I had a funny conversation with Blair down at Tina’s Master’s degree presentation on Sunday morning, and by 3pm I had modified it for use in Charlie Ravioli. I have become a shameless carrion-eater. But hey, Charlie cracked the 43,000 barrier last night.

It was a delicious morning, all drenched in sun with a spectacular brunch laid on and two particular reasons for celebration: Tina’s excellent research project, on the use of the Old Masters Art Collection in couples therapy, and Recheng’s appointment as co-director of the up-and-coming Oakland Art Gallery. It’s fun to bask in reflected glory!

Jonathan and Re brought Tina the perfect gift: a DVD of The Graduate.

My demon-cat Bebe appears to be mellowing out. As proof, I offer two games we invented today.

1. show all working

We’ve put up a whiteboard next to Jeremy’s computer. Ian’s asked a fairly straightforward question about trigonometry, and the whiteboard is covered with pictures of trapeziums (trapezia?) The sock we’ve been using to clean the board has gone in the laundry basket.

J: Here, kitty, kitty.

I pick Bebe up. She curls trustingly around my hands, and I erase trapezia with the fur on her back. She purrs.

2. spinning cat

This one’s pretty self-explanatory. Put Bebe on my office chair; spin.

J: Change direction!

R: Won’t she fall off?

J: Won’t that be even funnier?

I change direction; she holds on.

J (relenting): Oh, the poor kitty.

I stop spinning. Bebe pauses for a moment, then marks the chair back with the scent glands in her cheeks. She purrs.

Van Gogh vs the Swedish Solar Observatory.

R: Adaptation is supposed to be good.

J: What is it?

R: They got Charlie Kaufman, the Being John Malkovich guy, to do an adaptation of the Susan Orlean novel The Orchid Thief. So it stars Nic Cage as Charlie Kaufman, trying to do an adaptation of the Orchid Thief, and he has an evil twin, also played by Nic Cage, who gets all the girls. Then Susan Orlean turns up as Meryl Streep, or vice versa. Hijinks, as usual, ensue.

J: What’s the Orchid Thief again? I saw someone reading it in Atlas.

R: Just another po-faced novel.

J: Well, they weren’t so much reading it as waving it around…

A well-dressed black man leans over an ill-dressed and apparently intoxicated black man, who is sitting in 16th Street outside Pancho Villa.

“Yes,” says the well-dressed black man, “but what transpired?”

So we’ve hired a new chap, Chris, to write about networking for us. He’s a fellow refugee from the old company, so he knows our founders, Nick and John.

Chris (to Nick): I’ve been trying to IM you all morning, but you’ve been spurning my advances.

Nick: Oh, that was you, was it? I thought you were touting porn.

Chris: Maybe I shouldn’t have started with “Increase Your Penis Size!!!”

John: Your IM handle doesn’t help, Chris. It’s not very …readily identifiable.

Chris: “Angstweevil”? No, I s’pose not. It’s a long story…

I think he’ll fit right in.

25,454! A very productive morning.

This afternoon, I slept.

My brother went to the bike races at Phillip Island, and all I got was this super-cool annotated map.

We like fresh air. We usually sleep with both windows next to our bed wide open. Even that’s a compromise, since our last bedroom had French doors, which were almost never closed.

“Our dream house will have balconies off every room,” I tell Jeremy.

“It will look like a forest log with shelf fungus,” he says approvingly.

It’s still pouring with rain and we had to close the windows last night. The house got too stuffy and I had fever-dreams and woke up with a headache.

“I dreamed about competing Olympic bids,” I say, “but I got confused. Redwood City was in Rushcutter’s Bay.”

“That is confusing.”

“Yes. I found out about the bid, by the way. They were going to use Oakland and San Jose and Stanford as well as the city. They wanted Sacramento and Monterey too, but the IOC said it was just too far. Even the revised plan had some things 70 miles apart, whereas in New York it was 30 miles. Much more convenient for the terrorists.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” says Jeremy. “The terrorists would have brought their services to wherever the event was held.”

“Ideally, though, we’d hold it in Nevada, every event on its own salt flat with a dedicated missile silo.”

Jeremy pretends to be a general: “‘We had to destroy the Olympic Village in order to save it.'”

The thing is, it can go nine months here without raining. I used to forget that it rained here at all, and every November I’d be freshly startled, like a goldfish swimming round and round in its bowl. “Oh look, a little plastic castle.” “Oh look, a little plastic castle.” “Oh look, a little plastic castle.” I liked to point out that I had been assured in song that it never rains in California, and that apparently I was misinformed. This is the sort of joke that never gets old, chiefly because it wasn’t funny in the first place.

Last night as the first drops hit our Sutro Tower-facing bow window, husband, cat and I were sprawled on the futon watching South Park.

“Ah, rain. Must be November,” I said. “See what I did there, honey? I maintained state!”

“Very good,” said J.

This morning Hedwig the wonder car was festooned in scarlet threads washed from the bottlebrush trees.

So at the physics lecture on Saturday night, Savas Dimopoulos talked about parallel universes folded up into higher-dimensional cylinders less than one millimeter away. I couldn’t picture this at all until he threw up a slide showing an elongated s-shape. Two points on different bars of the s might be thisclose together, but if the light has to go many light years around the curve of the s, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to see your near neighbour. What you might be able to feel is gravitational force from an invisible nearby mass.

Lying in bed this morning with Claire spider-monkeying around inside my belly, I decided that she’s in a precisely analogous state. She’s only millimeters away through my abdominal wall, but she’ll have to go the long way around to see the light of day.

Meanwhile I feel gravitational force from an invisible nearby mass.

R: Sharon Osbourne says she and her family have lost their privacy, and that if she had her time over, she wouldn’t invite the cameras into her house.

J: I’m unclear on this.

R: Yes.

J: Was she under some impression that she and her family would get to keep their privacy?

R: Apparently so. Now she has cancer and she’s throwing up all over the place, and Ozzie’s drinking again, and the cameras are in their faces all the time.

J: So what you’re saying is, this season may be less cheery.

R: Could well be.

J: Wow. It’s like Buffy, only faster.

It’s hard to tell which of my babies is growing faster. Claire now looks exactly like a basketball stuffed under my shirt, while Charlie Ravioli has topped the 12,000 word mark and is fast approaching one-quarter-finished. At this rate I’ll have a complete novel draft by November 17th, and a daughter shortly thereafter!

With one exception, my characters sit around drinking coffee and talking incessantly. I can’t imagine where they get that from.

Monitor Charlie’s progress here.

For some reason, everything smells like toast.

R: Where’s the cat? I want to check her for toast smells.

J sighs.

R: She’s gone. She’s been abducted by the conspiracy to impregnate my house with the smell of toast.

J: Is this the same conspiracy that broke in last night and replaced your novel-in-progress with one just like it, only crap?

We love our work. There’s a printout on the wall with a quote from our finance guru Steve: “The market has bottomed out.” It’s dated April 5, 2001.

“Hurrah!” says John, my editor. “Stocks are only three hundred points below Steve’s ultimate bottom.”

“Truly he is a financial visionary,” I say, chortling, and adding with relish: “Steve’s ultimate bottom.”

2099 words before breakfast! I’d like to thank my husband and my cat. I owe it all to the flagrant misuse of the epigraph.

The story of the night was Peter’s. He was at a pumpkin-carving party on the weekend, and a friend chiselling out the final details of his sculpted squash sent his knife right through the ball of his thumb. Ow. He pulled out the knife and started spraying arterial blood about the place.

Peter took him to the emergency room. The doctor took one look and said: “Pumpkin?”

Saw The Seven Samurai for the first time at the Castro last night. A perfect film at every scale, from the choreography of the action scenes – you always know exactly where in the village you are – to the translation of the jokes – “Find hungry samurai.” Shimada and Kyuzo are exactly what I’ve always wanted Jedi knights to be: dangerous, melancholy, competent and kind. A simple, urgent plot and unflinching characterization: this is what people are like. Isn’t it terrible? Isn’t it hilarious?

Damn, it was inspiring.

I was held up on the way to work by a road crew repainting the white lines at the intersection of 17th and Folsom. There was a slender, beautiful boy pushing the paint machine on a trolley. It had a big tank dripping white paint and a complicated apparatus for making the line wide and clearly defined on the asphalt. I was just thinking that it looked like a fragile piece of machinery, when my young beauty gave it an almighty kick.

Behind him came an entourage, all in their emergency-orange vests: the first scattered some kind of powder on the wet paint; the second wielded a sort of leaf-blower to help it dry; and the third gestured helpfully, if cryptically, at the waiting traffic. It only took them about three minutes to finish my side of the intersection, the east, which was the last. As I drove through they were packing up the paint machine. It all seemed hyperefficient to me, except for the cryptic gestures. I wonder how many intersections they can repaint in a day?

In other thoughts, I’ve got Yo-Yo Ma’s CD of the Bach cello concertos on high rotation in the car stereo. I will ever bless the name of Miss Emily Brayshaw for recommending these. I’m onto my second CD set, because I scratched the crap out of the first lot by having them floating around Wim the Volkswagen for a year and a half. Hedwig the wonder car’s CD changer ought to help this lot escape the same fate.

The first lot weren’t by Yo-Yo. I think it was the Naxos set, something very generic anyway, and it was a very dry, precise performance, which I loved: cold and academic, my kind of music. So much so that I thought Yo-Yo was a bit sloppy and sentimental and Pablo Casals-y when I started listening to these.

I was wrong. He’s not. He really knows how to play cello, that Mr Ma.

Had a very Russian River weekend, with the usual delicious foodstuffs and hawks and redwoods and turning leaves and amazing weather and hanging out with friends. But driving home on the freeway is dull. We have to make our own fun.

R: Enjoy me while you can. We’re going to have huge fights after Claire’s born, and you decide to bring her up as a Catholic.

J: So she can reject our values and become a fundamentalist Unitarian.

R: Right! She’s not just going to like trees, she’s going to think trees are really really great.

J: Have you noticed how many American cars look like jokes?

R: What, with the blonde, the priest and the rabbi welded on the hood?

J: You’re really fond of that meta-joke, aren’t you?

R: It’s the priest. Catholicism, the funniest of all denominations.

J: I don’t know, I seem to be mining a rich Unitarian vein.

Having stomped around for the last day or two feeling bookless – Lawrence and the Arabs, for all its merits, just isn’t cutting it – I parked illegally and spent forty minutes in Dog-Eared Books on Valencia. I stomped crossly through fiction, classics, drama and critical theory, rejecting everything with a bitter scowl.

Then I found natural history: bada bing, bada boom! I bought Malthus, Darwin, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. The woman at the counter asked: “Are you doing a research project?” “Nope,” I said, “I’m having a baby.” She looked blank. “I want her to be a good chimpanzee,” I explained.

Have I mentioned how excessively fond I am of my cat? Just now, in a transparent bid for attention, she launched herself from my desk, described a ballistic trajectory with its zenith about six feet in the air, dropped like a speadeagled brick onto the pink rug and bit it. Take that, puny floor-covering!