Me: “I’d like to write a writing group. ‘Have you thought about writing it in the first person?’ ‘I think your story really starts on page 9.'”

Liz: “The poetry group would be ‘Why don’t you make it rhyme?’ or ‘I think you should replace every third word with the word after it in the dictionary. To make it more postmodern.'”

“People really say that?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t they have medication for that?”

Later I read out a line of dialog and Liz says “I have to show you a woman I know who writes really good dialog.”

“Are you saying my dialog is shit?”

“No!”

“I’ve had a quarter of a glass of wine so I’m paranoid. WHAT OF IT?”

Naomi: “They do have medicine for that.”

Liz silently hands me chocolate.

“There’s some dialog I would have liked to have written.”

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.

San Francisco looks ugly and squalid after Sydney, especially around the 101/280 interchange coming back from the airport, especially in the rain. I was glad to be back in California anyway, even if I am missing the fire-opal water at Shark Beach and schmoopily watching grainy videos of Peter Allen singing “Tenterfield Saddler.” Happy Australia Day.

But San Francisco’s beauties do reveal themselves shyly, to the patient eye: breathless empty roads at midnight, the Dolores Street palms standing straight in the orange pools of streetlights; unnecessarily cool air startling your throat and needling your exposed skin; the lemon-and-silver sun after rain.

Despite various tragic events, I am enjoying an extended period of uncomplicated happiness.

[09:19] mizchalmers: o noez
[09:19] FurHordinge: ohez?
[09:19] mizchalmers: we forgot to have a windoze 7 launch party
[09:19] FurHordinge: zomg!
[09:20] mizchalmers: *fake laugh* what do you use the new features for, my husband jeremy???
[09:21] FurHordinge: oh, it’s so easy! if I want the screen to go blue, I just do this!
[09:21] mizchalmers: here is our friend token minority! she has this to say! “…”
[09:22] FurHordinge: look, Female is showing off her recipe database and pictures of the kids!
[09:23] mizchalmers: teehee!
[09:23] FurHordinge: and Male is watching his DVD of explosions again!
[09:23] mizchalmers: (resignedly) oh, male!
[09:24] FurHordinge: (I propose we make a family movie for all the family: Exploding Princesses Talking About Their Feelings)
[09:25] FurHordinge: (And Ponies!)

[11:07] mizchalmers: of course the seminal Exploding Princesses Talk About Their Feelings (And Ponies) film is LadyHawke

R: “Who’s the nicest person you’ve ever been married to?”

J: “Hmm. The Rach. Who’s the nicest person you’ve ever been married to?”

R: “In the real world, or in Rach world?”

J: “Sigh.”

R: “Johnny Depp would never sigh at me like that. Neither would Simon Schama.”

J: “That’s because they are not real.”

R: “Rory Stewart would never tell me my imaginary boyfriends aren’t real!”

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.”

Jeremy: “So Jimmy Neutron’s parents are going to Burning Duck.”

Rachel: “Our generation? SO OVER.”

J: “Cat? Why are you snappy?”

R: “She needs to go to Burning Cat. And take catnip.”

J: “And there would be laser pointer art. Hey I could do that… Maker project… and choreograph the cats…”

R: “Bebe might have epiphanies on the catnip. She might come to realize there are better ways to express her anger than biting.”

J: “She might start insisting that the catnip comes from outer space.”

R: “I? Am going to kick your ass. Albeit v e r y s l o w l y.”

J (fleeing in slow motion): “It’s okay. Bebe doesn’t even know what redwoods are.”

Claire: “I am emptying my Carnavale balloons.” Jeremy: “You are Deflater-mouse.”

—–

Claire: “But the TV is our God!

—–

Ruairi appears with the pony puppet, all tangled in its strings. “I knitting!” he cries. “I knitting a HORSE!”

—–

Small robots marched around my coffee table, and were given tangerine food cubes.

—–

“Lost In The Fog” at the Roxie: boy meets horse, boy loses horse.

—–

Julia: “It’s raining mucher! It’s raining even much!”

—–

Rach betters TV: The News Hour With Tom Lehrer

—–

Claire to Julia, in bath: “The water snakes are not, I repeat, NOT, your friends.”

—–

For all its downsides, a plutonium mug would keep my coffee hot.

—–

Julia: “WHOO! I’m fallin’! Oof! I falled.”

—–

According to my records this is the second Thursday this week.

Francis: I hear that Sausage Day is a new holiday
Yatima: a celebration of all things sausage
Francis: I assumed it was a post-Valentine’s celebration of all things not very romantic or not involving any special effort
Yatima: i laugh every time i think about it
a lone sausage
Francis: as I was IMing to Rose about it:
[12:33] francis heaney: “Here, I bought you a Hershey bar. It was on sale.”
[12:34] francis heaney: “I ate half of it already.”
Yatima: “happy sausage day!”
funny you should mention it
jeremy got given free hershey’s bars, the little ones, and keeps offering them to me
i’m all “hersheys? …thanks, pet”
Francis: I’m actually addicted to the tiny Special Darks
Yatima: i eat michael recchiuti
and scharffen berger
when i settle, i settle for lindt
Francis: I only eat chocolates that were hand delivered to me from Germany
Yatima: gigantic, unashamed chocolate snob
germany? bah
the chocolate baths on venus, or nothing
Francis: MY chocolate comes from ATLANTIS
Yatima: MY chocolate comes from the civilization that DROWNED atlantis for its inferior choc
you can’t buy this chocolate
Francis: it is transported from the future and is made of special cocoa-treated stem cells
Yatima: you have to donate your menstrual blood
for the stem cells
HA
beat that, sausage
Francis: *hard to breathe*
*too much laughing*
also here is the Sausage Day Gift of the Magi:
Yatima: i sold the corkscrew to get you a tin of cat food, but you sold the tin opener to get me a bottle of two buck chuck

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 have a big post brewing but in the meantime, have you noticed how much better things are under an Obama administration? There is life on Mars, and when people fall out of the sky over New York City, they live.

J: There are birthday presents for Claire, and supplementary presents for Julia so she doesn’t get jealous.

R: What if Claire gets jealous of Jules not getting jealous? It’s so hard to keep it fair! What was I thinking having a baby on Christmas Day? Why didn’t anyone warn me?

J: There should be books. Although the obvious authority is useless.

R: “I did what it said in the Bible!”

• AIDS/abstinence/other (yawn)
• a pony (strong, fast, loyal)
• a baby (obsessively attached, uncanny)
• the baby Jesus (loyal, uncanny)
• the Bilderberg Group (warning: this list item not thought through)

“And the star guided three wise men from the East to where the baby was lying there in the hay.”

“MAMA I KNOW THIS STORY ALREADY.” *eyeroll*

“I don’t think you know all of it. The three wise men were called Sandy, Pigsy and the Monkey King. Sandy was a fish god, a god of the ocean and death. Pigsy was a god of earth and appetite. And the Monkey King was the Great Sage, Equal of Heaven. He was an air spirit.”

“What’s an air spirit?”

“Listen. The three kings brought three gifts for the baby. Pigsy brought gold, which is a gift of earth and the body. Monkey brought frankincense, which is a gift of air and spirit. And Sandy brought myrrh, which is a gift of water and death.”

“Why?”

“These are the gifts we give the people we love. We look after their bodies and their spirits, and we then take care of them when they die.”

“Oh. Okay.” Long, pensive silence. “Daddy? Did you fart?”

Choosing new glasses isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. Where are the frames that say all three of “unreformed Mission hipster-nerd”, “corporate bitch” and “PTA mom, but in a Sandra Tsing Loh way, not a Sarah Palin way”?

From Prada and Kate Spade, as it turns out.

(˙ǝʌlǝʍʇ ɯɐ ı) ˙ǝɯosǝʍɐ sı sıɥʇ

“It’s what I was saying the other day – being with you is like solitude, only better -”

“Loneliness: now with more people!”

“You know a sensitive husband would totally understand what I am saying, and be touched by it -”

“I’m like nobody, only more so!”

“You’re just digging a hole for yourelf.”

“The Well of Loneliness?”

“The well of loneliness-only-better.”

I love my rugrats
I love to read and write
I love my neighborhood
I love the sky at night
I love the whole world
It’s made of particles
Boom de yada boom de yada
Boom de yada boom de yada

I love the calculus
I love my Twitter pals
I love good restaurants
I love the animals
I love the whole world
The solar system too
Boom de yada, boom de yada
Boom de yada, boom de yada

I love Antarctica
I love organic farms
I love the BBC
I love your loving arms
I love the whole world
It’s where I keep my stuff
Boom de yada, boom de yada
Boom de yada, boom de yada

Cambridge already seems like a dream.

The only proofs that we were ever there are my new bras from Marks and Spencers. They are excellent, and improve my posture. So well do they lift and separate that I have nicknamed my boobs Church and State.