I have nothing to blog but my weekends.

Friday, lunch (actually breakfast) at Tartine with Scott the WiFi guy; olive cake and one of their amazing little endive salads. Kappy and her retriever Boston dropped by to pick up a birthday cake – the white-nectarine-and-raspberry tart – for my boss, so Claire and I accompanied them to the office for gossip and a slice of tart. Claire played on the rug. My coworkers gurgled with delight. Tartine’s vanilla cream is a wonder of the world.

Back out in the street I ran into Karie. She used to live up near Shotwell Films; I remember walking to work my first day at the451, back in 2000, and she called out of her window to say hello. She was planting jasmine in an old toilet bowl on her fire escape. Just the kind of woman she is, Martha Stewart by way of Burning Man and Valhalla. She, too, cooed over the sleepy baby.

Next Claire and I headed over to the SF Public Library. I’ve never been a giant fan of its architecture or collection – it’s no Mitchell Library or Long Room – but Claire greatly enjoyed the atrium and skylights, and made me realize how spoiled I’ve been. The Mitchell and Berkeley and Fisher Libraries are truly great, and even the Mechanic’s Library is very good, and it’s churlish of me to not-love the SFPL just because I secretly want it to be the British or New York. Anyway, I found what I needed: Fussell’s Wartime, Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt and a decent-looking book on the Viennese.

Saturday we bought a dozen bagels at Katz and spent most of the afternoon on Ian and Kiki’s back deck, smearing said bagels with avocado and cream cheese and topping them with excellent smoked salmon, chopped onion and capers. Saturday night a big group of us met up at the Tonga Room. Jack loved his Gaugin shirt – “It’s shiny! And it’s by some old guy, which is cool!” Ian and Kiki got him a tool belt from Cliff’s Hardware. Every half-hour or so there would be thunder and lightning and a shower of rain. I drank virgin coladas and talked to the funny-as-she-is-beautiful Justine all night. It was very splendid.

Sunday Jeremy announced that brunch with Peter would be “in a place of Rachel’s choosing”, then objected strenuously to my choice of Foreign Cinema on the grounds that it has a pretentious name, which it absolutely does. But it was amazing – a huge beautiful courtyard off Mission Street, filled with sunshine and reminding me vaguely of Brennan’s in New Orleans or the Irish Film Centre in Temple Bar. I had a mimosa and the Flatiron steak, with fried Yukon potatoes and rabe. It was beyond delicious. I didn’t so much eat it as absorb it directly through the membranes in my mouth, via osmosis.

Otherwise I slept all weekend, because the child is growth-spurting again and feeding off my precious bodily fluids. Oh well. If I must be enfeebled, at least I can be diverted. Fussell is always a cracking read, and Spirited Away is just as wonderful the second time around.

Had another very cool weekend, which I should blog before it gets flushed from the cache (Yatima is pretty much all I have for a long-term memory these days; that and Google). Spent all day Friday at Burlingame again. Shannon and I tanned ourselves in the flower garden while Claire (large sunhat, SPF 30) inspected this strange new life form we call grass. Cian made bombing raids on the plum tree, and Jeremy and Bryan headed out to hunt and kill fine Mediterranean foodstuffs for their womenfolk and children… folk. The O’Sullivans left for Ireland that afternoon and I had to hug them quickly and run away lest I blub. I miss them more than somewhat.

Saturday morning I had my second lesson with Toni McIntosh, and continued to not fall off. Merlin is a terrific pony with beautiful manners and a nice big jump. My muscles are so rusty I can hear them creaking, but I still remember how to sit still, balance in the saddle and give with the reins, more or less. I did kick him in the ribs at one point and he bucked so hard that I ended up around his neck, laughing and admitting: “I totally deserved that.”

“Yes you did,” said Toni.

She is a wonderful teacher, and had us doing a not-unchallenging pattern over a couple of decent verticals, one on the diagonal. She made us do it again and again until I had my legs underneath me and the pony in the tack and everything balanced and forward and harmonious. There were red-tailed hawks hunting over the creek and the sun blazed down. It was a spectacular day.

Laura Miller’s piece on Hayao Miyazaki contained this, for me, striking sentence: “The image of a breeze blowing silky ripples over a hillside covered with young grass might just be his chosen emblem of pure happiness.” I’ve loved that particular image ever since I read Stevie Smith’s “Scorpion”:

I should like my soul to be required of me, so as
To waft over grass till it comes to the blue sea
I am very fond of grass, I always have been, but there must
Be no cow, person or house to be seen.

Sea and grass must be quite empty
Other souls can find somewhere else.

…but at Creekside it’s not just a literary trope. There are actual hillsides there that every March or April turn brilliant green with the spring grass. There are verifiable breezes that ruffle the soft blades like swell through the Sydney Harbor heads. This all conspires to make me idiotically happy.

Saturday night there was an amusing BBQ at De Haro, and Kiki made her essential avocado-and-mango salad. Sunday we picked up lunch at Tartine and headed over to ActivSpace to spend the entire afternoon enjoying the good feng shui of Jack and Salome’s new apartment. The boys played PlayStation games. Jeremy kicked Jack’s ass.

R: My husband is the alpha geek. So there.

S: Yeah? Well nyerr.

Sunday night we started watching My Neighbor Totoro, which is, in my very humble opinion, perfect. As I said to Jason at Oz, it makes me feel like a complete tosser to have to admit that all my favourite films of the last year were Japanese, and all by two (count ’em, two) directors: The Seven Samurai, Ran, Spirited Away. It comes as no surprise to learn that Kurosawa loved Miyazaki. (I am sure the reverse is also true.)

Completely irrelevant aside: Alex used to joke that he wanted to write a play about the man who came as no surprise. This man would walk into a room and everyone would say: “Oh, there you are then,” and go about their business.

Well, it seems pretty funny after three glasses of Jameson’s, I tell you what.

J presses a finger to his lips and beckons me to the door of the bedroom.

Claire and Bebe are in bed, both on their backs, rolling around, enjoying the sunshine, squeaking. Feet, paws, hands wave in the air. As I watch, Claire reaches over to Bebe’s front legs. Bebe takes the fat infant fist gently between her sheathed forepaws, and licks it.

I let out a breath. They look up and see us. Claire giggles. Bebe turns over, comes to sit on the edge of the bed and coolly washes herself. She’s an aggressive, territorial alpha female, she’d have us know. She wouldn’t be caught dead dandling a human kitten between her scythe-like talons. Well, maybe this once, but if we tell anyone, we’re dead meat. Understood?

Today I am feeling extremely grateful for various things. Email, for example, and three particular pieces of mail I got this morning. The promising results of three recent sonograms: two healthy-lookin’ fetuses, and two healthy-lookin’ breasts (none mine, in case your mind was boggling there). Huge advances in veterinary surgery. Baby monitors, psychopharmaceuticals, important findings in public health.

Nor is my gratitude solely technophilic. I am also very pro-family this week, especially my family, complete loons that they are. My mother’s wickedly fabulous sense of humour, my sister’s ear for listening and singing in harmony, my three brothers – two blood, and one spare – all of whom are instinctively kind, like my Daddy. Oh, yeah, and my own grumpy old man and our snot-nosed brat: the two most amazing human beings that ever lived.

Highway 1 at sunset; nourishing bowls of pasta in the Community House at midnight; stomping up the stairs under the stairs; the smell and white noise of Coleman lanterns in Newbird; a patchwork quilt; black widows in the dunny; Cian chasing chickens; raptors; hummingbirds; French toast; baths are better with friends; a hike up and over the hills; Shannon’s amazing and perfectly-timed chili; Afshin’s superb rice and salmon; “You have the most beautiful collar bones I have EVER seen”; “Check out the shoulder on that girl. Have you ever seen a more perfect shoulder?” “I have not”; random kite festival at the Point Arena lighthouse; reliving the Rearden Steel roller-coaster for nj at the Record Cafe; “Uncle Ian! Uncle Ian! Tell us the one about how you got excommunicated!”; “I’m terribly, terribly sorry, but you are all going to Hell”; black beans, scrambled eggs with avocado and chili-turkey sausages; “Do you hear that?” “What?” “It’s the bath… It’s calling me…”; “My gift is my song, body and soul.”

R: Every now and then this weird thing happens where some company comes and talks to me and it sure sounds like they’re in my sector, but they’ve never heard of any of the other companies I cover, and none of my companies have ever heard of them. And it’s like I’ve fallen into some crazy mirror-world and I can’t figure out what’s going on. And then they say the magic word.

J: Windows.

R: Exactly.

J: It’s like they’re running enterprise software for the Atari platform.

Why I’ve been a bit distracted this week:

• grid confcall
• Bowst. for TDM
• Spotlight on perf man
• BMC-DGI
• Claire to pediatrician at 1pm
• notice tiny ding in Hedwig, have enormous freak-out about it, have lunch, calm down, remember Hedy is insured, file claim, call trusted mechanic
• Reflec.
• Dijkstra deadline
• Applim.
• deposit checks for Oz
• mail John
• mail RachH
• thank you notes
• check, fax and mail Man-Bell
• Chris H
• dinner with Julian, Afshin, Bryan and Robert
• call Peter
• Active R.
• grid questionnaire
• grid topology
• Rainbow cereal apricots peaches

The amazing part? Pretty much all done, yay me (and my extraordinary support team).

1. TS Eliot

Fleabag the Dalmation, a dog-year dead,
Forgot the mew of the cats and the dinner bell
And the bitches and the leash…
Lab or Shi-Tzu,
O you who lift the leg and pee to leeward,
Consider Fleabag, who was once handsome and tall as you.

2. Duke Ellington

Hey, Opinionated Baby, I know,
You miss the womb you left long ago,
And when nobody is nigh you cry.

3. Crowded House

Walking ’round the room singing
Various parodies
At 987 Alabama Street
Now it’s the same room but everything’s different
You can find the deck, not the boxroom
Things are cooking in my kitchen:
Yam and apple and carrot puree
Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire
Couldn’t conquer my fruit pie…

Claire and I are sharing our second bad cold, but still managed to have a memorably happy day.

Jeremy made oatmeal and tea before heading off to the Death Labs at dawn. I did the 9am editorial call in my bathrobe with C on my lap. At one point she squeaked indignantly, interrupting another analyst.

Analyst (sharply): What was that?

Me: I do apologize, that was Claire…

Analyst (relieved): Oh, it sounded like a sarcastic comment.

Me: She’s very sarcastic. I have no idea where she gets it from.

I shuffled my meetings for the rest of the day, ate my oatmeal, drank my tea and took the baby back to bed. We played, read the new Harry Potter and slept on and off until about 2.30pm. She bounced in her Kick’n’Play while I showered and cooked up the remains of yesterday’s Thai dinner in Jeremy’s cast iron pan. I’d’ve left the leftovers at the restaurant if Jack hadn’t told me to take them home. Fried up together, they made a delicious and substantial lunch, and I was grateful to Jack for his foresight.

Claire and I shared a banana smoothie (two bananas, plain Brown Cow Cream Top yogurt, rice milk) while I steamed a glorious sweet potato. It went into the steamer pale pink, and gradually turned deep gold with the most wonderful fragrance. I Bamixed the beJesus out of it, then forced it through a wire mesh. It turned to orange silk. I don’t actually like sweet potato much, but this tasted already-candied; you’d swear there was brown sugar in the puree, but there isn’t.

Claire looked skeptically at the first spoonful. She’s sucked on rockmelon (canteloupe) and apricot, but all her serious solids so far have been green or white: banana, avocado, yogurt, rice cereal. Still, the rockmelon and apricot experiences should have tipped her off – she adored them both. She took her first taste of yam, ruminated thoughtfully upon it, grabbed the spoon out of my hand and started passionately making out with it.

Her expression must have been the same one that everyone laughed at when they took me to Tetsuya’s: “O brave new world, that has such foodstuffs in it!” There was yam on her forehead and in her ears and up to her elbows. She smeared it down her thighs. She was in yam heaven.

She had three helpings, and I froze the rest, along with some carrots and apples, also steamed and pureed and forced through the mesh. It was a wonderful afternoon, with the sun shining in from our new deck and the baby playing in her bouncy chair and me with the food cube production line moving along well, singing loud tuneless parodies to keep her amused. I hope this is a big part of her life, hanging out in the kitchen while her parents cook delicious food from awesome organic ingredients. I hope that for her, food will never be a drug or unappetising or problematic, but always just part of what makes life worth living.

Seth is talking about Fermat’s last theorem again, which reminds me of a recent, happy dream. Teresa Barnett, who I met doing Andrew Piper’s 1989-1990 dig at Port Arthur, stayed with us for a night or two. When she left, her thank-you note was a simple, hand-written proof of Fermat’s little theorem.

It’s what my old professor Adrian Mitchell called the exemplary trope: the hero, arming himself for battle. (Googling Adrian I discover to my utter surprise and delight that he is now Head of the School of English, Art History, Film and Media at Sydney Uni. Wow! He is therefore boss to my friend Kate Crawford, pursuing her manifold accomplishments in the Media program; also, great heavens preserve us, to my old sparring partner Julian Murphett, now with his doctorate from Cambridge and a couple of books out from CUP. Extraordinary achievements! Toasts all round!)

I had to dig up the fetish gear from various hoards and caches; jodhpurs from the linen closet; green Creekside polo shirt from the top shelf in the bedroom; green Troxel helmet and Ariat half-chaps and leather gloves from the camping equipment downstairs. It all fits again, more or less, and I am the Pony Club poster child for June 2003.

I’m having a lesson with the New Zealand Grand Prix showjumper Toni McIntosh at 6pm. I haven’t ridden since I won the medal round on Austin at the Creekside Show last July, when I was four months pregnant. I’m giddy with anticipation. Epona, goddess of horses, please don’t let me fall off.

Not to be a spoilsport, but the Harry Potter thing: I confess I am a bit nonplussed. Um. So, what’s the big deal again? Why Rowling, exactly? Why not the amazing Richard Adams or Susan Cooper or Alan Garner or Russell Hoban or Robin McKinley or Robert C. O’Brien or Patricia Wrightson, for example? Why not the great, very unjustly forgotten Joan Aiken, whose “All and More” was my first seriously overdue library book, the year I turned 8? Why, for God’s sake, not the world authority on schools of wizardry, the immortal (I hope) Ursula K. le Guin?

I mean, no disrespect to the Harry Potter fans and all. Rowling is, well, fine, she’s perfectly okay, and I’m as thrilled as anyone else to see Cody’s et al stuffed to the rafters with kids: more power to them. But these other writers, they’re the business, seriously, they’re the ones that made me want to write. It’s much more than that, they’re the ones that made me fall head-over-heels in love with the novel at the expense of all other art forms. Phrases of theirs still haunt me: “prince with a thousand enemies”, “the dark bright water”, “stone out of song”, “rules change in the Reaches”, pretty much every conversation between Tom and Jan in Red Shift, which is, God forgive us, out of print.

Hey wait a minute, I know what I sound like here: I sound exactly like all the REM fans who, when I fell in love with Automatic for the People, told me that the album sucked and that the band’s last decent work was Document or Green. I am, in other words, being indier-than-thou, which I swore I’d never be. So here’s the positive spin (per Grant: Features! Benefits!) If you like the Harry Potter series but feel vaguely disappointed with the latest installment, as it sounds like many critics already do, here are some other great works you may appreciate: Watership Down; The Dark is Rising; Red Shift and The Owl Service; Riddley Walker; The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword; Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Silver Crown and Z for Zachariah; The Nargun and the Stars, The Dark Bright Water and The Ice is Coming; The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea; and above all, the jewel of my heart, the Earthsea series.

Here be dragons! Go, now! Read!

(#1)

R: I loved Surrey Street. I loved the robinia and the French doors onto the balcony, and the bougainvillea out the back window.

J: And that time the bathroom floor rotted through and the shower leaked into the kitchen.

Big: And waking to the sound of the brickpecker.

R (delighted): I’d completely forgotten the brickpecker!

Walking back to the car after lunch at Tartine:

R: So did you think my dream was dorky?

S: I thought it was sweet. In that I-am-the-center-of-the-universe way you have.

R: Right. (pause) Good thing I left out the part where I was wearing my wedding dress. Oh, and my demon-slaying superpowers.

S (breathless with laughter): You fought demons in your wedding gown?

R scuffs at the ground with the toe of her boot.

Later:

J dances around the apartment pretending to be R’s bridezilla dream-self: I can fight demons if I want to! It’s MY SPECIAL DAY-EE!

No one takes me seriously.

R: I dreamed Baghdad was peaceful and prosperous, the richest city in the world, and that the Tigris and Euphrates were the new Silicon Valley. All totally oasis-y and lush. Salam was the mayor and Esther Dyson was running around hyping software. We had a tiny apartment in a cool neighborhood in Baghdad and a sort of dacha in a village in the valley. It was my 33rd birthday, and everyone had come from all over the world, the whole Frock Advisory Council, Garfield, Alex, Adrian, Sam, Jack, Salome, Colin, Maya, everyone, and all hitting it off like mad. Gabriele Russo and Mark Bennett talking nineteen to the dozen, that sorta thing. Paul Gregory was running around in his centurian getup and Moonbase Alabama were organizing all the catering and logistics, like they do, so I could sit in the shade with Claire eating sorbet and catching up with people I hadn’t seen in ten years… God, this is my dorkiest dream ever, isn’t it?

J (fondly): Ayup.

R (dolefully): So much for my subtle mind. A nakedly yearning dream for peace. You’ll lose all respect for my thought processes.

J invokes the ghost of Thurber: “It’s just a naive little domestic dream, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”

R: It wasn’t utopian though, it was really us, bitchy jokes and all. And the village was old and tumbledown but gorgeous, all courtyards and wells and frescoes…

J: And date palms.

Pause.

R: Did I tell you about the date palms?

J: Worked it out from first principles.

R: Yes. Well there were lots. And Mark had brought his boy toy, the one that broke the restraints? And he looked like a really handsome blond teenaged version of the Hulk.

That I got through the last three weeks at all, let alone with my sense of humour intact, I owe entirely to my friends and their superpowers. Special thanks are due to Jonathan, Peter and Shannon, who gave me the greatest gift of all: food.

R: God, I’m knackered.

S: You’re naked?

R: I am kuh-nack-er-ed. A knacker is a horse butcher. I am drained to my sinews, like a horse’s carcase hanging on a hook. You Americans, there’s no colour in your language at all.

S: That’s because we don’t glorify horse slaugher.

R: One time I said to Jeremy: “I like horses! And French food!” And he said: “Sometimes they’re the same thing!”

S: Eeuw.

R: So anyway, how are you?

S: Knackered.

R: So anyway, how are you?

A: Fine, fine – wait, is this going to end up on Yatima?

R: What? Why?

A: I read Yatima, I know how you …change things.

R: I do not change things! Well, maybe I edit.

A: You do. You condense.

R: Yeah, exactly. The Reader’s Digest version. I optimize for the funny.

A: Yeah. You put a whole lot of things together. To make it sound better.

R: And to make it sound like I’m popular… wait a minute, is that sad?

It’s spring, and the city is full of flowers.

I just had salmon teriyaki for lunch.

Noelle is coming home from Iraq.

…some guy walked down Alabama Street, jauntily whistling Darth Vader’s theme.