chloe the goat

Originally uploaded by artolog

She’s becoming quite the neighborhood celeb.

It’s been crazy. I got that bistro set for the terrace and we’ve had friends over nearly every night to sit out there and drink sauvignon blanc with us. Which has been delightful, except that I am always hungover which makes me even grumpier in the mornings. Hard to imagine but true. On the bright side I got chunky gold streaks in my hair, and between that and the excellent European foundation garments making me feel like a million pounds sterling, I am probably the cutest I have ever been.

On Saturday Claire and I went to Armistead Maupin Elementary for our first garden day. It’s sort of miraculous: there’s this sliver of land between the school and the fence, and it has been planted with corn and lettuce and herbs, peaches and currants and hazelnuts. I met the PTA presidents and a bunch of other parents and Devon the eco volunteer, and Claire met Ivy and Toni who are also going into kinder and might even end up in her class.

We helped build a cob bench, a mix of clay and sand and straw that is sort of like adobe. Claire and a bunch of the other kids mixed it by stomping it with their bare feet, then we all squished it around the stones that make the core of the bench. Very primal to be building with these ancient materials: good villagey bonding experience.

Today I finally paid attention to my car’s loud whiney noise. It was whining every time I turned a corner, which was annoying because I turn corners a lot. Takes a village to fix a car: the cool punk rock bikers who live with lovely old Stan down the street diagnosed it instantly when I parked beside them yesterday as low power steering fluid.

I considered changing it myself until I researched the matter online and found that the wrong kind of fluid will cause your power steering to INSTANTLY EXPLODE or something, so I took it to Jerry’s where they fixed it as part of an oil change. Because this was Sunday and they were shorthanded I was conscripted to help them push an SUV into the garage. I love my mechanic. And my punk rock biker neighbours.

This afternoon Claire and I picked blackberries on Bernal Hill, and made them into pie.

I planted grape vines on my terrace. I’m going to put flowers out there too. The tomatoes Aten’t Dead. I figure if we put a cafe table and chairs out there we’ll have effectively a whole nother room in the house, right? Right?

I miss Cambridge. My commitment to contrariness is the stuff of legend. I particularly miss Grantchester, which is a fairly obvious sublimation of the extent to which I have always missed Grant and Kirsty.

San Francisco, my equal in contrariness, is doing its utmost to win back my affections. On Friday we left the kids with a babysitter and went to the Lumiere to see Werner Herzog’s film Encounters at the End of the World. As we arrived a limo pulled up and a whole bunch of people in fancy dress got out. I regret to say I was quietly sarcastic about this, because they turned out to be the producer/cinematographer and several of the interview subjects.

Encounters is about Antarctica. Unusually for a Antarctic film it was made for no budget under the Artists and Writers program; so there were no minders following Herzog around whitewashing everything, ho ho. This shows, especially in the early scenes, where McMurdo squats on Ross Island like a filthy little mining town, and we spend a good deal of time talking to the service workers who make up 90% of the population.

If you like Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Antarctica, funded by the same program, you’ll love this film. Herzog likes the same misfit-idealists for the same reasons. And it’s not all righteous social anthropology either. You can’t really point a camera anywhere down there without seeing something unimaginably beautiful and strange. Producer Henry Kaiser is a specialist diver who blasts holes in 20-foot-thick ice with TNT, then swims in the ocean underneath.

The footage from those dives is otherworldly. There are aliens down there.

Encounters may be the best science fiction film I have ever seen.

After the excellent Q&A, Jeremy and I headed out into Russian Hill walking randomly. I wanted to try Petit Robert, although I had no idea where it was. We walked briskly up Polk, under a friendly fog, past wine bars with warm laughter spilling out. It all felt very French and lo, there was Petit Robert. Jeremy had rabbit risotto and I had moules frites. We split a bottle of really delicious pinot blanc, and the dessert came with milk jam, a kind of dulce de leche that catapulted me back to the alfajors my sister used to make by boiling cans of condensed milk, when I was a little girl.

On Saturday we went to Spanish class then drove out to the newly-reopened Warming Hut for sandwiches. I was not-quite-subliminally looking for a place as pretty as Grantchester. Crissy Field is not it; it’s striking but not beautiful. Still, I loved seeing one of the Pier 39 sea lions porpoising along right in front of us.

“Sea monster!” Jules cried joyfully.

We spent the afternoon at the Dyke Rally in Dolores Park. It was too crowded for me, I don’t really like human beings en masse, they are strange, unaccountable chimpanzees. But it was lovely drinking chardonnay with Ian and talking about Europe. We agreed that San Francisco looks and feels like a frontier town compared to Paris or London. Ian says that no one is allowed to build anything in Barcelona until they can prove the new building will be much prettier than the old one.

Today we took both kids to see Wall-E. Jules particularly loved it and was able to follow the plot very closely: “Robot! He has lost his friend. Oh! He has found his friend again!” I cried, because I am a big girly wuss, and also because the dystopian beginning – an Earth of garbage – is much more plausible than the hopeful end. I tend to think the future will look more like McMurdo and less like Grantchester or Oz Farm, but I hope I am very wrong.

Oh! I forgot to mention that a neighbour brought his kid to Martha & Bros this morning. Not his human child. His baby goat. An orphan from the herd he keeps down at the Port of San Francisco. She was adorable and soft, and capered about. A goat in the cafe! Maybe I am wrong!

It’s been filthy stinking hot in California for a couple of days but tonight the weather has changed; I can smell the rain coming in on a cool wind through the wide-open bay windows.

The children are asleep. Even though it began with taking Jeremy to the airport for yet another business trip, we had a wonderful day: Talbot’s Toys and Martha’s birthday party.

I feel dislocated, as if my roots go no more than an inch into California soil. I miss my Londoners sorely. And yet the jacaranda we had left for dead is covered in green foliage and flower buds. Hope hurts after such a long absence, like the ache of a muscle long out of use.

The children were perfectly behaved on the flight home; Julia slept on my lap for four hours. The house is much smaller than I remembered. The cat is frenetically overjoyed to see us. Jetlag’s a little bit easier to deal with when you’re flying west and it’s staying up late rather than going to bed early.

I dreamed Veronica Mars had murdered someone and covered it up brilliantly. An odd, depressing dream, set in Oxford.

I’m reading a biography of Rosebery. Little thrills me more than cracking the spine of a new book about a Victorian liberal. Because I am an old coot.

Even though the sun is shining, there’s a freezing cold wind blowing and rattling the house. YES, THANKS NATURE, I GET IT. Could you STOP NOW?

The girls are at their most splendid. In our wanderings around Baja Noe today I got stopped by three separate sets of strangers today to be told how completely lovely they are. Jules in a little pink dress with her shock of white candy-cotton hair, and those unsettling blue eyes. Claire in a hummingbird t-shirt and cords with a kicky new bob and indomitable scowl. They’re both being extra well behaved, and showering me with random affection. You’d think they were empathic.

Hard to read or write – can’t summon the attention span. Easier to attack long-procrastinated chores. The cat litter has never been cleaner, and the last hardy tomatoes on the terrace have been ruthlessly watered.

Approved on April Fool’s Day. We started the process when Claire was six weeks old. She’s five and a half. For those of you keeping score, yes, this does mean I got European citizenship, US residency and a good public school for my daughter, all in the space of about six months. I know what you’re thinking: bitch. And fair enough.

(I’d been waiting till I got my green card to unleash hell’s fury on the DHS, but now it’s here I find myself thinking warmly of the hardworking individuals who approved it.)

In other news, Julia found my secret stash of Lindor truffles this morning. There were two. She gave me one.

“Yours.”

And held up the other, saying shyly:

“Mine?”

So we started the day with chocolate. Why not? It’s cold and Mr Jeremy is away; we need to indulge ourselves a little.

The children are being delightful, suggesting that Jeremy is in fact a bad influence. (Joke.) I read Horton Hears a Who to Julia, who heard me out and then asked politely to be put in bed, curled up and went to sleep. Claire carefully washed her toothbrush:

“If you don’t wash it properly the bristles get stiff. That’s what Ada told me.”

I dreamed last night that I got pregnant again, not that I really want to, I think, but that the bewildering vastness of my love for my daughters remains almost impossible to believe. Dreaming about pregnancy is like running my hands through heaps of gold. Mine!

A cup of hot tea next to me when I woke up. The same tea, cooler, when I woke up again after a peaceful doze. The cat snuggling into me. The children behaving delightfully. Our Spanish class, always excellent fun. Milo’s third birthday party. A pinata in the park. A visit from Jamey, Rowan and Cian. A run on the hill, where the California poppies are rioting. A hot shower. A cup of hot tea next to me as I write this. Being three-quarters of the way through an excellent book (Bridge of Birds.) My lovely Mr Jeremy sitting in one of our handsome new, thriftily Craigsourced armchairs. Plans for a sushi dinner.

Well, that was a crappy day at the end of a rough week at the end of a challenging and exhausting three months.

So I got home from work and changed and went running up on the hill. Haven’t run in ages but I figured I couldn’t feel much worse, and sure enough the sun and the music and the California poppies did their job, and soon I felt a little bit better.

And we just watched an old episode of Spaced that made me cry with happiness.

And that is how I will choose to remember this day.

We got Claire’s school assignment! We didn’t get our first two choices, the adorable schools that are within walking distance.

We got our third choice. It’s a short bus ride away. It has a great campus, with all the kinder and first grade classrooms opening off a library, and an organic garden out the back. The principal is a woman about our age, totally kickass (and parenthetically, hawt!) Claire got into Spanish immersion but there’s also a Chinese bilingual stream and English general education, so the school is a veritable crazy quilt of cultures. The kids all do Carnavale and Chinese New Year.

It’s so ridiculously charming and San Franciscan that I have taken to calling it Armistead Maupin Elementary.

Because this is me here, and I am incapable of doing anything in a gracious and straightforward manner, I have had moments of eating my heart out over my first choice school, especially as two of Claire’s close friends got into it. And yesterday, ambivalently, I dropped off an application to get on the waitlist for that school.

Ambivalently, because Armistead Maupin is actually a better school in several respects. There’s that library! And the test scores are higher, not that I care about test scores, which usually just measure white middle-classness, but Maupin is the very opposite of a white middle-class school so high test scores mean it is doing something surprisingly right. And as Jeremy points out, there are significant advantages to having school friends and then other friends who do not go to the same school as you. For example, you have more friends.

What’s more, we were lucky to get ANY of our choices: about a fifth of families went zero for seven in the first round. My first and second choice schools both saw triple-digit growth in demand this year, and demand for Maupin itself was up double digits. (I never think about my second choice school, oddly enough, which suggests that it should have been my third choice.) (In fact our little cohort was ridiculously lucky. All four families got fourth choice or better, and we all got Spanish immersion. Holidays in Sayulita, anyone?)

It’s not very likely that we’ll get into our first choice school off the waitlist. I’m actually pretty okay with this now, as I get more and more attached to the thought of Claire attending Maupin. The surprising thing about this is that a few years ago, my first choice school was underenrolled, meaning if you made it your first choice you were bound to get in.

In other words, demand is going up, and this is because more parents are applying to public schools, and this is because the schools themselves are getting better. Which means? That crazy terrifying Diversity Lottery, the one that makes it impossible for us Type A moms to control exactly where our precious darlings will go to kindergarten, is doing precisely what it was intended to do: mixing things up, challenging everyone to improve all the schools, and helping give all the kids in San Francisco a better education.

None of which is any comfort to the families who went zero for seven. My heart goes out to them, and I wish them every bit of luck in Round Two. And to the parents who have yet to go through the whole messy process, I say what wise parents from (the awesome, the essential) PPS kept saying to me: Yeah, it sucks and is labour-intensive and stressful and startlingly painful. But we ended up with a great school where our kids can thrive.

For an incredibly funny and reassuring perspective on the whole mess, go read Sandra Tsing Loh.

I would like to have an editor like Gordon Lish; only, instead of ruthlessly editing my stories, he would write them, then let me collect the accolades, royalties and hot poet wife. Takers?

Me to Julia, idly: Do you like cats?
Julia, intensely: I. Love. Cats.

What I hate most about running is that I end up warm and energized, able to breathe more easily and calmer about whatever is worrying me. It’s so unfair. The odds are totally stacked in its favour. Exercise cheats.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the San Francisco Ballet, storefronts around Union Square have the original, embroidered and jewelled tutus on display. The effect is to make the expensive clothes that are for sale seem drab and dowdy.

Claire: This is my unicorn. These are its legs. And this is its metal claw, for killing.

And another thing I liked about Juno; it would have been so easy to make the cheerleader character a caricature, like Reese Witherspoon in Election, but they didn’t go there. And ANOTHER thing. Her parents were so right-on in the scene where she told them – so right on that I clutched Jeremy’s hand and hoped to God I would be that cool in that situation.

We got the tree undecorated at the appropriate time. Jonathan, Salome, Robert and Gayatri and the relevant children arrived, exchanged presents and made cookies, I am told; I fled to the comforting steam of Kabuki, where Re-cheng and I compared notes and were pummeled. Sweet.