Despite my best efforts, I will probably never be much good at riding. The numbers are against me. For something like equitation, the ten thousand hours thing is legit, and though I’ve ridden as much as I possibly can for the last seven years, “as much as I possibly can” is at best three times a week. I’ve added maybe a thousand hours to my childhood total of maybe another thousand and a half. If I maintain the same course and speed I’ll clock up ten thousand in fifty years, when I am 95. If I retire at 65 and spend ten years riding ten hours a week, I’ll get there by 75. So, longshot.

Also working against me is my conformation, long-bodied and short-legged, which had the significant advantage of being effortlessly good at birthing a couple of ferociously healthy little girls, but is entirely the wrong way round for looking elegant on a horse. My trademark seat is my torso swaying like a poplar even as I struggle to get my meaty peasant calves around Sam’s ribs.

And still. And still. I’ve been riding Sam for a quarter of a year, and I’ve learned how he likes to be asked to come round, and how sensitive he can be to the pressure of my leg. Sit on him holding the buckle of the reins and flex one ankle down; he steps away. I’ve learned to love the softness in his poll, the sparkle and flow of his impulsion. I’ve learned to ask more of him and of myself, because he is far and away the best-trained and best-natured horse I’ve ever had. I’ve learned to see our distance and sit on the saddle and wait and count our strides into the fence and tuck in my elbows as we go over, just as he tucks his knees.

Today in the indoor, Laura raised the fences, and a man on a big bay went around, the bay horse snorting and blowing. And Laura said, “Now you, Rachel.” And I knew how the jumps would ride, and I knew Sam was engaged and in front of my leg and cheerful and willing and game. And around we went, pop, pop, pop, as if it were easy. These are the only compliments on my riding that really matter: the trainer putting up the fences, and my little brown horse being happy.

With the rain after the drought, the hills are exuding mad chlorophyll with everything they’ve got. It’s wall to wall wildflowers around here. It rained again this afternoon and as I drove up 280 after riding Sam, the clouds and the fog in the valleys made the vivid green hills of Woodside look like Irish countryside.

The red-tailed hawks are very fat and happy.

Manhattan maintained its tradition of being an exceedingly nice place for us to visit. A few of the lovely things that happened:

– Liz loaned us longjohns so we wouldn’t all die of cold
– Delta gave us all cupcakes for Valentine’s Day, and I got a bottle of pink champagne too
– our hotel randomly upgraded us to a suite
– it snowed the perfect amount, and then the rain washed the slush away
– Leonard gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of the NYPL and made sure to point out the Gutenberg Bible, which I would otherwise have missed
– on Monday night, the cast of Hamilton performed at the Grammys and won a Grammy, so that on Tuesday night when we saw the show, everyone was obviously both hungover and super jazzed
– Daveed Diggs signed a $10 bill for Claire at the stage door

A perfect trip, and an ideal birthday present to myself.

…our deepest wants can never be fulfilled: our wants for youth, for a halt to aging, for the return of vanished ones, for eternal love, protection, significance, for immortality itself.

One night she watched the tram light coming towards her, the rails gleaming, the road slick with rain. The trams had been a little adventure in the beginning but now they were the emblem of the hard machine of her days. I could step out in front of it, she thought. That would put an end to the misery and the loneliness and the feeling that every day would be like this forever. It would hurt, she supposed. But if she was lucky it would all be over in a second. In the moment she stood with that choice, she was free of everyone else in the world…

The Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

The Museum of Modern Art, including my favorite works of art:

The New York Public Library:

Some show or other:

What an unbelievably great and awesome trip; we are so lucky.

Haven’t brought the kids to NYC since they were well smol. I remembered this meteorite with great fondness.

After an extremely pleasant lunch…

…we rugged up to face the elements.

Central Park had turned into Narnia.

In a rare concession, the teen allowed as to how this was actually pretty fun.

The Week of All the Deathiversaries, which I have taken to calling Shark Week for short, ended with some kind of football game which I resolved to go to the far end of our metropolitan area in order to avoid.

Pretty safe to say that we have, as a family, grown fond of kayaking. Among the floating homes of Sausalito we discovered this round, glassy lagoon. Venice has nothin’ on us.

I would also like to call out this colony of harbor seals for some really fine achievements in lolling.

I like it here.

My mother was a genius
My father commanded respect
When they died they left no instructions, just a legacy to protect
Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints
It takes and it takes and it takes
And we keep living anyway
We rise and we fall and we break and we make our mistakes
And if there’s a reason I’m still alive
When everyone who loves me has died
I’m willing to wait for it
I’m willing to wait for it

…active listening was hard work.

We don’t need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It’s how we justify killing each other.

It’s not unlike colony collapse disorder, but for humans.

How difficult it was to find one’s way, how difficult it was not to violate any of the incredibly detailed male regulations.

Merit was not enough, something else was required, and I didn’t have it nor did I know how to learn it.

Maybe there’s something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us; I was young at the time, and I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman.

Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation.

I had a meeting Friday morning with a man who does Silicon Valley liaison for Australian startups.

“I first came here to visit SGI when I was working at a manufacturing company called Wormald,” he said.

“Wormald, huh?” I said. “Did you know Robin Chalmers?”

“Of course I knew Robin!” He said that Dad was the first management theorist he’d met, and described Dad’s model of companies plateauing when their products were commoditized, and needing to find new products their factories could make in order to achieve new growth. The Innovator’s Dilemma, in other words, but worked out from scratch five years before that book was first published.

I remember having the same conversation with Dad myself. It was in the early 1990s, which was probably Peak Dad. I was at uni, flailing around, trying to figure out who I was and what I was going to be. He was running the factory, building the fire systems for the Collins Class submarines and thinking deeply about Australian manufacturing and competitiveness. We talked endlessly about everything: astronomy, Cantor’s diagonal argument, Christianity, geopolitics, John Donne, Martin Gardner, maths. He was unbelievably patient with me, and loving and funny and thoughtful and silly and wise.

I’m very grateful for the reminder of what he was like then, even if it did hit me like a bullet in the chest. I miss him so much.

This is Jen and her daughter Reese heading out for Halloween in 2009.

You can almost see how long-awaited Reese was, what a fantastic and amazing turn of events she turned out to be. She had just learned to say her cousin Maggie’s name when this picture was taken. Look at Jen slinging the weight of that love and hope, all wrapped up in sparkles, casually onto one hip.

She was a big sister to me when I was a very small and anxious person. I miss her a lot.

…in my head, everything is always so tangled. I am such a damaged thing.

“Do you have a better idea?” she demanded. “Maybe we can hurl some stuff into the underbrush! Or hit something! That solves everything! Maybe we can be really manly and break things!”

Blue tried not to look at Gansey’s boat shoes; she felt better about him as a person if she pretended he wasn’t wearing them.

Local

Bike the Iron Horse Trail (Shoreline Park, near enough)

Go to Anne and Mark’s Art Party

Hike Tennessee Valley to the Pelican Inn and back

Kayak Sausalito and/or Tomales Bay

Learn archery

Serve a meal at Glide Memorial

Summit Mt Diablo and/or Mt Tam

Visit Hearst Castle

Further afield

Getty Villa

Grand Canyon

La Brea Tar Pits

New York

San Diego Zoo/Safari Park

Jeremy is in Australia and I am, naturally, bereft, but otherwise hanging with my cats, my children and my children’s recently developed executive functions has been good fun so far. When he is here, Jeremy (as a programmer by definition a member of the proletariat) makes the kids’ school lunches for them, whereas I (having ascended to the managerial class) supervise the children making their own lunches the night before. They’re also pretty competent cooks of simple if eccentric evening meals, such as sweet-corn-with-bacon or this evening’s tentacle-y pasta surprise. Our tastes in media are converging, so we pile onto the sofa to watch and discuss Steven Universe or The Fosters. It is convivial, and it’s a world away from his business trips when they were small. Parents: it gets better!

They’ve both been taking advantage of the time alone with me to grill me on various topics. Today Claire asked about Ireland, and I told her about the great Not-Getting-Into-Oxford fiasco and how well that all turned out in the end, and how picking up how a stray copy of Wired Magazine in Dublin sometime in 1994 led so unexpectedly and wonderfully to San Francisco. Later I made some wild assertion or other and Claire scoffed: “What would you know? You didn’t even get into Oxford.” Later still Julia (and this is a good illustration of how hilariously both the same and different they are) named different people in our family-of-choice and asked exactly why I loved each of them, requiring me to show my work.

“Our children are pretty great,” I texted Jeremy. “Did you know? Why wasn’t I told?”

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin Civic Center. This building, you guys.

It’s organic architecture, inspired by the Marin hills on which it stands.

Like Star Trek, The West Wing and Hamilton, it is a love song to participatory democracy and the dream of what humans could be.

It’s hard to believe your eyes.

Claire is at Star Wars again, Jeremy and Julia are with Yoz and Dexter and I am sitting in the house alone with the kittens and the clothes dryer! Amazing scenes.

I have become the type of mother that keeps a To-do list of holiday activities in Evernote; Ian accuses me of being “improving.” Monday we finished off the Christmas shopping – Desigual had a sale so the children made out like bandits, as you shall see. Tuesday we went ice skating, Wednesday we visited the Winchester Mystery House, which was more interesting than I had expected, and the Tech Museum of Innovation, which was slightly less. God love my little wolf pack, though; they can kill hours in even the most dated of science museums.

Christmas Eve we had lasagne at Jack’s house, and I made a very ugly pavlova; Christmas morning we went out for Claire’s birthday dim sum and then to Ian and Lisa’s for Orphan’s Christmas, where I made a very pretty pavlova. It was all very delicious and satisfactory.

Yesterday we finally made it to MoAD, which has terrific shows by Alison Saar and Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle, all about black women’s bodies and the pressure of history and the thorns and glass and glitter beneath the surface; and to the Contemporary Jewish Museum which had a great show full of robotics and color and light, of which the below was my absolute favorite.

I lay there for a while pretending to be an astrophysicist studying a white dwarf from a ship in zero-G while Jeremy and Julia came and went around me at interesting angles. I’ve checked off not-quite-half the items on my To-do list, and it’s been a terrific holiday.