To get to Oz Farm you drive for a million years on 101 then turn left and drive for a billion years on the most beautiful twisty turny roads in the world. The good news: in the mumblety years since we first ventured up there, my driving has improved out of sight. The bad news: I have daughters now, who get carsick. When we finally reached the domes, down an unpaved road, along a riverbed, over a log bridge and up through a bit of Middle-earth, it was with armfuls of vomity laundry to wash in the bath.

The good news: Oz Farm is still the loveliest place on the planet. The domes sit above the river, beside a meadow, under a redwood forest. We’ve never had such spectacular weather this late in the year. We could pick apples off the trees and eat them, but it was hot enough to swim in the river. We saw Stellar’s blue jays and frogs and falcons and deer and garter snakes and the bat that lives inside the domes. We climbed the Point Arena lighthouse and saw seals and a kestrel and the exhalations of a whale.

Mostly I lay in the sun and read, or sat by the fire and read. I caught up on any amount of sleep debt. We had ravioli and rack of lamb. Carole made lemon mousse. We drew pictures and played Carcassonne and took a sleeping bag outside so we could lie on the deck and watch the stars. Both Claire and Julia fell asleep in my arms.

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.

“I just like giving pink cupcakes to Goths. It’s a very specific fetish.”

“So when you get the opportunity, you HAVE to indulge it.”

“Exactly!”

“Rule 34!”

“You totally just Googled ‘pink cupcake Goth’, didn’t you.”

“I totally did.”

Really ace weekend. Dinner at Brenda’s Friday night – crawfish beignets zomg – and then Source Code, which was epically popcorn. And then drinks at Yoz’s, where he pulled out his phone and said, “About this blog post: is Juniper Arwen Anemone Sagan Donner Hermes really a real name?” and we said “Oh my God, haven’t we introduced you to the Ximms yet? You’ll love them, they are lovely!”

Saturday I mostly slept. I slept late, went to the farmer’s market with Salome, which these days is mostly sitting outside Sandbox eating beef piroshki and drinking De La Paz coffee and talking about our lives. Then I went home and napped for hours. Then we took the girls swimming and Jules went to Azucena’s party and Claire and Jeremy and I had yummy vegetarian Indian. When I got home Bebe lay on top of me purring and saying “You remember how you slept late and then had a long nap and I got to snuggle with you all day? That was aces.”

This morning I rode Omni with Toni and Colin and jumped VAST FENCES, possibly as high as 2 foot 9. I have undeniably improved. I visited Salome on the way home and played with the boys while she tidied up, then we went back to my place and collected J and the girls and walked up the hill and had lunch in the garden behind Progressive Grounds, and bought books at Red Hill where I took a picture of a job ad for Rose, and visited Good Prospect Community Garden and picked lemons, and met Kathy and Martha out for a walk, and went to Holly Park, and picked up dinner at Avedano’s and now we are home and dinner smells awesome and I am fond of my life.

I keep forgetting to mention that while we were up at the Big Yellow House I figured out the secret to happiness. It is to make enough money without hurting anyone, if you can; to work humbly at something impossibly difficult (like fiction or equitation); to find the people you can love unconditionally and love them with everything you’ve got; and to play games with them. Hence the world-historical importance of Carcassonne and mahjongg.

I didn’t promise that it was going to be original.

Drew died on Friday. I’m pretty sure Tina waited till this morning to tell me so that I could have a happy birthday yesterday. (I did.) Tina is Jen’s sister. She was with Drew when he died.

Drew was another member of the big Santa-Cruz-Burning-Man-beach-party-with-dancing community that took me to their collective hearts when I moved to California. I saw a lot of them through the late nineties and early 2000s; right up till I had Claire, really. My relationship with Drew was very simple. Every time we saw each other we would give each other huge hugs and catch up quickly on what had been happening (me: marriage, a new job; Drew: cancer.)

Then we would dance.

It’s been, as you may have surmised, a challenging February. I am left with the knowledge of how lucky I have been: to have known people like Jen and Drew, and to have had friendships composed entirely of mutual goodwill. If you are reading this, then you are one of the people I am grateful for. Be well.

Claire in the back of the car with a notebook and pen. “Hey mama, guess what? The eighteenth binary number is 131,072.”

Sitting in the sun at the barn as a Dopey the half-Clydesdale is led past me, and seeing him as he really is: a huge strange alien beast with a vast wise eye. Like a dragon.

Going out on the harbour with Badgerbag in the Daisy, and the marine battery failing, and us having to row back to shore. Two fortysomething Internet feminists, in a boat, marooned, capable, happy.

Dylan Thomas said “After the first death, there is no other;” but he always talked a lot of tosh, didn’t he? It’s not as if I know a great many people but in the ten days since Jen died, three other people have also died. Salome says I am cursed and I am starting to believe her. This morning’s news was the worst, at least to me; a girl I knew back when I worked at the little riding school eight years ago, the year I got pregnant with Claire. She was about eleven then. She would have been nineteen now.

I sat bawling at my desk in my office, as seems to have become my habit, and then I mopped myself up and washed my face in the bathroom and sat down and took three calls. Being a grownup can be horrible. I had no idea. But it’s better than the alternative. On the way home, crushed onto a 14L Mission, it occurred to me that she will not, now, get married or have babies or graduate from college or spend a gap year with Peace Corps or start a company or start a non-profit or negotiate a raise or sign a mortgage or do any of the grown-up things I dream of or complain about.

I had this plan that I would make lots of younger friends, so that when my peers started dying I would still have friends. The possibility of burying children was something I managed to overlook.

I can’t trust myself to write about it.

This can’t be happening.

We had a huge bunch of friends and kids over on Sunday morning for pastries. Claire just wanted to hole up somewhere with a book, but littler kids kept finding her and invading her space. She was filled with impotent fury.

Moira: She reminds me so much of how you were when I first met you.

Me: …I was 22 years old.

Moira: Yep!

Oh yeah so I have a blog.

Homeschooling Claire: I have Google Translate open in another window. She is reading Isabel Allende’s La Ciudad de las Bestias. When she comes to a word she doesn’t know, I translate it for her, and she enters the word and its translation in the dictionary she is compiling. We picked up a typo on the second page.

Very late night last night scaring myself with mystery stories off Wikipedia. “Research.” The stupid novel is, well, coming along.

Lunch with Kay and Kelso yesterday: pies from Chatswood Chase. Kay’s mother Ros turned up. Her interests these days are Antarctica, astronomy and Aboriginal politics. We had a lot to talk about.

Q: What does Antarctica sound like? A: Calving icebergs. Seabirds.

Q: What does Antarctica smell like? A: Fishy penguin poo.

Note to self: send her Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. And Big’s Rach would like The Middleman.

Kay and Kel had their interview at the American embassy. After eighteen years of trying, they won the green card lottery. So they are moving! To New York. Look, I know New York is nice and all, but we counted it up and we have spent like five of the last 22 years in the same hemisphere. (She went to France. I went to Ireland. She went to America. She came back, and I went to America.) So she’s moving to the West Village? I told her Berkeley is the West West Village.

I am restless in Sydney. I miss my Barraba family and my San Francisco family. It’s overcast most days, so we haven’t been to the beach. I read Black Chicks Talking and am halfway through Best Australian Essays. Bought at Berkelouw’s and Ariel, respectively. I will keep the dead tree book industry alive single-handedly, if I must.

It is my favourite dish at the Moroccan place Francis found in Midtown, where we always have dinner. Rach H. made it for us last night when we went over. Between Jeremy’s visit in September and this trip, Rach’s mother passed away very suddenly from cancer. Seeing her face I was reminded how exhausting grief is. It is very hard work.

She cut and peeled garlic cloves and crushed them in a mortar and pestle. She mixed them with cilantro, olive oil, turmeric (instead of saffron), chopped onions, lemon juice, salt and pepper and marinated chicken legs in the mixture for a while. She added a cinnamon stick and water and put everything in her Le Creuset on the stove to simmer for almost an hour. When the chicken legs were falling off the bone, she took them out to brown and let the liquid reduce with green olives and preserved lemon in it. She served it over couscous. It was divine.

And then there was pavlova for dessert.

So we’re back in Sydney, I guess. It’s overcast.

We visited Ric in Lulworth. He was okay. Afterwards…

Claire: Why do we have to visit Ric?

Jeremy: Because he’s my Dad.

Me: If your Dad were sick would you visit him?

C: But I’m shy of Ric.

J: I’m shy of him too.

Me: I’m not shy of him but seeing him this way makes me really sad.

J: Yeah. It’s not shyness. It’s sadness. And you don’t want to cry in front of him because that would just make him sad.

Me: Right, so I do this horrible smiling-all-the-time thing. I’m hideous.

J: Don’t be silly. It’s obvious how much he likes to see you.

At this, I burst into tears.

Me: Oh, to get through a single day without blubbing.

Next we visited Thussy. Thussy and her Reg are two of my favourite people on earth. She is Austrian. He is a former RAF pilot. In their house, it is always World War Two. Reg has walked away from plane crashes and fought off cancer and is now a bouncy and bellicose 87. I suspect he will outlive me. We whisked Thussy away to Cottage Point Kiosk for awesome fish and chips.

Thussy! Has met! George! Morris! She says he is very nice. Thussy has also tickled a rhinoceros named Ferdinand and hiked in Nepal and ridden in Iran and Patagonia. Good luck having an awesomer godmother than mine.

Next we met Mary and Andrew and Vincent at a chocolate cafe in St Ives. The chocolate was delicious and the company was even better. We have been making an effort to meet new people lately and have had a 100% They Are Lovely, We Like Them Very Much result, which seems absurdly yet gratifyingly high.

This is one of the nicest things you’ll read on the Internet. Maybe ever. I am the starfucker that zooms through with a bottle of Bailey’s at 8:06pm. Keep reading; it gets even better after that.

We miss you, Douglas Adams.

God-daddy G: “i don’t know why she needs a godfather when she already gets advice like “there has to be a way to overthrow the plutocracy without being a horrible rapey douchebag”. You HAVE TO LEAVE ME SOME WISDOM SPACE!”

Work dinner with people Jeremy knows. You know how terrified I am of other chimpanzees – you may even have seen me bare my teeth at them in an abject signal of submission. But Konrad and Alyssa are extremely nice and funny. They have an excellent joke about a Rabbi Weasel, and they laughed when I described the Apple Newton: “Of course, this was years before you were born.” Alyssa took Claire and I took Julia and we had piggyback races down the hill. As Claire was falling asleep, she said: “I loved it when Alyssa gave me a piggyback.”

Do I sound miserable here? Someone asked me today if I was going through a hard time! I’m ashamed to say I laughed. Oh, my heart is breaking for the all kids who committed suicide this month, and I just sobbed my way through several relevant bits (ETA Milo’s is the best), but the reason the It Gets Better project slays me dead, every time, is precisely because I was bullied and it did get better, so much better, better than I could possibly have dreamed. Not only do I live in a city that, if it were human, I would have a helpless girlcrush on and want to make out with all the time, just look at this place, I mean, damn, I’ve had at least two occasions in the last twelve months – Jeremy’s last birthday party and the Labor Day picnic – where about five hours flowed past in real bliss. Didn’t even know that was possible. I’ve been worried my blog is getting too sappy, because I am just nauseatingly cheerful and fulfilled right now.

Anyway! Just felt I should clear that up. Today was really great. Claire, Julia and I Internationally Walked to School for cute keyrings and stickers. The webinar I gave in the morning went exceptionally well. I had a vat of Blue Bottle coffee and a very delicious bit of salmon at the reliably nommy Boulette’s Larder, right on the Bay, with several of my favourite people. In the afternoon I fooled around a little with amusing work, and then I came home to run the first math circle session for Fall. All the math parents just lovely, and even better, half of them already knew each other and were overjoyed to catch up. The new space is pretty much ideal, and it’s about sixty feet from my front door. I was able to sneak away during the third session, have a sit-down dinner with Jeremy and the kids at home, and be back in time to lock up. Now I am blogging with the MacBook on my left hip and the Beeblebooble curled up on my right. Oh look, and there’s a new MythBusters, and Jeremy just brought me tea and chocolate.

Riding lesson tomorrow! Oz Farm this weekend! Tickets to Zoe Keating next week!

Claire and I had a sleepover at the Cal Academy on Friday night, which was completely brilliant. “Can I eat whatever I want?” “Knock yourself out, kid.” We staked out the absolute primo position – under the tree in the African Hall – and woke up to birdsong, and the shadow of a leopard. We had watched “Night at the Museum” to get into the spirit of things. “It’s going to be SO AWESOME,” I kept saying: “the penguins and the butterflies and the alligators are going to COME TO LIFE.” To which she replied only: “MA-ma.” No one does disdain like your seven-year-old daughter.

Saturday was nuts: we were out of the museum by 8; Claire made it to wushu, and Salome and I made it to the Farmer’s Market, but only after being distracted by two of more than sixty simultaneous garage sales on the hill. Next year we will plan accordingly. She got a lamp and a very nice grey sweater vest. I got a pink bag I am not sure about, and Mary Janes and a cardigan and a brocade cushion cover that I am perfectly sure about, all for $8.

After the market we went to Julia’s! Kinder! Barbeque! Then Claire and I battled traffic to the Container Store, where I got baskets for the shopping bags and shoes that otherwise litter our entry hall. The baskets are a perfect fit! I am enamoured of my new, clutter-free entry hall. Jan, who arrived while the girls were at swim class, only asked “Why do you have so many shoes anyway?” I came late to the stereotypical shoe love, but I am making up for lost time. The girls were beside themselves with delight at seeing Jan.

Yesterday I rode Bella over fences, and we did a big course, and rode it better than we’ve ever done before, so that was insanely great. Then Danny and Liz and Ada came over and we had roast chicken with two kinds of yams and potatoes and carrots and a salad with spinach and yellow cherry tomatoes and squash blossoms. And it was very delicious.

Danny is thinking of buying Albion Castle in the Bayview and making it his supervillain lair. I pointed out that it would be almost unworkably far away from Mission burritos, and he said that tapping the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel could be his first crime.

This morning Julia started kindergarten. She was radiantly brave, and gave me a huge grin and a thumbs-up as she marched into her classroom. I got something in my eye. I have two schoolgirls now, and no more little kids.