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!

Some time ago, I don’t even remember when, I had a vivid and elaborate dream about stealth aircraft flying out of an airfield near my son’s (!) playground. These planes were wedge-shaped, a bit wider than the recently-announced Birds of Prey though otherwise very similar, and shockingly manouverable: vertical take-off and landing was the least of it.

The coolest part, though, were the two mission patches the pilots gave my son after we went for a joy-ride over Seattle. One was a sort of Rosie the Riveter deal, with the outline of the stealth plane disguised as Rosie’s, err, riveting tool. The other was a campfire, with the outline hidden inside one of the flames.

My mission patches were way more stylish and art deco, but the Bird of Prey guys had exactly the same idea. I probably read about mission patches like these somewhere; I’m into skunkworks and Dreamland and that whole Rachel, Nevada thing. I prefer this explanation to the alternative, because if I’m actually picking up classified information in my sleep, it’d behoove me to turn myself in.

R: So the guy I had to meet turned out to be this way-cute, twentysomething Dubliner with black hair and blue eyes. He was gorgeous, and he lives on Merrion Square, and he’s a CTO.

J: Is that so.

R: And you’re just a humble senior software engineer.

J: Humble?

R: Okay, you’re an arrogant senior software engineer.

J: Senior systems software engineer.

(Meanwhile on The Onion: “Corporate Brass Forced to Tolerate Tech Support Guy’s Wolfman-Like Hair, Beard.” That was no lycanthropic freak of nature, that was my husband!)

The 21st century has been temporarily wound back. Our CEO brought Krispy Kreme donuts for all. We’re going to party like it’s 1999!

I am very fond of my colleague Jim, but the microwaved leftovers he is eating for lunch smell like sweaty socks.

Glorious wedding on Saturday, at a Unitarian church in the hills above El Cerrito. My sweetie and I are strolling the grounds before the ceremony, admiring the rapturous view of the bay.

J: I wonder what Unitarian Hell is like?

Several people turn and wonder what the crazy pregnant woman is guffawing about.

Bon voyage, Dan and Kathleen!

“The burn is the original seeing.”

Wiese Street, just now. Elderly black man to his elderly companion: “Hey! Ain’t nothin fair, ain’t nothin’ right. Nothin’ is fair, nothin’ is right.”

Companion (she’s heard it all before): “Yeah, yeah.”

1.

Me: Did you have fun in the science museum?

Ross (my nephew, aged 4): Were you with me?

Me (confused): Yes, I’ve been with you all day.

Ross: Then you know what kind of a day I’ve had.

2.

Ian: I’m inventing television!

Me: We’ve already got one. It’s verra naice.

3.

Kathryn: We stayed in the Standard Hotel.

Jeremy: Where the rooms are one metre wide and high. And everything weighs a kilogram.

A modern Australian love story: he’s an Iranian asylum-seeker who’s been detained at Woomera for two years. She was Indonesian, and has died of burns from the Bali explosions. He’s on suicide watch.

Worker’s bloody paradise, mate.

Yep. Her tiny hands are frozen. Frozen, frozen, frozen, her tiny hands, frozen is what they are. Really really cold. Yep. And tiny.

I get it, already.

I am the Venus of Willendorf.