I’ve been thinking, for complicated reasons, of things I have that are irreplaceable: the rosettes I won on Alfie and Noah; the Onkaparinga blanket Sarah gave me to take with me to Ireland, and which is wrapped around my knees as I type; the ring my father-in-law gave me; the bronze horse on my hall table, which was a present from my mum. Big Ted, Alain’s bear when he was a child, who is beaming fondly down at me from his shelf.

For that matter, the bears my mother gave to Claire and Julia: Topaz and Bess. Topaz spent three days lost behind a shelf at Claire’s pre-school, and another two days in the back seat of a taxi in New York. Our miracle boy.

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…

We stayed up to watch the landing. Claire crashed out but Jules was with us when we jumped up and down and screamed and cried a little bit. I hope she remembers this for ever: the helpless fear, the perfect landing, the grainy pictures beamed back from another world.

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.

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.

DSC_9762, a photo by Goop on the lens on Flickr.

Also epically cool.

When the boat sailed out you can see we were on a silver bay under a pewter sky. As Jeremy noted, you could have rendered all the waves using Fourier transforms. It was exactly like sailing into a mathematical function. I thought that for the first time I understood why people love the sea.

Five minutes later, as I was hurling into it, I had forgotten again why anyone loves the sea.

ETA: Tonstant weader fwowed up.

Elephant seals: hella, hella charming.

Someone who clearly wishes us harm gave Julia a kazoo, and so we woke at 7 this morning even though it is Saturday. We feigned death until it was time to go to wushu, then we visited Briar Rose the hamster who lives with Salome, Jack, Milo and Najah. To Metate for fish tacos and then down to San Bruno Mountain to hike the Saddle Loop Trail with Jamey and Rowan.

I was expecting the mountain to be as it looks from a distance – bare and raw – but in fact it is paths winding among masses of wildflowers, and beautiful forests, and an unfortunately named Bog Trail that winds through a little canyon so beautiful it reminded both me and Jamey separately of Glendalough.

From there to the opposite corner of the city for swimming lessons (the short people) and coffee (me and Jeremy.) Claire won a ribbon for her backstroke – she has very nearly topped out of the swim school – and we made it into Lucca’s delicatessen five minutes before it closed, so we’re having fresh ravioli and Doctor Who for dinner.

“I’m so tired. I had a long day,” I said to Jeremy.

“I know,” he said. “I was there! And it all started with a kazoo.”

It’s our twelfth wedding anniversary. I was campaigning to have this recognized as the horse anniversary, but the universe wants to make it all about kazoos.

Delia Falconer’s Sydney is, I think, the best book I have ever read about my hometown, and an excellent short introduction to Why I Am So Fucked Up. Recommended!

A reread: Seven Little Australians, which has aged amazingly well. The shock for me was realizing that Yarrahappini, Esther’s home “on the edge of the Never-never,” is… just outside Gunnedah, and closer to Sydney than my parents’ place.

We swim at the pool at Haddon’s homestead. Cobalt tiles and sandstone. The children are real swimmers now; Julia can swim across the pool; Claire can swim its length. Sunlight through the water. No sound but birdsong.

Driving home, the shadows of clouds across the green hills.

At night, leaving my sister’s house: ten times as many stars.

I didn’t think she would really get out of bed, but at dawn Claire and I were indeed up on Bernal Heights, watching the lunar eclipse. Then this evening she pored over Jeremy’s copy of Full Moon. I love her so much.

I came across a notebook the other day with this written on the back:

JULIA FIZHARDING
A GIRL
HER BUK
SHE ROTE IT
THIS IS HOW YU RITE MI NEM
J-U-L-I-A

Finally picked these up for long summer camp commutes, worried I had already missed the girls’ developmental window for them. Indeed, even Julia deemed them “kinda babyish” on first listening.

They’ve been on constant rotation for three months. Beautiful, intelligent earworms that make endaughtered car trips nigh-fun.

Julia vigorously requests They Might Be Giants’ Here Comes Science every time we get in the car. So we’re all singing along to “Meet the Elements”, and I say:

“Ooh, ooh, huge science news yesterday. You know the Super Proton Synchrotron?”

Claire: “Maybe?”

Julia: “No.”

Me: “It’s a particle accelerator, like the one at Stanford, but way bigger. Well, yesterday they announced they think they observed neutrinos travelling faster than light! It’s almost certainly a mistake but if it’s true, it’s the biggest science news of our lifetimes! We’ll have to throw out a hundred years of science and start again!”

Claire: “Wow, really? I can’t wait to tell everyone at school!”

Me: “It’s amazing what you can get used to.”

Optimal Husband: “Yes?”

Me: “Today I went riding with my daughter. And tonight I had an all-time top-three meal. I should be euphoric! Instead I am merely very happy.”

(Special commendations to the beet meringue. And the heirloom tomatoes with a tomato water on the side. And the sucking pig. But it was all just beautiful and delicious.)

Claire and Bounder, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

What with one thing and another.

I dreamed that Werner Herzog was giving me a lift home. His forest-green car shapeshifted between Porsche and VW Beetle, and when he remotely controlled it out of its parking space it turned over in a ditch. Not to worry. Herzog threw a rope over a tree limb and hauled it out by hand.

The dream is true to the spirit of the film. It’s a documentary about a French cave found in the 1990s that is full of paleolithic art. Herzog, being Herzog, found the stone eccentrics: a circus-trained scientist, an “experimental archaeologist” and a master perfumer who snuffled his way around the Chauvet Cave before announcing it didn’t smell of much. Oh Herzog, how I love you! NEVER CHANGE.

The paintings, though, are ungainsayable. Despite a couple of weird layering artefacts, the film is worth seeing in 3D because of the way the painters used the contours of the rock. There’s one frieze that made both me and Jeremy laugh because it could have been the Picasso we’d seen earlier at SFMOMA.

Very comforting to me to know that for as long as people have been people, some decent proportion of us has been spellbound by horses.

Fellowship of the Ring songs matched to Christmas carols, for Claire, because she is awesome:

The Road goes ever on and on

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky

Upon the hearth the fire is red (Walking Song)

Hark the Herald

Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!

O Little Town of Bethlehem

Ho! Ho! Ho! to the bottle I go (Drinking Song)

The Tree of Life

Sing hey! for the bath at close of day (Bath Song)

Joy to the World

Farewell we call to hearth and hall! (Farewell Song of Merry and Pippin)

Deck the halls

O! Wanderers in the shadowed land (Song in the Woods)

God Rest You Merry

–Tom Bombadil’s Songs—

Good King Wenceslas

Ho! Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo!

Good King Wenceslas

Cold be hand and heart and bone (Wight’s Chant)

Deck the halls

There is an inn, a merry old inn

All that is gold does not glitter (Riddle of the Strider)

Gil-galad was an Elven-king (The Fall of Gil-galad)

We Three Kings

The leaves were long, the grass was green (Song of Beren and Luthien)

Troll sat alone on his seat of stone (Sam’s Rhyme of the Troll)

Earendil was a mariner (Song of Earendil)

The Holly And the Ivy

A Elbereth Gilthoniel

Seek for the Sword that was broken (Boromir’s Riddle)

When winter first begins to bite (Warning of Winter)

I sit beside the fire and think (Bilbo’s Song)

Away in a manger

Annon edhellen, edro hi ammen!

The world was young, the mountains green (Song of Durin)

An Elven-maid there was of old (Song of Nimrodel)

God Rest You Merry

When evening in the Shire was grey (Frodo’s Lament for Gandalf)

Greensleeves

The finest rockets ever seen

Greensleeves

I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew (Galadriel’s Song of Eldamar)

Good King Wenceslas

A small and exquisite Renoir: the head of a blushing girl.

Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse: monumental and charismatic.

A melancholy Matisse self-portrait.

Matisse as a genius colorist. Picasso as a genius of line. But three big pieces from the Blue Period. That’s a good blue.

Two from a Marie Laurencin that I really liked. This is one.

The Le Corbusier house. Daniel Stein gambling all the money away! A magazine headline: “From Picasso to ponies!” Zomg!

Bit overwhelmed at that point… I should go back. We joined SFMOMA. The building is gorgeous, and so’s the Blue Bottle kiosk with the Louise Bourgeois spider on the roof.