you live in Paradise,” I observed, and he agreed. Afterwards I went to Adriano Zumbo and picked out an array of jewels, including Through The Looking Glass With Jessica Rabbit and Clancy the Rains Are Coming. And the passionfruit tart for which he is justly famous. Adriano served me himself and was adorably pleased that I’d made the pilgrimage all the way from SF.

My father-in-law and I are the only sweet teeth in a family that leans towards the more astringent pleasure of olives and juniper berries and limes. His eyes lit up when he saw the shining confections. They tasted of summer and heaven. He ate with relish and asked for more. Afterwards, we had two nearly coherent conversations with him – “What’s under a floating floor?” “Concrete!” and “You fell in love with me at first sight, didn’t you?” “Oh yes.” Janny told him Claire’s comment on Janny’s wedding photo: “You had much less wrinkles, Janny.” Richard laughed.

It was more than we’d had from him in weeks, and it was our last visit on this trip. I have no idea how to end this post.

Lamb roast on our last NYE at Cooper Park Road; fireworks; early to bed. Julia was ill all night and I slept, very badly, beside her. Up to write a book review and pack and zoom to the airport and jump in the absurd little turbo prop plane to Tamworth, where we found my Dad, my Dad! Intense conversation all the way to Barraba, and there were my mother and brother and sister and brother-in-law and niece and nephew! The kids formed a solid playblob for six hours. I gorged on Christmas cake and trifle. We played mahjongg. Now I am lying in bed in the Playhouse Hotel listening to rain on the roof.

I finally made it over to the new Blue Bottle Coffee location near work, for yogurt parfait and New Orleans iced coffee. It’s a stunning place, all blond wood and huge windows, just like my idealized typical Sydney cafe. Idealized Sydney is awesome; the food is incredible and there are no cockroaches and everyone is going to live forever. I am about to head back to Australia and tear myself apart all over again, the neurotic expatriate’s annual orgy of second-guessing and self-doubt. Whee. I didn’t love my country until I left it and now I long for it with an intense and hopeless passion. I also greatly fear having to move back. Don’t you wish you were me? To paraphrase Garfield, until you actually go and live there again, Sydney makes a very serviceable paradise.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with the notion of sanctuary: a farm in a green valley fortified by impassable mountains (it was somewhere near Lithgow, or maybe Braidwood), a nine-hundred-year-old college quadrangle, a city on a hill. After ten years of war and bloodshed and political heartbreak, and after having my babies in an empire that seems to have gone mad with its own power, my longing for safety is more intense than ever. And at 38 I am finally smart enough to have figured out that nowhere is safe. Bushfires threaten my parents’ little country town; California’s bankruptcy is the water eroding the foundations of UC Berkeley; San Francisco trembles astride the San Andreas fault.

James Ellroy says “Closure is bullshit,” and he is right. Sanctuary’s bullshit too, and so are happy endings, and so is vindication. The grave’s a fine and private place; other places are busy and beset with interruptions and altogether not so fine. I blame time. It’s time that slams asteroids into your Chicxulubs and shoots your last breeding female in the eastern migratory Whooping Crane population. Of course it’s also time that puts a brand new baby Claire in your arms in the dark of a Christmas morning; that wakes you up at dawn to look into the wide blue eyes of a brand new baby Julia. I would not, in fact, have wanted to miss those moments.

Sanctuary is bullshit. Imaginary Sydney is imaginary and so is imaginary San Francisco, and this sensation of treading water, of struggling to finish a to-do list that gets longer the more items you cross off, this is, in fact, the experience of life itself. You wake up and hug your brilliant, stubborn children, you go to work and listen to peoples’ stories and try to figure out what it is they are asking for and which wishes of theirs you can grant, you listen to music and you mourn your beloved dead. And if you’re lucky you get a few minutes a day, three strides of Bella in a collected canter, one really good cup of coffee, kissing Jeremy on his throat and feeling his heartbeat quicken. The memory of the candlelit table on Sunday night, and everyone laughing.

As you can probably tell I’ve been having kind of a hard time lately, and I dragged myself out of bed before dawn this morning wishing I could just stay snuggled under the covers with Jeremy and Jules. I drove down to the barn thinking about how little progress I’ve been making in all areas of my life, really, but especially with riding, and wondering about my apparently-innate predisposition to settle for mediocrity and sabotage myself. It was awesomely cold at the barn, and the rain had stripped the poplars of their leaves.

There were horses listed for our lesson but no riders assigned to them, and since Bella was on the list I took her out of her stall and groomed her and wrapped her polo wraps and didn’t make them too lumpy. It’s comforting just to be in the presence of a horse, even when you suck and are a failure. Horses are large and warm and they like to be scritched just so, and they don’t really care whether you’re getting published in professional markets or how well you are hitting your quarterly goals.

We rode in the indoor and after we had warmed up, Erin called us all in and told us we were going to work on riding in a frame. This is the new, politically-correct term for getting the horses on the bit. It’s actually a much better term because it avoids the very common but mistaken emphasis on hauling the horse’s head in… anyway, Erin made an excellent point, which is that getting the horse into a frame is as much as anything else an exercise in multi-tasking. You need to be riding off your leg and into a soft hand with a good feel, yes, but at the same time you need to be making rigorous checks of your position and correcting any bad eq. She said we all had decent balance now and should be capable of doing both things at once.

I’ve learned this before. I actually learn it about once every eight years, and always on chestnut horses for some reason. The first was George, a spectacularly ugly liver rabicano of extreme amiability. I will always remember him for giving me that first feel of a horse’s jaw softening, his neck bending and his hind feet stepping up under his body. The next time I learned it was on my Alfie, who was far better at dressage than any purebred Arabian is supposed to be. The next time I learned it was in my late twenties on Noah the Swedish Warmblood with his fiery forward trot.

Now I am almost forty and my body has been through two pregnancies and its left sciatic nerve is fond of firing randomly. On the bright side I have more tact and patience and humility and clue than I have ever had before. And I am on Bella, who is cranky and has no neck, but who is also so very clever and kind. I had already been bending her in the corners. Now I just asked for a little more bend and a little more give, and she dropped her chin and softened her back and stepped out like she was two hands taller.

As Erin pointed out, the theory of riding in a frame is very simple. You keep a steady outside rein, you push forward with the outside leg and you keep a soft and asking and giving contact on the inside. The horse should move off your outside leg and into that giving rein, and should engage her hindquarters and drop her poll and chew sweetly on the bit. I guess that’s where the old name comes from. The theory is simple but the practice, of course, is almost infinitely complex. You can go on learning this every eight years for the rest of your life, and I hope I do.

Bella was spectacular. Erin, who is never complimentary, was complimentary. The little mare stepped up behind and arched her little short neck and I could feel the muscles under the saddle all relaxed and ready for work. I felt, too, what Erin had said about my balance. It’s taken me a year to regain the strength in the saddle that I need in order to be able to ask for this kind of work. The irony is that it’s much easier to ride when the horse is engaged. The horse will respond to a much lighter leg aid; the constant communication through the bridle makes turns and changes of directions almost trivial.

And it feels so very, very good and right. This is the gift horses give us: their willingness, their power and grace, their readiness to play along. Even when I let the reins out to the buckle, Bella would still cooperate, would drop her nose almost to the arena sand to stretch her neck, would come back to the walk at no more signal from me than me flexing my stomach muscles. What a remarkable thing it is, to achieve this kind of Vulcan mind-meld with a big strange alien animal. How much of my education and the good parts of my character I owe to horses like Bella. What good timing it was to have a ride like this after so many hard weeks. And how very, very lucky I am.

Bit better, although I can’t walk up the hill from Safeway without getting out of breath. McKenze has the girls. Pleased with myself for roasting butternut squash for soup and changing cat litter. (Separate operations with thorough hand washing between.)

Beebs is so awesome when I am sick. She just snuggles up to me and purrs and purrs and purrs.

So sick. Jeremy is in Tokyo and I have manflu – fatigue, muscle pain, headache, cough and debilitating self-pity. I stumbled out of bed and made it to Nervous Dog where we found Katherine, Claire’s friend from Mandarin camp, and her mom Michelle. Katherine took up wushu after Claire’s demo at Mandarin camp, so Michelle walked both girls over to the studio. Then Salome arrived, took charge of Julia and sent me home to bed.

All of it unplanned. Reminds me why I work so hard to live where I do. Thank you neighbours; you are beyond price. I sleep now.

We bought the girls’ alarm clocks and imposed new structure on bedtime and the morning routine in the hopes of getting more shuteye, because we are all a bit psychotic from sleep dep.

Apparently the clocks gain quite a lot of time, because this morning they went off forty minutes early.

Results:

MORNING SCHEDULE

7:00am Wake up and sofa snuggle
7:10am Get dressed for school
7:15am Breakfast, one episode of TV
7:45am Put on shoes
7:50am Brush teeth and hair
8:00am OUT THE DOOR, ON THE BUS

EVENING SCHEDULE

3:00pm Home from school
5:30pm Homework
6:00pm Besos y abrazos por Blanca
6:30pm Piano practice
6:45pm Dinner and one episode of TV
7:05pm Dessert
7:15pm Put pyjamas on
7:20pm Brush teeth
7:30pm BEDTIME

To support the project, aimed primarily at More Sleep For Everyone, Jeremy got a frog alarm clock for Claire and bees for Jules.

…we’ll see how this works out.

A cat is inveigling itself onto my lap.

The extra hour just made a long day longer.

It’s been a while since I blogged about The Girls And Their Awesome, which is odd and lame of me, because Their Awesome is Very.

Julia is experimenting with language. “I missed Daddy,” she said the other night, in an emo moment, clearly meaning the present tense. It’s a direct search-and-replace from what I always say when I see her after work: “Julia! I missed you!” Other idioms of hers are translations from the Spanish. “I want much milk!” she says. “Mucher and mucher!” Jeremy pointed out that this was a literal rendition of “mas” and “mucho.”

My relationship with Claire is a little stormy at the moment, Claire’s experiments being in the area of defiance. “No!” said Julia to me last night during one heated exchange: “no shout at my sister!” She’s right, of course. She’s also extremely well-mannered. If I photically sneeze, she and I will volley: “Bless you.” “Thank you.” “You’re welcome.” “I love you.” “I love you too, mommy.”

Ah, Claire, my volatile, stubborn, brilliant, fabulous rock star. She and I butt heads continually. I would take a bullet for her in a heartbeat and I believe she’d make an excellent president, but does she have to be SO IMMATURE? The other night she went into full meltdown because I had given her ice cream in a blue bowl, AT HER REQUEST, and ignored her followup request to disregard the earlier request, take the orange bowl away from Julia and give it to her, Claire. She went to bed without ice cream, rather than back down! I HAVE NEVER WITNESSED SUCH SELF-DEFEATING FOOLISHNESS except, of course, obviously, my own.

Did I mention brilliant? May I brag? No? I will anyway. She had a catch-up piano lesson one Friday, in which she learned a new melody; by her regular lesson on Sunday, 36 hours later, she was playing the duet with Renee. She lazily corrects my awful Spanish and instructs me in Important Facts. (Actually Julia has picked up this habit as well: last night I made the obviously unfounded claim that we live on planet Earth. Julia pointed out that we live in our house, while planet Earth is in space, and can only be reached by going UP UP UP UP.)

God, they crack me up. Claire picked up Arthur and the Comet Crisis at the library. There’s a passage in it in which a computer notes that the comet will destroy the earth, and adds: “Have a nice day!” Claire thought this was beyond hilarious, and has been reading it to anyone who will stand still long enough to hear it. She has inherited my bleak sense of humour and taste for apocalyptic science fiction! Good times, good times.

When the alarm goes off before sunrise every morning, groan, they jump into the big bed with me and the cat and I hug them as tight as I can, looking down at their dear heads, one strawberry-blonde bob, one puff of white silk. My daughters, my daughters, my daughters; I never dreamed I could possibly love anyone so much. Mucher and mucher.