“This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else.”

There will be twenty women in the next US Senate. Twenty women. And at least one of them is a staggering badass.

Gay, straight: it’s all the same love.

Beautiful.

Rachel Maddow is perfect. The end.

NAJAH encounters a young fellow of similar age who is also dressed as the SPIDER-MAN.

ME, joyfully: Spiders-men!

YOUNG FELLOW OF SIMILAR AGE: You scary?

NAJAH shakes his head.

YFOSA: No. Spider-man no scary!

*

CLAIRE: I’m not a cat. I’m a werewolf. I’m a werewolf! I’m not a cat! I’m not a cat, I’m a wolf.

*

ME, accompanying JULIA across a particularly terrifying front yard: There’s a severed limb! There’s another one! Tombstones! A giant rat! Are these demons guarding the door? OH MY GOD THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THERE WATCHING ‘HOME IMPROVEMENT.’ AAAARG NOW TIM ALLEN IS ON!

JACK: Hush.

ME: At least it wasn’t Shatner.

*

ADA: That lady said that my costume was “very creative.” It was either a compliment… OR AN INSULT.

*

DANNY: I’m afraid Ada’s Nefertiti hat will fill up with rain.

JEREMY: She should fill it up with candy.

ME: It’s the inundation of the Nile.

This weekend, Jeremy’s mother is arriving but Jeremy will be spending the entire weekend wrangling adorable killer robots. That’s okay; I will take Jan with me to the girls’ piano, wushu, riding and swimming lessons, and to Najah’s birthday party. That’s assuming I finish the huge work deadline I am currently avoiding by writing this. Next weekend is not so bad – just a garden work day, school Fall Fun Festival and Julia’s birthday party, plus all the usual lessons, but at least I will have Jeremy around to help.

Sigh! I do love my wildly busy life. The girls and I have been doing a lot of cooking and drawing and reading. Julia has hugely enjoyed the beginning of piano and practices every day. Fourth grade at school comes with a choice of flute, violin or something else and Claire chose violin, which in practice means that she is trying to reproduce Zoe Keating songs at one-quarter scale. I am more than fine with that.

I am reading the Jenny Linsky stories with Jules and the Swallows and Amazon series with Claire. Jules is enormous fun to read with: every plot twist is a total shock to her. Claire likes to crochet or cross-stitch while I read, but will occasionally nudge me to ask a question or make an observation that makes it clear she has been hanging on every word. Curling up with them to read, usually with the cat walking over the mountain range of our knees, is the best part of every day.

DSC_2028, a photo by Goop on the lens on Flickr.

Ignore the poo.

DSC_1667, a photo by Goop on the lens on Flickr.

I seem to have spent the entire summer grinning like fule.

IMG_20120929_125536.jpg, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

This is Claire on a Welsh cob and I am pretty sure I daydreamed the whole thing.

I got back to the office today after more than a week of traveling on business and for fun. My desktop wallpaper is this picture of me sitting with Julia on the log bridge over the Garcia River at Oz. I looked at it for longer than usual this morning, because that’s where we spent last weekend.

Oz is a strenuous exercise in looking at landscapes of extreme beauty, eating delicious food, playing in the river and soaking up the sunshine. We read, we draw pictures, we toast marshmallows in the potbellied stove, we have long baths. It’s like everyday life only better. This year as I was reading in bed, an opossum came visiting on the deck outside, exploring the dome windows with its opossumy nose.

I am a creature of habit. Here’s what I wrote about Oz last year and here’s the year before. Liz blogged that same weekend although, being Liz, she added lots of interesting local history.

Speaking of which – local history, I mean – I paid more attention in the Point Arena lighthouse museum this year, and learned two Salient Facts therefrom. Salient Fact the First is that in the 19th and early 20th centuries the white settlers logged the living hell out of that part of the country, sending logs of old-growth redwood down the Garcia. There are pictures in this book, which I probably need to buy of the devastation. The logs ended up in San Francisco, building for example the house in which I live. So my pristine wilderness meadow isn’t, and it isn’t because it was torn apart to build my home.

Salient Fact the Second is also about the meadow, which turns out to be pretty much the San Andreas fault. The thought had never crossed my mind – that place is my sanctuary – but of course when I went back to look at Liz’s blog, she had already guessed as much. O promised land, what a wicked ground! No wonder I love you so much.

Last night Claire and I went through her favourite cookbook and picked out the gnocchi, lasagne and baked peach recipes for her to make. Today after wushu we went to Lucca, the awesome Italian place on Valencia and 22nd, for pasta flour, amaretti and parmesan. (Some dulce de leche and tuna in olive oil snuck into my bag as well.) At the farmer’s market we found stone fruit, onions, spring onions, cilantro, kale, potatoes and Colin, who always has the best neighborhood gossip. At Good Life we bought meat, carrots and lemons. Right now I am baking paleo quiche (savory custard tarts in pancetta crusts) and the girls are about to make lemonade to sell at the street party around the corner.

It’s so rare that I find myself being more or less the mother I’d hoped I would be…

But somehow, after weeks of trial and error, Randy and his team had accomplished the ideal. They had found a design that was both functional and beautiful. The swept-wing solar array looked like nothing that had ever been created before. It looked so good it just had to be right. And the calculations said that it might be able to hold as many as thirty-six strings.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye know on Mars and all ye need to know.

I’ve had some discouraging rides lately, feeling like I will never not suck, etc. Remember how Colin asked us to rethink cadence, and I forgot how to ride, and then I realized that Bella just needs a bigger canter to get over bigger fences? What I elide with a neat little narrative like that one is that the epiphany itself is almost beside the point. The stories I tell in my blog, like the running commentary in my head, are post-facto rationalizations of choices my body had already made. And muscle memory doesn’t have epiphanies, not really. You get a feeling, then you lose it, then you struggle to get it again, and you get a little worse, and you beat yourself up for sucking and being lame (which are sexist and ableist slurs, so… don’t do that, anyway.)

But you keep trying, if you’re me, in your half-arsed, forty-something, adult amateur way, as if riding ever so slightly better, not hanging on the reins, not squashing the movement with your stiffness, not blocking on one side – as if those things had some kind of moral weight, or any meaning beyond just exactly what they are. More rationalization, I guess. The truth is I want to ride because I just, I just want to ride, I always have. It’s beyond wanting to jump classes or overcome obstacles or transcend my earthbound whatever, although it is all those things as well. What it fundamentally is is having glimpsed something very good – that feeling, very occasionally, that I am moving with Bella, helping not hindering, that the two of us together are something more than the sum of its parts. And being unable to forget, or to effectively reproduce that singing moment, that plain canter with the horse moving straight under me, outside hind to inside fore, and nothing in me stopping that, my body like water, like light, like part of her body.

I had that, in glimmers, last week, and on Friday. Today we rode with Colin again and the thing about Colin is that he puts the jumps higher for us than any of the other trainers do: that’s his privilege, because it’s his name above the door. He was actually pulling them down because Toni had been jumping Coneli at a solid 4’6″, but even taken down they were 3′ or so, and the oxers were wide, and there was a hogsback.

I looked at them and knew that I could be afraid and let the fear stop me, but I could feel Bells sound as a bell underneath me, and I knew that Colin wouldn’t overface me, so I did that thing where I pretend to be the rider they think I am, and I felt the tension ebb away. That “chill the fuck out, I got this” feeling. We jumped the massive course and all I thought about was Bella’s rhythm and my line. I made mistakes but I fixed them. There was a huge oxer I thought would be a problem but when we rounded the corner to it I saw my distance and showed it to Bella and she jumped it. And then there was a white vertical five strides before the hogsback, and I turned her to it and saw the five and we jumped through it all forward, on the lightest possible contact; and it was very good.

“She goes well for you,” said Colin. “Cranky old mare.”

We had babysitters last night but it was a perfect storm of Working Mamahood: a stressful meeting, a race home to be in time to pay Julia’s tutor and drop off a BBQ chicken for the girls’ dinner, then sweatily retracing my steps to find that the place I had planned on meeting Jeremy was closed for renovations.

I had a glass of wine two doors away. J arrived and I glowered at him until I remembered that this place exists and was in fact just around the corner. We had a fricken celestial meal. The highlight was the salmon tartare, which came in a white dome of frozen horseradish that melted on your tongue like angels singing.

We sat at the bar watching the kitchen prep: liquid nitrogen to keep the horseradish domes crisp and to freeze the popcorn; the cherry sorbet served in champagne coupes with a little lime soda. Commonwealth is run by San Francisco hippies and $10 from every tasting menu goes to local non-profits, hence the name. J got tipsy. I had to pack for a business trip when we got home, but then we curled up on the couch and watched Thor, which was extheedingly thilly.

aIMG_6717, a photo by k0re on Flickr.

Bells was a witch today, for Reasons, but by Grabthar’s hammer I am fond of this mare.

I booked the hotel months ago, but I realized on Friday night I never got around to buying eclipse glasses. By Friday night they seemed sold out throughout Northern California. Tears and recriminations ensued. On the bright side, during the make-up family hug, Claire said: “I took it out on Julia but I was actually mad at you,” which is a pretty sophisticated bit of emotional insight for a 9yo. The next morning I called Scope City as soon as they opened, and before I said hello the man on the other end said “We have a shipment of eclipse glasses arriving at 11.30am.” I laughed and said “We’ll be there,” and we were.

Christmas saved, we drove to Chico to see Tina and JD. Chico has dammed its river and built a swimming area around it.

There are so many storybook-style houses, it looks like the freakin Shire. It’s gorgeous. My daydream now is to be writer-in-residence at Chico State.

In Redding we saw the Sundial Bridge. What can I say? I’ve wanted to see it ever since I knew it existed. It sits on a bend in the Sacramento, with the snow-streaked Cascades to the north and trees all around. It’s a cantilever spar cable-stayed bridge, so its modernity stabs you with its sharp gnomon. What I didn’t know is that it also has Spanish ceramic mosaic all around the dial and down into the plaza at its base, so it feels like Parc Guell had a love baby with a James Turrell earthwork.

There’s a big science museum right there, too, so we got to watch the animal show with an iguana and a black vulture and a turkey vulture and a red-tailed hawk and a Stellar’s jay and a porcupine called Spike and a raccoon and a grey fox and a barn owl called Cricket and two cockatoos. Claire was the audience volunteer for the Stellar’s jay. She was given a hat with antlers and the jay perched on her head!

And then we hung out in the plaza under the bridge until the moon ate the sun, and we watched it through our eclipse glasses.

And it was epic. At totality, everyone clapped and cheered.

We drove all the way back. We had dinner in Williams, which is literally a cowtown. Our restaurant prides itself on cutting its own sides of beef, and is decorated with the brands – as in branding-iron brands – of local cattle ranches. The garlic bread was a mountain of garlic and butter on a baguette. J and I still smell of garlic 24 hours later.

We have a rice cooker – we bought it after the first Cambridge trip, when a rice cooker saved our lives – and last night I’d shown Claire how to make a cup of white rice with a pinch of salt, a glug of olive oil and a cinnamon stick.

There were leftover sausages, which Claire cut up.

Julia made Julia Salad:

A grated carrot
Corn kernels
Torn-up nori

Julia has a glass of milk, Claire is drinking mineral water and I am kicking back with a cold Marlborough sauvignon blanc. It’s a beautiful evening, the door’s open to the terrace, the Daleks are on the telly and all’s right with the world.

The mister is off building a robot thunderdome with the downstairs neighbor, so I called the wife and invited her and our boys over for dinner. While she was here her phone rang and the ringtone was Weezer’s “My Best Friend.”

Me: sharp intake of breath. “That’s MY ringtone. You have ANOTHER best friend???”

Salome: “I am totally busted. It’s my default ringtone.”

“YOU TOLD ME IT WAS SPECIAL FOR ME. I GOT ALL TEARY.”

We had BBQ chicken from a place on 24th Street with arugula and avocado salad and broccolini and brown rice. I made a compote out of leftover strawberries and we had that with cream for dessert. Salome and I got a little tipsy on limoncello from Lucca’s deli.

This is what my life is like now. Yesterday I was weeding our little front flowerbed and Colin the carpenter stopped by and we chatted about the shelf he is making for Claire’s yarn, because Claire took up crochet after Rose taught her how. Then Kathy came by on her way to pick up Julia and Martha from the math circle Vali runs in the place on the corner. It’s been difficult to blog these past few months because happiness writes white and I have never been so happy before in my life.

I showed the wife pictures of the house I grew up in.

“But it’s beautiful,” she said.

“I see that now. It’s a jewel of mid-century modern, and it was full of teak and Hans Wegner originals. My mother had flawless taste.”

“I pictured you growing up in a place with no light! Like, a dungeon!”

“But that’s what it felt like. I look at it now and all I can think about is how miserable I was back then. When I was a teenager I could not put together a simple declarative sentence about my internal state to save my life.”

“You were a bit like that when I met you.”

One of my catchphrases nowadays is that closure is bullshit. Scar tissue is what it is. I still feel the cold where the broken bones in my ankle fused back together. But the other California cliche, validation, is not so much bullshit. Having a third party acknowledge the you that has spent the last umpty years tunneling out from underneath all your own garbage: well, that’s not nothing, as we say. It’s a thing, as we say.

It’s even possible I will forgive her for her lies about the ringtone.

“Call Peter the Rocket Scientist! We’re going to brunch like it’s 1999!”

Felt as if I’d died and gone to the Mission District.

And then I went to Seattle and then I went to London and now I am back.

Took Rose and the girls to CuriOdyssey. River otters high-fived my dottirs.