Bob arrived at dinner in an extraordinary piece of technology, a boned *and* underwired bra that turned her boobage into two perfect, upthrust half-domes. This led to a wench-off, in which the assembled females tried to out-cleavage one another. One stray breast knocked over a wineglass and the wench-off paused to make way for the cleanup.

“What happened to the breasts?” whimpered Yoz.

Shards of glass removed, the wench-off resumed. Jeremy’s fish-eye was all over it.

“We’re colluding in our oppression!” I pointed out, to a chorus of cheers.

I should maybe blog, huh? The trouble is that everything happened at once, personally, professionally, immigrationally, you name it. It was like living through the denouement of a space opera. The upshot, actually, is that very little has changed. Jeremy remains splendid, the children are gorgeous and infuriating, my life is busy and amusing, my friends are awesome, redwoods are pretty, I like food, I sound like the monologue at the beginning of The Sarah Silverman Show. I’ve learned some very important lessons this week but it’s too soon to tell what they are. Let’s just stick to the basics shall we? Don’t just do something, stand there. Love, valour, compassion! Keep calm and carry on.

Sunday’s race brought my year total to 245.5km, or just over 152 miles. In Middle-earth terms, I’ve run from Hobbiton to just outside Bree. In California, that’s from Bernal Heights, where Julia was conceived, to Big Sur, where Claire was. In tiny little England, I’ve run from London to Manchester. In the real world – and now brace yourselves to be amused by my touchstone for the real world! – I have run from Frenchs Forest to Bathurst.

“Rock star guitar!
We know
rock star guitar!”

“Spider-man
saw Batman
and Mary Jane…
Yes he did, yes he did.
Oh baby, oh baby!
And then Spider-man
knocked Batman
out of the other movie…”

(sings an octave) “That’s the Mountain Song. It sounds like you’re climbing up a mountain.”

Woke up, lay in bed arguing with self about whether to go race. Lost argument, put on running gear and drove lickety-split to where I thought the starting line would be. Got lost. Decided to go for a run anyway. About half a mile in, found the runners under a huge tree, all ready to go.

“Am I too late?”

“No! But I have to let everyone else go, first.” So the race began, and then I registered and got my number, and off I went in pursuit. I picked off the competition one at a time; the eighty-year-old, the four-year-old, the hot blonde in the Genentech shirt. I figured she’d come after me, and sure enough, we paced each other along Chain of Lakes and up JFK.

My lateness blew what shred of a race plan I had out of the water, so I trotted, wheezing, and walked, fretting. I told myself that even if I made my worst time ever, at least I had shown up. I did notice that the race seemed much shorter than usual, the mile marks much closer together, and at one point I surprised the bejesus out of myself by thinking that running along a long slightly downhill stretch felt like resting.

God, Golden Gate Park is never more beautiful than in the morning, in the fog, its grass implausibly green, its trees implausibly imposing. I turned the corner into the Polo Fields and kept to the last shred of my race plan, which was to sprint into the finish. At first I couldn’t understand what the timer said when I crossed the line. I had to go back and check that I had, in fact, run a personal best. Despite taking a two-minute, quarter-mile handicap.

I have nothing but praise for this business of my metabolism working as advertised. Australia’s sporting culture, so brilliantly described in George Perec’s novel W, gave me an antagonistic relationship with my short-legged, short-sighted body. The first crack in the ice was having two glowing pregnancies and efficient, awesome births; Julia helping to demonstrate that Claire was not a fluke.

And now I have been running for six months, very slowly, but very consistently; and a little faster and a little further every time. I’ve lost weight but gained muscle; I still have a pot belly, but no one asks if I’m pregnant any more. I have far more energy and can walk a mile, uphill, without even noticing it, making 24th Street BART a lot more useful than it used to be. What really amazes me is that the dedicated sadists in the PE department at my high school have failed, in the end, to divorce me from my own flesh.

Got home, rounded up kids at some expense of spirit, walked over to Salome’s house for coffee (grownups) and playing (kids). Shannon called and I went downstairs to heartily approve the tiles she bought for our front step at the creative reuse warehouse down in the industrial district; a whole box for less than the cost of a single new tile retail.

When I got back upstairs Jamey and Rowan had arrived, and we all decided to catch the bus to Mission Playground. We took up two lengthways seats on the 49 Van Ness. Milo was squished between Salome in her Jackie O glasses and Jack in his green checked fedora. His solemn freckled two-year-old expression was the exact midpoint between their two faces.

We stopped in at Borderlands to admire Ripley and her half-brother Sly. When we got to the playground, tucked around the back of Valencia, far from the traffic, the trademark Mission sunshine was pouring out of a cloudless sky. Milo drove the playground train for an hour while the grownups sat in the shade and talked politics. And then we had lunch at Burger Joint, and then we caught the bus home, and now the girls are playing in a moderately friendly way with the toy trains, while Jeremy and I read the Internets.

Have I mentioned that I love it here? I love it here.

One of the things I desperately love about San Francisco is how normal I seem here, to the point that my vanilla-ness is a standing joke among most of my friends. I love it because I spent 25 years in Australia trying without success to explain myself, my jokes, the way I dressed, the books I read, the subjects I studied, the music and movies I liked, the way I wore my hair and every other perceptible feature of my personality to audiences ranging from the bored but antagonistic to the outright hostile. That blew.

Here, if for example I am mourning an owl, I can be reasonably sure my neighbors will also be mourning, and will throw a wake and bring candles and cookies and flowers to remember her by. Which is exactly what happened last night. It was as Bernal as could be, complete with communal hooting. Julia especially liked that part.

The fourth best news from the owl wake was that Bronwyn found and read a perfect Mary Oliver poem, but I can’t find it online. The third best news was that peregrine falcons are nesting on the hill! The second best news is that Great Horned Owls are nesting in Glen Park, and that they’ve hatched and are raising three chicks!!! Twenty four hours later I am still overjoyed about this.

The best news isn’t mine to share, but you can be sure that when owlets are only the second best news, it’s a pretty damn good party. Owl grief, owl joy. I kept thinking of that great line from Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything: “Life wants to be. Life doesn’t want to be much. From time to time, life goes extinct. Life goes on.”

I usually put it like this: if my mother had been a man I would have had a British passport long ago. Of course if my mother had been a man there wouldn’t be any me. But it’s almost that raw: until 2002, British men could pass citizenship to their adult children, but British women could not. Now that the law has been changed I felt obligated to apply, just to underline the fact that my mother is a human being.

Ceremony was today. I dyed my hair blue and wore a skin-tight white t-shirt with a glittery Union Jack heart. I was not, perhaps, taking the occasion very seriously. Jeremy came for moral support, and to take lots of pics. The British Consulate is in One Sansome, a generic Financial District high-rise, with more laid-back security than most Manhattan fund managers. Thirteen of us filed into the Nova Albion room, where an absurdly flattering picture of Queen Elizabeth II fought for space with a full-sized polyester Union Jack.

I didn’t expect the consul-general to make me laugh (“Love making new Brits. Best part of the job. New taxpayers! Lovely.”); I really didn’t expect to find the whole thing so moving, or to feel such a wild sense of relief in the aftermath. Of course now I am English I am sentimental. I also like Doctor Who, talk funny and drink gallons of tea. So, no change whatsoever.

Watched Roving Mars, a documentary on the awesome Spirit and Opportunity missions which reaffirmed my long-standing crush on mission director Steve Squyres. He describes Spirit as the challenging but hardworking firstborn and Opportunity as Little Miss Perfect; thus giving Claire and Jules their newest nicknames. Rove babies rove! May you too exceed your mission objectives by some orders of magnitude.

Was grumpy most of the day. Claire had her second piano lesson. I dreamt of Carnegie Hall. Date night; Jeremy and I went to see the latest Harry Potter film, which I found unexpectedly touching.

J: He was quite the whiny little bitch, though.

R: Oh my God; you should have read the book.

“Oh blogger.”

“Bloggery bloggery bollocks.”

“Blogger off!”

“He’s a dirty old blogger.”

(singing) “…but a hedgehog can never be bloggered!”

(Possible replacement for “Fsck!”?)

Peter Chubb slept on our couch for a few days recently, looked over all my spine-cracked paperbacks and said: “People who like O’Brian and Trollope usually like Lois McMaster Bujold as well.” So I bought the very first Miles Vorkosigan book, Cordelia’s Honor, at Stacey’s – I’ve been dropping by regularly since Cody’s Stockton Street closed, out of pure guilt. And I read the first page or two and was bored, and put it aside. I took it and Antarctica to Boston and New York on the theory that I wouldn’t mind leaving either of them behind and thus lightening my luggage.

Of course Antarctica was really, really good. Jeremy and I once had the delight of touring the Australian Antarctic Division’s Aurora Australis, and the Treaty, like the United Nations and the CSIRO, has always belonged for me among those clear-eyed, idealistic Fifties-era efforts at a Higher Good that we as a species never quite lived up to but still should. Well, Robinson’s book is basically that impulse writ large, so you can imagine how I lapped it up.

So I didn’t actually pick up the Bujold until the flight home, and even then I only read the first part, Shards of Honor. And then I had to sit looking out the window for a few hours blinking back tears, because I had just discovered a new author who took her place immediately among my all-time top ten and who is prolific to boot, so that besides the basic joy of flying home to Jeremy and Claire and Julia there was the prospect of many weeks of the sheer pleasure of reading books that would challenge and move me and make me laugh.

It was, for those few hours, just too much happiness to bear.

Thinking of Squid

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens

…only with blue hair. Took the girls to the Berkeley Kite Festival.
Now Claire wants a kite. It’s her Chalmers blood.

“In Australia they have this disgusting gruel called Tex Mex. It makes Chevy’s look authentic.”

“There’s a chain called Montezuma’s.”

“There is not.”

“Is. The tacos are like corn chips and you have them with shredded iceberg lettuce. I so never saw the point of Mexican food.”

“Sounds like America in the fifties.”

“It is America in the fifties. Cross the equator, lose fifty years of progress.”

“It’s the International Decade Line!”

Flight of the Conchords was also, in part, about Australia and its shortcomings. I laughed so hard, Claire came padding out of her bedroom.

“Mommy you were cackling. I thought there was a witch in our house.”

An energetic Rainbow run led to pan-fried kale with cherry and grape tomatoes and bocconcini balls, cream of cauliflower soup and a rhubarb and strawberry compote with meyer lemon juice that may be one of the yummiest things I’ve ever made. Finished dying my hair blue, which took forever and is unlikely to be repeated, so everyone relish the colour while you can. Then a remarkably successful date night with J; dinner at Liberty Cafe, a long and cheerful walk to Flora Grubb and a lovely Burning Man-y party where we ran into all our friends as we were trying to leave. Isn’t San Francisco nice?

R (sings): Once I ran to you (I ran!)
Now I run from you (I run!)
This tainted love you’ve given
I give you all a boy could give you
Take these tears and that’s not nearly ALL!

J: I see.

R (sings): Tainted love, oo-oo-ooh! Tainted love.
Don’t touch me please I cannot stand the way you tease!
I love you though you hurt me so, now I
Have to pack my things and go!

J: You’ve had lunch then.

R: Yes, it was quite good. And you?

J: I’m hungry.

R: Go eat, then call me and sing.

Yes, dear readers, where the hell have I been? An excellent question. I was doing so well through June and July with the daily updates, and then I fell off the map. Work, actually; I was being paraded around temples of commerce as a John Hodgman-esque Resident Expert, complete with nerd glasses. I actually felt very shiny in my new suits until some blog made a snarky comment about people who wear Ann Taylor and earn only $100k being “poor”, at which point I got the fuck over myself and laughed for some not inconsiderable time.

Then a weekend in Oz. All the long drive up, every time, I try to temper my own expectations with the conviction that it can’t possibly be as good as I remember it. Expectation-tempering was greatly assisted, this time, by Julia having violent projectile carsickness all along 128 and Mountain View Road. Then I get there and it’s better than I remembered. Words and even shiny cameras can’t do it justice; it’s just a river valley with an apple farm, and redwoods, and I don’t know a more beautiful place on earth. Especially when it has swashbuckling heroes and punk dyke heroines and feisty and ingenious kids swarming around. And soup. And roast lamb. And pie. Pie!

Lots more! Books and owl grief and an insanely busy weekend planned, with films and parties and kites! All in good time! Lunch included a double espresso! Can you tell?

ghougle (v): to Google ghoulishly

I wasn’t going to drink last night but Matthew bought me a glass of very good champagne, and then a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-pape; I should have known. I woke abruptly at 5:30am, two hours ago, from a dream in which Danny nursed me through appendicitis at an Oz Farm magically superimposed on Samarai Park Riding School, with Colin and Maya having a picnic lunch nearby. Between that kind of weirdness and a killer hangover, it was clear I wasn’t getting any more sleep.

So I dragged on my running gear after all and headed out into a light drizzle, which by the time I reached the Apple cube at the corner of Central Park was a wall of water, that thunderstormy rain that comes down in fat warm teardrops. I was soaked to the skin and my glasses were so fogged I had to stand under the street signs to read them. Chivalrous New Yorkers cried out encouragement, and one nice Englishman asked the way to the nearest diner.

“Sorry, I have no idea, I’m from California!” I said cheerfully, before thinking wait – since when have I been from California? The doorman gave me a wink and the woman who shared my elevator did a fantastic double-take.

“Why are you so wet?”

“Ran in the rain.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

“No no!” I said fervently: “It was absolutely great.”

It does feel rather like I had sweaty sex with an entire city full of handsome and tremendously gifted men and women. Whaddaya know, I’m poly for New York! Of course everyone is poly for the right girl.