I can’t tell whether Armistead Maupin’s Michael Tolliver Lives is actually his best book, or only my favourite of his books. I read through the entire extant Tales of the City, along with Mirrorshades, one dark winter at Moira’s house in Newtown, indulging my customary lack of clue that it was my own future I was reading about.

Now Michael Mouse is hanging with a grrl sex journalist a la Annalee and marvelling that people are blogging about Ishi. It feels as if Armistead has walked into my world, whereas in fact it was I that walked (joyfully, thankfully) into his.

“Are you my kitten?”

“Meow, meow, meow.”

“Tell me about the time before you were born. When you were inside Gemma.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Oh.”

“Do you remember before you were born? When you were inside me?”

“Yes.”

“Really? What was it like?”

“I could hear your heartbeat.”

“Oh. Okay then. What made you choose me and Daddy to be your mum and dad?”

“Because I touched you and you were warm. And I touched Daddy and he was warm.”

“Dude.”

After the miracle of the backpacks, my Dad wrote:

In my experience, it is more likely that other people will deal with you honestly.

He pointed out that he lost his wallet in Bathurst and got it back. He doesn’t have to convince me, though, because as well as Rajit Singh I have Suzanne I-am-so-sorry-I-lost-your-cellphone-number, who took Claire to the police station in Glebe when we lost her in January, the memory of which still makes me sick with fear at what might have happened.

May their blessings multiply like galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field.

Human beings are, yes, a savage little virus that is giving the Earth a fever. We are nasty belligerent chimpanzees. But that isn’t all we are. We are chimps that can choose to be bonobos. Human hands made Spirit and Opportunity, those brilliant intrepid travellers on Mars. Human hands made New York City, the most awesome and civilized place on Earth.

My absolute best moment at Viable Paradise was after reading Norman Wood‘s story. Norm is a retired insurance salesman from Florida. Think shorts and Hawaiian shirts. His story was an achingly sweet coming-of-age tale about a prepubescent girl. I remember looking up at him and catching his eye – he grinned at me – and thinking how easily I might have overlooked him in an airport or a mall: and yet he has this inner life that sparkles like a jewel.

I remember thinking, people are geodes. Whatever they look like on the outside, inside there is amethyst and stardust.

Just tired. Lots to tell you, but it’s hard to type with cat asleep on right arm.

“I married him for his luck. I’m a fortune hunter.”

“Remember, there’s no ‘me’ in Met.”

I was happy as soon as I saw the Bay Area lights out the window. Touchdown, the parking shuttle, my car, the search for a place to park in my pretty neighbourhood, the clement 2am walk back from the spot I finally found; all these things increased my joy. Man, I love it here.

New York was glorious and it was the trip of a lifetime. And now there is wine mulling on the stove and I have roasted our Halloween pumpkin for soup. And we are all together and warm and so happy.

After playing in the snow in Central Park, we trekked out to PS1, the MOMA annex in an old public school. The art-gallery-in-former-institution vibe reminded me a lot of Kilmainham Hospital, one of my favourite spots in Dublin. The exhibitions were pretty great. One artist had some plywood gratings sitting on helium balloons, so you could walk on air. The girls liked that. They also enjoyed a couple of dark rooms with big videos playing music videos. We all danced crazy to the cancan. That’ll be one of my lasting memories of this trip.

Leonard and Sumana saw my last blog post and invited us to their Backup Thanksgiving, conveniently located near PS1 in Queens. We ate Leonard’s fantastic chicken – the Sunday night roast tradition getting an unexpected boost – then Claire had a go at Powerpoint Karaoke. She chose Charlotte’s Web as her theme.

“There was a pig called Wilbur and he lived in a red barn and he looked at the spider. He looked at the spider’s web ALL the TIME. And it was really great.

“And Wilbur had a friend who was a rat who was called TempleTON. And the goose saw that the rat had a tunnel, and he let the rat have an egg that had in it a dead baby goose. And the goose egg went in the tunnel. And the egg broke! And if you went there you would smell a smelly smell!

“And I think that’s all the time we have!”

When I thought about bringing the girls to New York I had two mental images of how it would be. Claire would run around the huge gallery of the Temple of Dendur at the Met, and Julia would say “Rrrr!” to the T. Rex in the Museum of Natural History.

In fact Claire was a lot more interested in the water feature around the temple and the coins people had thrown into it. I had to explain about throwing coins into water and making wishes. Claire was very taken with the idea and demanded pennies. Four formal wishes were made:

• Claire: “that I can keep twenty five million dinosaur models and put them in a book as BIG as the WHOLE MUSEUM.”

• Claire again: “that an Egyptian mummy would come to life as a person at Halloween and scare everyone!”

• Jeremy: “that we would get the backpacks back?”

  This made me smile sadly and shake my head a little. Jeremy and the girls flew in together on Thursday night. I was in Boston at a work event. Claire fell asleep on the taxi drive to the wonderful apartment we found in Harlem, and Jeremy was so frazzled trying to manage both girls and the stroller and the luggage that he left two bags in the cab.

  One was Claire’s backpack, containing kids’ books and Topaz, Claire’s beloved teddy bear. The other was Jeremy’s backpack with his camera, laptop, PSP and passport, and the girls’ passports too.

  So Jeremy in New York and I in Boston spent an anxious night calling the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the eight police precincts assigned to collect lost property from cabs. I learned more than I wanted to know about New York taxi lost property. It’s not centralized; the dispatcher can’t call the driver for you; lots of people never get their stuff back. I started making contingency plans, and tried to interest Jeremy in a MacBook replacement for his ThinkPad.

  Passports can be replaced (although being Undocumented taps into existential fears of mine, so that loss was nasty enough on its own.) And we could buy a new laptop and camera but, as Jeremy pointed out, it’s his personal kit; the lens an extension of his eye, his laptop with all his settings and passwords. Losing that is hard.

  But I didn’t believe we could get it back, so:

• Me: “I just want Daddy to feel better.”

  The worst thing, for me, is Jeremy being upset. I was kicking myself hard for not flying down early enough to meet everyone and count their bags, but the work schedule hadn’t allowed it until the last possible minute. So I spent an unhappy night in Boston and Jeremy spent one here, and when I said “Is there anything I can do?” he said “Just come.”

  So I got to Logan and fast-talked myself onto an earlier flight and got to NYC to give everyone big hugs and drag them out for a cheering lunch at the Met. Jeremy was looking greyish and worn. I would have given a lot more than a penny to fix that.

The best part of any museum, for me and the kids, is the gift store. At the Met I found another red backpack, with a picture of the faience hippo William, for Claire, and an actual cuddly William for Julia.

And then I found a huge popup book with twenty five, if not twenty five million, dinosaur models. So I got that for Claire as well, and that was the first wish.

That evening the kids were watching Goosebumps and there was a brief flash of a mummy come to life, which was the second wish. By then Jeremy was feeling a lot better, so I got my wish too.

And the next morning Jeremy checked his mail on my Mac and saw what he thought was spam. He almost deleted it until he parsed the subject line: “stuff in cab.” The driver had the bags and wanted to return them to us. There was a number. When Jeremy showed me the mail my jaw dropped.

We spent the day at Natural History where Julia woke up just in time to say “Rrrr!”

Rajit Singh, saint of New York, returned the bags to us last night. He was apologetic; Jeremy’s water bottle had fallen out and been lost. Everything else was there. Rajit Singh told Jeremy he had felt it was his duty to get the bags back to us. He felt that he should have helped Jeremy more when he saw him struggling with the sleepy children. When he saw the important documents he was even more concerned.

We gave him a stonking tip, although I don’t feel it was enough. I say flowers grow in that man’s footprints.

Claire’s mental image of New York was of snow, and this morning we woke up to a dazzling white world. It’s snowing now and I am writing this from Jeremy’s laptop. Somewhere in New York, Rajit Singh will wake up and see the snow, and if you want to keep your feet warm, you should walk behind him, like the page walking behind Good King Wenceslas. I hope blessings fall on him like snowflakes.

Every half hour or so in the evening I hear trotting hooves on the cobblestones. It’s a horse and carriage, probably carrying tourists from Boston Common.

Business hotel districts are eerie at night.

A toy pony. But even so!

“What, you mean they’re not really laughing at my jokes? And I thought I was funny.”

“Oh, you’re charming. You’re just not as charming as you think you are.”

“No one is as charming as I think I am.”

Adrift in the affectless between-world of airport lounges, plane cabins and hotels marketed to business travellers. Equipped with my laptop and Advil PM. Missing my daughters ferociously, their noise and hot breath and incessant demands, their wowsomeness. Falling asleep at my laptop.

Is it?

He was declared a “heartless snake” by the Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson after swinging to the right of Howard on Aboriginal reconciliation in the final days of the election. His claim to be strong on climate change rings hollow when he has promised a subsidy of A$110m to Gunns Ltd, a company intending to build one of the world’s biggest pulp mills in Tasmania, which will burn half-a-million tonnes of native forest a year in the monstrosity of its electricity generator alone.

For the first time since the morning of Mardi Gras 1996, I am not ashamed of Australia’s Federal Government.

Rudd will disappoint me in, oh, let’s be generous and give him ten days or so. But today? Today is sweet. Today the government that brought us Tampa and Woomera and Iraq and the Orwellishly named “NT intervention” and union-breaking twenty years after Thatcher fucked the poor, the government that made race-baiting an accepted part of the national conversation, the government that made me incandescent with rage every time it caught my attention; the Howard government is OVER.

Salome, Julia, Milo and I dressed up for the Dickens Fair, but Claire steadfastly refused to wear anything but jeans and a t-shirt.

It’s one of the ridiculously fun, only-in-San-Francisco events, like Maker Faire and the Mime Troupe, that have become fixtures on my calendar. The organizers take two cattle sheds at the arse-end of Cow Palace and decorate them as Victorian London. Actors dress up as Father Christmas, Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, explorers, chimney sweeps, pickpockets, fine ladies and so forth. There are fish and chips straight out of the fryer, best I’ve ever had in America. There are choirs singing sea shanties, pantomimes in the music halls, shops selling a slightly anachronistic range of hastily-adapted Renaissance Faire merchandise.

It is an insanely good time. Highlight of this year was the ball, Claire being just the right age to be swept away by the actors. Everyone danced until they melted down and fell asleep on the way home.

• Claire getting out of bed the other night to return her cup to the kitchen. Jeremy and I paused the DVD and monitored her progress. As she headed back to bed she gave us one thumb up.
• Julia when I got home from work the other day, standing on the baby gate and laughing her fool head off. Also Julia piling on when we’re all lying in bed in the morning and exclaiming “APPY PEOPLE.”
• Bebe snuggled next to me at night. She is well gone before the children pile on, of course.
• Everything about Jeremy. He’s a very cool person.
• A world wide network of beloved friends and family to each of whom I have owed email or a call for months now. You’re accomplished and witty with great bone structure, and I think about you all the time.
• Critical mass of brilliant, amusing friends right here in darkest Mission District.
• Paravirt_ops.
• Viable Paradise.
• On which note, books! Kage Baker, Elizabeth Bear, Lois McMaster Bujold, Naomi Novik, Kim Stanley Robinson and Connie Willis. Hari Kunzru and Jonathan Raban, Calvin Trillin and Sarah Vowell, Graham Greene and Lytton Strachey. God, I love books.
• Food, too. Fried clams at The Bite in Menemsha. Fish tacos in La Paz. Cherry tomatos growing on our terrace. The farmer’s market. The strawberries this year! Oh my Lord.
• Consequently, running.
• Music! Claire on the piano, Spencer Day, Dean Gray, Frontalot. My iPod! My camera! And for that matter:
• Architecture, photography, film.
• Trees, mountains, rivers, the sea. Oz Farm.
• San Francisco.
• Oh, I nearly forgot: British passport, forward movement on green card.
• A glimmer of hope that St Luke’s won’t be shut down. A field of Democratic candidates that doesn’t induce coma, one or two of whom could perhaps make passably competent presidents. An Australian Federal election Howard is going to lose. That last one feels good.
• But most of all Jeremy, who has fallen asleep at his laptop at the end of the sofa and is snoring. And Claire and Julia, the binary system we orbit. Also snoring. And Bebe, who is just a pretty, cranky cat. That snores.

Happy Thanksgiving.