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.

“Well of course people are paranoid about suicide here,” Ron Flud explained in the County Coroner’s Office. “I mean, it’s in business, it needs tourists. Every resident’s bread and butter is based on this city’s image. And suicide doesn’t sell.”

Spoiler: it’s not actually about a mountain.

Imagine if Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion had a lovechild who became fascinated with the disposal of nuclear waste by way of Martin Amis’s Night Train.

“I think everyone’s a lot more comfortable,” Ron said, “if we keep a low profile here. Suicide is the most threatening thing we can encounter as a culture. It’s a manifestation of doubt, the ultimate unknowable. A suicide by someone we know – or even by someone we don’t know – is a reminder that none of us has the answers. So apply that to a city with the nation’s most frequent suicides and you might start to understand this city’s reluctance to talk about it.”

The night before last I dreamed that I was minding a store and couldn’t make change because the cash register was neatly filled with empty tubes of toothpaste.

Last night I dreamed that Alfie and Sugar were alive, and that they and Bebe were my animal friends and we and the girls were out having adventures. We went to a beautiful island like Kirrin Island, except that it was in Sydney Harbour. I parked Hedwig on the tidal flats and she was flooded, but we floated her to shore and there was magically no damage.

The dreams of Alfie are often especially vivid and concrete. In this one, he was occupied with business of his own but came, obligingly, when I called. I had to adjust his saddle because it had slipped back, and I saw and remembered how the blonde and chestnut hairs grew all crazy and hedgehog at the top of his tail. His red mane was almost a foot long and tangled in the salt spray. I lifted Julia onto him and she wound her hands in its strands.

I have Les Oliviers all to myself: Jan and Jeremy and Godfather Chris and the children have gone to the market in Lézignan-Corbières. I am curled on the beautiful, cozy toile sofa in the sitting room. It’s absurdly warm with a brisk breeze making the lavender nod and cicadas singing endless songs in the trees.

The cicadas take me back to the Long Trail. I can see a burnt-black trunk of a Banksia tree, and Alfie’s iridescent chestnut shoulder twitching under a fly, and the leather and canvas rein in my hand, and the red clay of the trail. Little horse, where did you go? I miss you.

Les Oliviers is full of Richard, too. I can’t stop expecting to run into him on the stairs. All my dear dead. Stay close.

It’s mostly a quiet grief, except when it isn’t. J’s been sleeping badly and I’ve been having nightmares almost as Gothic as the ones I had when I was pregnant. The other night I dreamed (because I am pretentious EVEN IN MY SUBCONSCIOUS, EVEN WHEN I AM ASLEEP) that I was scrambling through the flat searching for my copy of King Lear. I didn’t want to read “Fear no more,” I wanted to read Lear’s dying speech:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!

The bloodlands lie between Berlin and Moscow. You’ve read parts of this history before, but Timothy Snyder’s contribution (a great one) is to change the frame of reference. His subject is the decade and a half of mass death in these lands, considered as the outcome of deliberate policies on the part of both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. Snyder’s story thus transcends national and ethnographic boundaries and the ideological differences between Hitler and Stalin to discuss how institutional genocide was allowed to take place. In Europe. And no one cared.

It is, as you might imagine, depressing. Parts of it are heartbreaking. Parts of it are nauseating.

It’s amazing.

It’s effectively the sequel to Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 and a companion to both Deathless and The Hare With The Amber Eyes. The other book that keeps nagging at me is Helen Darville-Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed The Paper (no link love for you, lady: you know why) which considered the Holocaust as some sort of legitimate revenge for the Ukrainian famine… of course she was a liar, as it turned out. But that’s my country for you: people lying about genocide for notoriety. (Hi, Keith Windschuttle!)

I’m listening to it in the car, which is a good way of forcing yourself to keep going. The narrator has a very particular diction, with clipped enunciation and a downward inflection. I couldn’t place it for a while, then I realized who it reminded me of: Paul Darrow as Kerr Avon. Which is downright unsettling.

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.

Dad, a photo by Goop on the lens on Flickr.

Architect, raconteur, bon vivant. I don’t think any woman has ever had a better father-in-law.

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.

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.

Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, on the other hand, are terrible, atrocious people.

After my first year at uni I got a summer gig on an archaeological dig at Port Arthur, the big Colonial gaol site and open air museum on the Tasman Peninsula. It was fantastic, my first adventure away from home, prefiguring Ireland and America. I got to try on different selves and to spend my days in hard physical labour and my evenings flirting and learning to cook. (Zucchini should be peeled and sliced and blanched and served with pepper and too much butter. Whatever you do to them, eels hand-caught out of the well are gross.) And despite its awful history Port Arthur was, and is, gobsmackingly beautiful. Every Benthamite Panopticon should be built out of sandstone and set in parkland, on a cove.

In 1996 there was a huge, terrible massacre there. The person responsible has said that he did it in order to be famous, and so I have not spoken or written his name since I read that, fifteen years ago. (Boy, I sure showed him!) But my desire to expunge his infamy reflected a deeper conviction that the massacre was an aberration, a rain of lead from the sky. It wasn’t about Port Arthur. It wasn’t some terrible reflection on human nature (Port Arthur’s awful history is that.) It wasn’t how life is. I resist all efforts by heartless men with guns to define the human condition.

The Columbine book is super-interesting in this way, because it discusses Eric Harris as a fully-fledged psychopath. (Dylan Klebold’s is a very different case.) Harris was, as far as anyone can tell, clinically aberrant; as if incapable of empathy at the genetic level. He was a rain of lead from the sky. He doesn’t tell us anything about bullying or nerds or people who wear trench coats or social life in American high schools. He is a natural disaster, like a hurricane or a flood. And this is most movingly expressed by Patrick Ireland, who is best remembered for climbing out a window with blood pouring from the bullet wound in his head. What kept him going through the hours it took him to crawl to the window? Not hope, as it turned out. Trust. At his valedictorian address to his class, Ireland said:

“When I fell out the window, I knew somebody would catch me. That’s what I need to tell you: I knew the loving world was there all the time.”

Life is mysterious and amazing.

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.