Got mail from my immigration lawyer on Tuesday morning. Spent the rest of Tuesday and all day Wednesday filling out forms, making photocopies, having our pictures taken, being inspected by an immigration doctor to make sure we weren’t leprous, psychotic, sexually deviant, syphilitic or tubercular and getting vaccinations against measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, pertussis, diptheria and some others I forget.

Today after Jeremy left for the UK I went to pick up our signed, sealed medical certificates. Our immigration doctor’s offices are in the heart of Chinatown. We had awesome Vietnamese for breakfast there the other morning, so today for lunch I just wandered into the dim sum place next door and pointed at things that looked good. I probably ate pig snouts and snake rectums, but it tasted wonderful and came to about $4.

All documented up, I walked three blocks from sunny, noisy, scented Chinatown through the hellish Stockton Street tunnel to my lawyer’s hushed office above Tiffany’s overlooking Union Square. I don’t write much about the immigration experience here because it’s an exercise in ritual humiliation that routinely makes me cry. I just wanted to emphasize that contrast: from the cramped grey examining rooms where Cantonese grandmas applying for family based petitions must in fact have to worry about testing positive for TB, to the godlike abodes of the calm collected professionals who will organize this bewildering mass of information for you, provided you can pay the substantial fee.

I have a theory. Nothing in America is not about class.

For those of you who are keeping track, we’ll be filing more-or-less concurrently for our I-140 and I-485, and if everything goes according to plan, we’ll be permanent residents in let’s see seven nines are umpty-ought, carry three and divide by the number you first thought of, what does that come to, right, maybe never.

It doesn’t do to invest too much in the process.

Reason it all had to be done in such a rush is that J, as noted above, has gone to England for ten days. I’m being very calm about this. It’s not the end of the world. I know that. It’s just a very high cliff, with the world’s ocean falling off in an unceasing torrent and far, far, far below, a glimpse of giant turtle.

“I didn’t say debtside, I just said bedside.”

“Oh, I misheard you! Debtside is funnier.”

“What about buyside?”

“Perfect.”

“I have my finger on the pulse of investment banking.”

“An excellent debtside manner.”

Things have been a little rough lately. I was cranky with Claire last night. We ended up in my bed, side by side, reading. I rolled over and lay with my back to her for a while. Then I felt her little hand in mine.

I looked over my shoulder. She squeezed my hand and gave me a radiant smile.

“I love you Mama,” she whispered.

“Thank you.”

“Can we be friends forever?”

“Sure.”

“And can you not die?”

Looong pause. All I could think of to say was:

“Not for years and years and years…”

The great thing about being married to a very smart man is that he understands things without having them spelled out to him. Of course, the really annoying thing about being married to a very smart man is exactly the same thing.

R: Had nightmares.

J: Awww.

R: Dreamed I was running around with a Brazilian boy in a favela outside Rio. Then the walls started oozing ectoplasm, so we flew away. As we took off I woke up with an ugh!

J: The favela being straight out of that Yann Arthus-Bertrand book we were looking at last night?

R: Yes. So I got back to sleep and dreamed I was trying to catch a bus, but before you could get on the bus you had to be accepted by the people who were already on it. And they kept turning me down.

J: So that would be the FOO bus.

R: …what of it?

J: Your dreams are so adorably literal.

R: What about the ectoplasm?

J: We TiVoed Ghostbusters.

R: Damnit!

Nope, no sleep.

Brunch, then sprawling in the sun on the warm pebbles at Rodeo Beach, cheese and tomato toasted sandwiches at the Depot Cafe in Mill Valley, home to nap (the small people, not the big people). Dan came over to look after Jules while Claire had a date with me and Jeremy. We browsed at Kinokuniya and had sushi at Isobune.

I was 22 years old the first time I tasted raw fish. Claire eats masago like it’s candy.

Now she’s watching Howl’s Moving Castle. I’m going to make fruit salad.

Oh! And last night when we went to see the Slavoj Zizek film, I said to the ticket agent:

“Three adults for Perverts please.”

A pretty boy nearby overheard me and squealed:

“It sounds so cool when you put it like that!”

“Oh yes, we are definitely For Perverts.”

“And there’s three of you!”

The girls have been waking in the night for some reason. I’ve been lucky to sleep uninterrupted from one till five, the last couple of nights. It’s astounding how hard sleep deprivation can slam you when you’ve fallen out of the habit. I’m practically walking into walls. The kids are tired too; Jules head-butted me by mistake and gave herself a voluminous nosebleed.

I made kale salad with olives and hard boiled eggs, cream of cauliflower soup, a summer fruit salad and banana smoothies. Running is a bit like pregnancy, in that I find myself desperately wanting to eat things like kale and eggplants.

If anyone sees my higher brain function could they ask it to call me please?

“We’re suing Uri Gellar and defending Michelle Malkin.”

“What? WHY?”

“I’m not sure. I was still too feverish to follow the trains of thought.”

“Are you sure the whole thing’s not just a fever dream?”

“Yeah! Uri Gellar, Michelle Malkin and I were in the bath…”

Claire and Ada are playing with the horses.

A: The horsie died.

C: “Mama mama, I don’t want to die!” “Sweetheart, you won’t die.” “Yes I will! I’ll get old and sick and then I’ll die!” “You’re sick? Oh! No!”

A: Then the mama horsie died!

C: “Daddy, daddy! Mama died!” “It’s okay darling, we’ll get another mama.”

I guess technically they were facing my mortality.

Ran my hundredth kilometre. Saw owl.

Grabbed family and drove out to Ocean Beach to see the freshly exposed wreck of the medium clipper King Philip, which foundered there in 1878 with a cargo of guano and the loss of no hands. There’s not much to see, just the weathered planks rooted in the sand and the grey Pacific raking them with its cold. But still, we had to see it, this time traveller, rare visitor from the past, the mahogany ship given form. Then the fog came in like a wet blanket and we scampered away to dinner at Tower Burger.

R: Charles Kingsley is awesome.

Coworkers stare at me blankly.

R: Asked how he could reconcile evolution with Christianity, he said “My friend, God’s orthodoxy is truth. If Darwin speaks truth, he is orthodox.”

This is from A. N. Wilson, who I was interviewing for the position of dotty Brit imaginary boyfriend. Rather impressively, seeings as I’m only halfway through The Victorians, he’s already disqualified himself twice: first for quoting Michael Behe without noting that Michael Behe works on pretend-science at the Discovery Institute; second and far more distressingly, for using the word “abo” to describe a couple of indigenous Australian children, as if that word had no negative connotations when used by a white person. Even Wikipedia knows better. I wrote a ferocious letter to the publisher.

Took a frickin wrong turn in the Walt Stack 5k and came through the finish line backwards! I BE DORK. Nevertheless ran in 33:44, two minutes up on last time for a personal record pace of (6.44 minutes per kilometre | 10.51 minutes per mile).

Jack: Running is the most boring thing in the universe.

Jeremy (morosely): No. The most boring thing in the universe is other peoples’ running stats.

Saw a sealion frolicking in the bay, and two great blue herons in a mating dance. Maybe I’ll run even better next time if I stop looking at all the damn wildlife.

Delicious dim sum lunch and then long lazy afternoon in Precita Park with Danny and Rose, where we collectively came up with this, for which I nevertheless intend to claim all credit.

There’s a whole city beyond the city I know, that I’m only just beginning to explore. This morning I took Jeremy and Claire to the new Flora Grubb for addictive coffee. Jeremy said what I had been thinking:

“It has a very …Burning Man feel.”

Sure, if you can imagine a lush Burning Man with delicious smells, an excellent selection of Japanese maples and no airborne grit. Once we were coffee’d up we headed to the gorgeous, gorgeous India Basin Shoreline Park, in the shadow of the old power station. It’s the parenthesis to Union Point Park in Oakland; Oakland has a sailboat playground, and India Basin has a steamship. With the post-industrial landscape and art studios and recovering shoreline, it felt like Blackwattle Bay and made me and Jeremy a bit homesick. Unaffected by our nostalgia, the girl went cheerfully nuts.

We jazzed up a very routine visit to the Target in Daly City by going in on Third and Geneva, past the MLK Pool and the new T streetcar line and Cow Palace, and coming back over Guadalupe Boulevard, which carves through San Bruno Mountain. Fierce. I wanted to hike, see the butterflies, meet Joan the Morgan Lady and go for a gallop up there. Nine years I’ve been in San Francisco and it feels like I’ve hardly scratched the surface.

Things I’m feeling curmudgeonly about:

1. the stupid, ugly condo development at One Rincon blotting out my beloved views of the Bay Bridge from Coleridge Street and Dolores Park.

2. Homestyle Midwifery having to leave St Luke’s, meaning there will be no more amazing births like Julia’s covered by insurance.

On the bright side, there’s a collective forming to support the Homestyle midwives going into private practice, and I saw the surviving owl this morning. Still, though. Hmmph.

R: What do you want to wear to school today?

C: Umm… blue… and grey.

Later:

J: I asked Claire what she wants to wear to school today, and she said, “You know, blue and grey.”

R (to Claire): You told me, so you thought Daddy knew as well?

C: Yes.

R: You do know we’re different people, right?

C: Well… you’re the same size.

Julia is an early riser. At dawn she is up with the cheerfulness and the cooing and the games. How could this have happened? Please send help.

Man, that was a long and tiring weekend. On Saturday we checked out the pirate ship playground then had delicious lamb and pavlova on the patio at The New Zealander. On the way back we swung by the old naval base – Jeremy wanted to make a pilgrimage to the site of so many Mythbusters explosions – and ended up driving through miles and miles of boarded-up base housing that reminded me of Telstar Logistics, and rightly so. Sunday saw me and Julia at another San Francisco military ruin, the Hunters Point Shipyard, for the Spring Open Studios, followed by a restorative Ritual coffee at the fantastic new Flora Grubb. By Sunday night I was wrecked. Jeremy made another lasagne. There has never been a husband so splendid.

Last night, Jeremy, taking Claire off for a timeout, quotes Futurama: Let’s have a long boring talk about our relationship.

This morning I drive with Claire grumpy in the backseat, think back to last night when The Office’s Jim lured a grumpy Andy into a rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and sing: What’s going to work?

Claire (softly): …team work…

Together: Wonder Pets, Wonder Pets, we’re on our way! To help the baby animals and save the day…

Worst run ever this morning. I decided to try and beat my usual time, so I cranked up Jonathan Coulton’s “Code Monkey” instead of my more usual warmup, “Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks. I was winded half a block up Eugenia, and groaning by the time I reached the owl. Then my earphone connector came loose and as I was trying to reconnect it I skidded, lost my balance and came a cropper on Bernal Heights Boulevard.

Worried onlookers flocked to me. I waved them off, saying:

“No, it’s fine, I’m just an idiot.”

I finished the rest of the run without mishap and came in at exactly the usual pace.

I’ve been reading The Tummy Trilogy, which makes it impossible to stick to any sort of diet that isn’t, you know, delicious. I don’t think I qualify as a serious eater in Trillin’s sense of that term – my tastes run too haute – but I definitely have a level of engagement with food. Luckily and in spite of this morning’s pratfall, the running seems to be sticking. I don’t do it for any particular reason any more. I just run. That should offset at least a little of the half-and-half in my morning coffee.

Every woman has to ask of her partner “Will he love me as much as Calvin loves Alice?” Jessa Crispin, another crush of mine, notes that we all have to admit the negative, because we are less worthy than Alice of love. This thought made me gloomy for a short while, until I came to a pleasing realization: Calvin loves Alice almost as much as I love Jeremy.