That was a good day. Claire was five weeks old; her Janny and Uncle Barnes had come out from Australia to rejoice in her presence. We took her to visit Afshin in the Oakland Hills, then we dropped by Alcatraz to see Jack and Salome and their menagerie.

Janny said: “I can live with the cats and dogs playing with the baby, but I draw the line at the rat!”

But Anna was the best rat ever. I was a sad disappointment to her because my hair is too short: her favourite place to sit was under your ponytail, although she would settle for a pocket or a hood. She was a cheerful, friendly, highly intelligent person, with delicate little pink hands that she used to keep herself scrupulously clean, and a strong and beautiful tail.

Unlike Salome’s fraidy-cat dog Belinda and big gay horse Noah, Anna was brave as a lion. She was bred for snake food, and when she was a few weeks old she was for sale in a huge cage full of white rats. Salome reached in and all the other rats ran away from her hand, but Anna sat looking up with her customary merry confidence. She faced death with the same courage.

We are in escrow, which is a lot like being in limbo. If you say your cultural equivalent of novenas for us, our property inspections will go well.

I bought Jeremy’s birthday present, and I’m not going to tell him what it is.

Except that it’s very cool.

Those koans did something to me. Thursday night Jeremy and I prowled around Japantown in dual quests for tempura (highly successful) and Christmas presents (futile). We browsed the Kinokuniya bookstore for hours, eventually picking up another Miyazaki DVD in order to obtain parking validation.

So Friday night we watched Princess Mononoke again. It’s such a strange and gorgeous film, so pretty and so alien. Then this morning I stumbled across the quirky Japan home page, which amused me for hours.

The Lonely Planet guide to Japan says it’s a wonderful place to travel with kids. Hmm.

He is splendid; a big dark bay New Zealand thoroughbred with a splashy white star. He’s very solid for a TB, like a scaled-up pony, legs like tree trunks. He’s quiet and sweet, but it was cold on Saturday morning and the wind got under his tail and he gave some great bucks. I stayed on! Which was lovely, and made up for the fact that I ride very untidily these days. David took one look at me and laughed.

But I did stay on, and even got a couple of decent canter transitions. Laz has a huge athletic canter like Noah’s, the sort of canter that makes life worth living.

When I was a kid, bored in English class, I used to design my perfect stable block, with a courtyard in the middle and wash bays and a proper high hay loft and a break room. David’s new barn is like that. The old one, with its swaybacked roofline and rotting timber, is completely gone. The new complex sits back up the hill, commanding a sweep of lawn down to a restored Los Trancos Creek.

It’s very beautiful. It’s also very strange to see a place I knew so well and loved so much, completely changed, and yet to feel happy about it. The things I really liked about the property – the creek, the trees, the grass, the sunshine – are the same or better, and the things I didn’t care for so much – the damp, dark stables, the tack room in a shipping container – have been replaced with clean bright well-constructed stalls. It’s the opposite of entropy! Postponing the heat death of the universe as we speak!

Claire loved the horses, and the horses loved her. They’re so gentle with kids, breathing warmly on them and touching their faces with sweet velvet lips.

Today Claire learned about brushing her teeth. I have this way cute little rubber bristle pad that fits over my finger, and a tiny tube of toothpaste flavoured with apple and pear. She found the toothpaste delicious, and the bristles rubbing on her teeth and gums deeply soothing. She sang “Aaaah” and joyously drooled.

I am pleased with Ellen Ullman’s book The Bug, because it’s a little bit like the book I’m writing, but at the same time – completely different! This is perfect. I can say, “You know, it’s like Microserfs or The Bug meets Mating and A Suitable Boy and the Aubrey-Maturin saga”, and publishers will have no earthly clue what I’m talking about. But other people, people exactly like me, will crave my book like the geek-girl crack it is. And if you can’t cater to your doppelgangers, to whom can you cater, hmm?

In other news, I have a new horse! Laz. His name is Laz.

I am reading good Zen koans to Jeremy over the phone.

“I like that one,” he says, chuckling. “Am I allowed to say that it has a good punchline?”

Me, I would never have left Ogion to go to Roke. Which is why I’m not Ged.

Wow. Feels even better than last year. I’m all teary, but it’s probably the unaccustomed indulgence in red wine and chocolate.

Why do I do this to myself? 48000 words, of which 18000 were written yesterday and today.

My shoulders hurt. And as for my brain…

You know what friendship is? Friendship is when you call someone and say, “Hey, I’m really sorry that I exposed you and your husband to this stomach flu that’s going around and I’m really, really sorry he got so sick from it, but all three of us have it now and I was wondering if you could come and take Claire for a bit?”

And she says, “I’ll be there right away.”

The people cry out for pictures; I am powerless to resist. Here she is with a loaded banana.

One of the most fantastic, endlessly delightful things about living in San Francisco is that if you get interested in a particular thing – genetically modified tomatoes, say, or alternative forms of rocket propulsion, or the massive advances in our knowledge of child psychology over the last 30 years, or how difficult it is to forgive someone who has hurt you – chances are the world expert in the field is living and working within a 40-mile radius, and sooner or later you’ll get to hear him or her speak.

Fred Luskin was just great. I’m writing it down here so I don’t forget.

“It’s been a mixed blessing, I have to tell you. The work we’ve done has helped a lot of people, but at the same time I hear an endless succession of horror stories. I hear so many that I don’t even react the same way any more. Talk to enough people about what hurts them and you’ll learn two things: how difficult life can be, and how downright shitty people can be. I see an inexhastibly supply of people who have been hurt. There is so much unkindness, ineptitude and selfishness in the world. We all struggle. Life is so much harder than we thought it would be.

“But the fact is, we over-dramatize our own stuff. This life is meant for us to figure out how to survive it. If we have $100 in the bank, we’re among the top 1-2% of wealthiest people who have ever lived. If we can have some relationships where we experience kindness, we’re truly blessed. How often, when your car starts, do you stop and think, ‘Thank you’? How often are you genuinely grateful for a meal?

“We have a biological imperative to scan the world to find out if we are safe, and we have a biological imperative to suffer from loss. To counterbalance those imperatives, we have to scan the world for its blessings, too. Our biology dictates that negative experiences register in our whole body, while positive experiences can stay on the surface. We have to offer thanks, and welcome goodness into our very cellular being. When we come home to somebody who loves us, to a child who holds up its hands to be hugged, we have to breathe in that blessing.

“As human beings we are built vulnerable. We are subject to physical decay. All the people we love will die. That sucks. When you go out into the world you underestimate the enormous risks you take. You have to find food, shelter, love, meaningful work, friendship. It’s incredibly hard. And every single thing that hurts us reminds us how vulnerable we are. We can win the game of Monopoly, but when the game is over, it goes back in its box, and so do we.

“When we get angry or upset we invoke the stress response. Blood drains from our prefrontal cortex and into our limbic system. We literally can’t think straight. At the same time, our livers release cholesterol to gummy up the blood in our hearts, just in case we get bitten by a lion and might bleed to death. Getting angry is like throwing Drano through your circulatory and immune systems, that’s how much damage it does.

“Forgiveness means you give the same attention to the things that do work for you as you do to the things that don’t, and talk about them with the same gusto. Life doesn’t owe you more than it gave you. It’s up to you to find goodness in what it gave you. It just takes practice.

“Count your blessings.”

Claire is hooting mournfully. It’s not like her at all.

Kiki: What have you done with the real Claire? This child is an imposter!

R (to the tune of Rubber Ducky): Doppelganger, you’re the one, who makes bath time so much fun…

J: At least, you’re one of them.

I had to cook two dinners last night, because I made a mistake on the first one. The beef stew made with our own chicken glaze was filling the house with delicious savory smells, when I remembered to my chagrin that I had browned the steak in seasoned flour and butter, meaning that if I fed it to Shannon and Cian, both violently lactose-intolerant, I would poison them.

Luckily Shannon had brought another chicken, brined with kosher salt. I sliced up some carrots and Yukon Gold potatoes and threw them in the roasting pan with olive oil and ground pepper. There were vine-ripened tomatoes and avocadoes and baby spinach for the salad, and the very last bottle of the celestial 1999 Adastra chardonnay to drink. I threw the gold-and-blue Provencal tablecloth on the kitchen table, and the six of us had a proper Sunday roast. The bird was juicy and tender and delicious and the schmaltzy vegetables disappeared in nanoseconds.

We sent the boys out for a couple of bottles of cheap red, and peeled five overripe pears. They went into a pot with an entire bottle of wine, a couple of spoonfuls of sugar, sprinkles of cinnamon, nutmeg and ground cloves and a dash of vanilla essence. The pears simmered for an hour while we finished off the chardonnay, and then we ate them, poached to a nicety.

Claire ate her pieces of pear, and her face filled with wonder.

Tonight: stew!

1. head

The woman had had some kind of appalling car accident. If you looked at her right profile, she looked almost unharmed. Her face was still stretched over the front of her skull, and there was enough activity in her brain stem to give her a semblance of normal function.

But the left side of her head was just… gone. All the way through. Her skull was hollow. The bone at the back was completely exposed, with a few bits of meat and hair still clinging to the spurs. In the middle of her head, where her brain should have been, there was nothing, just the healing surface of the brain stem open to the air, and the back of her face, and the terrible jagged edges of her skull.

2. nukes

R: I dreamed we had family nukes. I thought, cool, that’ll teach our enemies to fuck with us.

J: It’s probably a reasonable insight into the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But still.

There is prior art for That’s Our Nader.

Also, some corrections. Yatima wishes to remain your reliable news source.

1. Sumana notes the provenance of the gingery ginger snaps: the Wednesday Farmer’s Market at Civic Center.

2. My brother Bif La (now employed! Woot, and again I say woot!) says that when the taxi broke his femur, tibia and fibula, the noise it made was “more cracky than meaty.”

I don’t actually remember there being a sound when I snapped the ends off my tib & fib; I suspect I couldn’t hear it over Hawkeye’s galloping hooves. What I do remember is knowing immediately that I’d broken my ankle. This seems odd. Maybe I did hear the crack and have forgotten it? Or maybe you just know?

We brainstorm ideas for a sitcom featuring Ralph Nader as the wacky neighbour.

“Oh no! George W Bush has succeeded in rigging the election! Naa… der!”

“The Supreme Court’s decision is unsafe at ANY speed!”

Okay, I’ll stop now, I promise.

“Now she’s hitting the Ryvita with a spoon! This baby’s breakfast is going to blow. You. Away.”

Sumana came over last night for risotto and a new episode of The West Wing. It was the first time I’d watched the show since ER veteran John Wells took over from Sorkin. Many changes: Jeremy from Sports Night is now working for the VP; Chandler Bing is a lawyer; the First Lady has a wicked haircut that makes her look more awesome than ever (when I grow up, I want to be Stockard Channing – I’m too short to be Allison Janney, unfortunately); and Toby’s complex and rounded character has been excised and replaced with a tendency to an upward inflection at the end of each impassioned speech.

The show will be hereinafter referred to as The West Emergency Wing Room. There’s still great pleasure in the way CJ’s suits hang from her designer clavicles, and the episode’s moral ambiguity was acceptably morally ambiguous. But the old seasons, now in syndication, routinely choke me up in a way John Wells can never do. Sorkin may be a sentimental, manipulative, sappy git, but by God the man can write.

Anyway. There were interesting historical parallels between the cliffhanger and the shocking and unconstitutional sacking of the Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam twenty-eight years ago last Tuesday (yes, in case anyone was wondering, rage is being fully maintained over here). The risotto was perfection, and Sumana’s ginger snaps were so gingery that they burned, they burned. We made plans to do it again next week.

“I can’t wait to see how the budget crisis turns out!” I said. “Oh my God, I really just said that, didn’t I?”

“It’s okay,” said Sumana, patting my shoulder reassuringly, “all West Wing fans say something like that sooner or later.”

I can’t face my novel. I can’t face the J2EE application management company I’m supposed to be writing up. I can’t face my weary babysitter or the sink full of unwashed dishes or the dishwasher full of washed dishes that still have bits of chicken on them. I am the shrivelled hulk of a human being.

All I want to do is check out pictures of Swedish warmblood stallions on the Internet.

It’s an addiction, I tell you.