This morning two workmen carried a pane of glass across the busy intersection of Stockton and Geary, and a car chase did *not* roar through and shatter the pane of glass.
I remain confused!
ETA: Badgerbag points out that the car chases don’t get triggered unless there are fruit barrows as well, and a couple of Vespas.
I sat in Cafe XO this morning contemplating my pain au chocolat and my coffee and my unopened Lionel Shriver novel and my forthcoming riding lesson, and I experienced perfect happiness.
Now I am at home after a great lesson and my cat is draped across my collarbones like a mink stole, purring like fule, and Jeremy and the children are off seeing Kung Fu Panda 2 and I am contemplating the hot shower I am about to have.
Rest of my life’s going to be downhill after this, is what I’m saying.
Super cute. Soft fur, inquisitive whiskers, absurd little stump of tail. A little like sugar gliders, but wingless and they don’t purr. But adorable nevertheless.
win the first: I ask Claire to run through her recital pieces. “Okay mama, I will play them all once.” “Fine. I just want you to feel confident and proud on Saturday.” Pause. “Okay mama, I will practice them all twice.”
win the second: I trot across Geary to Peet’s to order my medium coffee. It is already made! My barista knows what I mean when I tell him: “I don’t even NEED a Ducati!”
I have been having epic rides on Omni and thinky rides on Archie and funny, challenging rides on Oliver, who is new and a bit of a clown and perfect for me. Oliver is a dapple grey with huge dark circles on his shoulders and haunches and mysterious white spiderwebs on his forearms and hocks. Archie likes hugs. Omni is my sweetie. All these horses. I walk around the stables cleaning tack and rolling up polo wraps in a sort of daze of happiness, like a kid in a candy shop.
This was not very good on horses, and not very good on the war. So, um. He seems like a nice person?
Also! That’s a Western (as in cowboy) show halter on the horse on the cover! I just. Gnnrh.
The bloodlands lie between Berlin and Moscow. You’ve read parts of this history before, but Timothy Snyder’s contribution (a great one) is to change the frame of reference. His subject is the decade and a half of mass death in these lands, considered as the outcome of deliberate policies on the part of both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. Snyder’s story thus transcends national and ethnographic boundaries and the ideological differences between Hitler and Stalin to discuss how institutional genocide was allowed to take place. In Europe. And no one cared.
It is, as you might imagine, depressing. Parts of it are heartbreaking. Parts of it are nauseating.
It’s amazing.
It’s effectively the sequel to Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 and a companion to both Deathless and The Hare With The Amber Eyes. The other book that keeps nagging at me is Helen Darville-Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed The Paper (no link love for you, lady: you know why) which considered the Holocaust as some sort of legitimate revenge for the Ukrainian famine… of course she was a liar, as it turned out. But that’s my country for you: people lying about genocide for notoriety. (Hi, Keith Windschuttle!)
I’m listening to it in the car, which is a good way of forcing yourself to keep going. The narrator has a very particular diction, with clipped enunciation and a downward inflection. I couldn’t place it for a while, then I realized who it reminded me of: Paul Darrow as Kerr Avon. Which is downright unsettling.
Is this the future where it turns out I am actually a replicant too? I can never remember.
ETA: Jeremy says “I always just assumed you were a replicant.” (That’s okay; I quite like boys with robot fetishes.)
1. It turns out that the reason it’s taken me this long to try to download audio books to my phone is because libraries have been tragically afflicted with an evil crippleware proprietary standard! Luckily there is also MP3, but establishing the extreme wrongness of WMA took a couple of hours of my life I will never see again. REVENGE.
2. Finally got off my ass and gave blood this morning. There’s a center right near Montgomery Station, and this morning I was the only donor there. They’ll disqualify you if you’ve ever so much as given the stinkeye to a British cow, which is ridic, but if you are as un-tattooed and monogamous and straight-acting and only-travelling-in-the-First-World, that is to say, if you are as BORING as me, go bleed into a bag. They give you muffins.
3. Last Friday morning I got to have a look at Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard’s offices, preserved exactly as they were when H and P retired, all Mad Men with wood panelling and windows onto a Japanese garden. Then I drove back to the city, where Liz gave me a guided tour of the Noisebridge hackerspace and I examined a Makerbot that was busy making new Makerbots. San Francisco is amazing.
4. The photos of Queen Elizabeth in Ireland are very strange to me for lots of reasons. The Queen looks more and more like my mother as she ages, to the point that the picture of her speaking in Dublin Castle actually raises recognition-hackles on the back of my neck; I have my own very vivid memories of the Book of Kells and Croke Park and the National Stud, and I don’t think I have ever seen the Queen in a place where I have been before; and I know enough history that my entire sympathies are with the protestors, with the security guards and the police, and with the Queen.
5. This week I like this Janelle Monae song, this Janelle Monae song (with a surprise cameo by Claude Debussy), this Olof Arnalds song (with a surprise cameo by Bjork), The Comic Book Guide to the Mission, Inside Wikileaks and, always, the great Ta-Nehisi Coates.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a girl in possession of a retirement-level liquidity event must be in want of a tax shelter.
Saturday was epic: wushu, then Fairmount Fiestaval, then a dentist’s appointment, then the library. We were received with amused delight everywhere:
…which was great fun right up until their swim lesson, when the paint got washed off but on the bright side, Julia earned her red ribbon. Their swim school is wonderful at providing these regular positive reinforcements for swims well swum. As part of my program of feigning maternal competence, I have all their ribbons pinned to a notice board in the living room. The new ribbon was pinned up with great ceremony.
Then I abandoned the children with their father and put on a little black dress and went to Writers With Drinks with Rebecca and Yoz and Gilbert and Heather, which was fab. I picked up milk on the way home and was interrupted from complaining bitterly about Safeway only ever having two registers open, even when there are thirty-eight people in line, by Rocky, who is making Indian tacos at El Rio and wants to open his own place. “It’s all good,” said Rocky. “You’re right,” I said. “I totally have to seize more day.”
“I just like giving pink cupcakes to Goths. It’s a very specific fetish.”
“So when you get the opportunity, you HAVE to indulge it.”
“Exactly!”
“You totally just Googled ‘pink cupcake Goth’, didn’t you.”
It turns out I am a sucker for little girls who just lost their grandfather. Required to amuse the children for three hours this morning, I took them to Centennial Stables, where they had pony rides on Benji and Bonnie. Afterwards we went to a fantastically well-appointed and well-maintained playground and sat in the sun and ate ice creams. In short, I spoilt them like a freakin’ aunt or something. (Sydney turned into Paradise while my back was turned. One side-effect of the resources boom is a state that can spend mouth-watering amounts of money on its infrastructure. The very bathrooms in Centennial Park are sleek and modern and clean.)
Later, when the clouds rolled in and the wind grew chill, Claire searched the apartment in vain for her favourite striped cardigan. Jeremy, Janny and I joined in the search, but it was nowhere to be found. I get very anxious about lost things these days. In the evening, after I had retrieved my mother from Central Station, I borrowed a [torch|flashlight] from Jan and hiked back to a different playground that we had visited yesterday, after lunch with Kay and Kelso. On my second circuit of the park, the torchlight picked out the cardigan carefully laid out on the brick wall, waiting for me to find it. The world is full of people who are thoughtful and kind.
Since we were last here, Jan has had the awful teal carpet taken up and replaced with golden wooden floors, and has redone the kitchen. We collectively agonized for one million billion years about what colour the kitchen should be, and eventually settled on… white. It looks fantastic. The house is far lighter and more pleasant to hang out in. Net win.
All this work got finished in the last week or so, just in time for the wake on Friday, although this was not part of the plan, and the contractors cut a lot of the wood out on the terraces, which are surrounded by planters. The plants got covered in sawdust and needed to be cleaned before all the people come over…
…which is how I came to spend the last hour dusting a large aspidistra.
Do you want to hear a silly-me story? ‘Course you do, why else would you come here? In January Qantas cancelled its direct flights between Sydney and San Francisco. I took this as a personal affront and sulked for a day and a half. And now Virgin has announced that it is taking over the route, so all the emotional energy I put into that sulk went down the drain and I can have my direct flights anyway. Someone remind me next time, or don’t, since I find that sort of thing annoying.
I loved Richard very much.
Architect, raconteur, bon vivant. I don’t think any woman has ever had a better father-in-law.
They are gone and I am bereft. They are among the least high maintenance of all the people to whom I am related, so there is not much narrative to impart, because all we were was happy. We looked at interesting and pretty things. We laughed. We ate delicious food.
They have promised to come back.
Radiant
Obedient, Your
Highness
Intelligent
Nice and
Infinitely lovely!
preoccupations
