“You’re not bad with money. No. No. I mean honestly, I think you’re the only person I know around here who isn’t living paycheck to paycheck. And you’re buying cars and paying for her freakin’ education and living in the highest cost-of-living… Yeah, but you do what you want, right? … I mean, Katy, she made like eighty thousand a year, and every month she’s like Oh, my credit card, and everyone says, Where does the money go? and she says It just goes away, I don’t know. So we sat down and made a budget. She buys a lot of clothes, she takes a lot of trips, Portland, Mexico, Europe. It all adds up. And she’s a high maintenance girl, she gets her hair done, nails done. And then she has to make payments on her car because she wants a nicer, newer car. Cleaning lady, dry cleaning – she gets tons of things dry cleaned. And I’m like, I don’t do half those things. And then she starts to realize…

“I mean, I totally was living above my means, my credit card, but then it all evened out because this settlement I got, the disability, it paid off the whole amount.”

We put all the Ikea furniture together using a cheap pair of pliers to bang in the nails. I’d try to do this, then hit my thumb and whine, so Jeremy ended up having to do most of it. That’s why, after my doctor’s appointment today, I stopped by Soko Hardware in Japantown and bought their very finest hammer: the Stanley AntiVibe One-Piece Forged Steel Curved Claw Nail Hammer. As Faith the Evil Slayer once said, It’s a thing of beauty, chief.

The elderly Japanese lady who helped me with my purchase asked when I’m due, and when I said two weeks, she narrowed her eyes and said:

“She’s moved down already though, yes?”

…which, seeing as the doctor had just told me so, impressed me greatly. In accordance with proverb, they Know Things, these Old Wives.

Back to the hammer. I tied it with a cheery bow. Jeremy’s decided to keep the bow until it gets annoying, which will probably be the first time he tries to bang a thing.

Yay for Ikea, anyway. After six months spent trailing the other pregnant and freshly infanted couples around the Emeryville store, we finally have our custom array of ingenious Swedish storage solutions installed. There are now designated places for ten years’ worth of photographs, five years’ worth of New Scientist, Jeremy’s techno-trousers, my endlessly accumulating books, all Claire’s worldly goods. There’s a shelf to hang our stainless steel cookware from and an ickle dishwasher that is the joy of my heart. The apartment is tidy and highly functional. It feels… shipshape.

Gotta hand it to Bush, the man is full of surprises. What the independent commission on 9/11 needed at its head was a statesman, an honest man with a reputation for decency and compassion. Someone whose probity would be unquestioned by all parties. Someone like… Kissinger.

“I can’t remember — when Kissinger signs a U.S. Government paycheck, does he use a ballpoint pen, or the bloody, severed limb of an East Timorese child?”

Meanwhile the Australian prime minister John Coward is floating the idea of a change to the UN Charter to permit pre-emptive strikes against terrorist targets, for conspicuously undefined definitions of the word “terrorist”. 40 million people around the world are infected with HIV and infection rates are accelerating. Vast dust clouds swallow up rural Australian towns. War, famine, pestilence: what sort of sick individual would bring a child into a world like this?

In other news, the cat is scaling hitherto undreamt-of heights of cuteness, sitting in the crook of my arm and nuzzling my cheek, her whiskers tickling me as she purrs. Somehow she senses that the days of child-substitute-as-cushy-sinecure are numbered.

Sadists are working on the roof of the house two doors down. Our bedroom overlooks the rooftops, which is usually very Aww, how gorgeous, except when people attack nearby roofs with crowbars at 8am on a Saturday. I’d been awake until 2am (novel); Jeremy didn’t get to bed until 4am (code). We reviled our neighbors in our hearts.

The roofies have technique, I’ll give them that much. After a good session with the crowbar, they gave us just long enough to doze off again while they set up the Loud Noise-Making Device. When the delight of this apparatus had palled, they resorted to simple hammers.

“I hope they bang their thumbs,” I told my sleepy spouse, who replied:

“They’d just yell.”

Ever have one of those days when the universe just wants to rub your nose in the fundamental interconnectedness of things?

3.30pm: Write thank-you note to colleagues for huge pile of gifts for baby.

4pm: Send wreath to Christchurch, New Zealand, for Jeremy’s grandfather’s funeral.

An heiress who – and much of the coverage missed this (I think) very salient point – was declared mentally incompetent in 1981, has donated $100m to a tiny Chicago poetry magazine called (imaginatively) Poetry Magazine. The fallout is already hilarious: Zyzzyva editor Howard Junker with his nose very decidedly out of joint in the letters pages of the New York Times, and so forth.

It is, as critics accuse, very bad philanthropy, yet the possibilities are tantalizing! Will poets become wildly rich and fawned-over celebrities, as in Henry Fool? Will the thirty thousand surplus screenwriters of Los Angeles up stakes and move to Windy City to try their hands at haiku? Will Charlie Kaufman favour us with a villanelle?

Did I mention she’s one of the heirs to the Lilly fortune, as in Prozac? How can you not love modern America when it just transcends parody?

J: I’ve got my accounting principles undies on!

I look at him blankly. He turns around. There’s a seam between two of the logos on the waistband of his boxers, so instead of saying GAP it says GAAP.

1.

R: She’s kicking me in the bladder again! I ask you is this right is this fair?

J: Blad the impaler.

2.

R (of Michael Jackson): He dangled a child off a balcony. Apparently they’re going to charge him.

J: With child endanglement?

50,015.

(It’s actually not finished yet; I still have about four chapters to write. That said, it’s my longest sustained piece of fiction, ever. And it doesn’t entirely suck.)

Jeremy’s parents have been staying with us, and seem mystified by certain passages of our banter. This morning Jeremy had the Black Ops of TCP/IP slide show on screen.

R: Alice and Bob, up to their old tricks. I don’t know how they stay out of gaol. They’re clearly nefarious.

J: Those pesky kids.

R: I should have put them in the novel.

J: Still can!

R: “Alice and Bob got married… it was a very private wedding.”

J: “Oh good, so Bob overcame the man in the middle then?”

We fall about laughing.

Jan, J’s mother, frankly: These are dreadful jokes.

I have inadvertantly greatly offended someone with a novel excerpt that he read out of context.

R: And the moral is, never date a satirist. Too late for you!

J (laughing): Too late for you!

This has been been ecky Two Thousand And Two-sday.

J: Grant says we shouldn’t use our cat as a duster, especially where animal rights activists can see us.

R: But she purred!

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.