It usually takes twenty minutes to half an hour to deal with my otherwise superb mechanic, so my heart somewhat sank when I realized Wim urgently needed brake work and so I’d probably miss the Monday morning teleconference.

Not so. I breezed in. “Rachel, right?” said Jerry.

“Ancient Volksie, no brakes,” I explained.

“Need a lift?” he asked.

I got to work in time to make a cup of tea and check my email before the call.

I feel both smooth and sharp.

Mark and Big have only been here 48 hours, but already the Vulcan mind meld is in effect.

J: Can you pass me the plum, no, the pear, the apricot…

Big: The peach?

J: I’m having trouble with fruit names.

IN UNISON:

Mark: It’s Mark.
J (pointing): Mark, right?

I had a complementary dream to this one. There were three hessian sacks with children inside. They were all intended to be thrown off the castle walls. (“Good idea,” said Big.)

I only saved one, but in it was a dark-haired baby like Knoa. I was determined above all things to protect her. An angry mob pursued me through the castle, hell-bent on sacrificing the girl in accordance with prophecy, but I managed to evade them, and she was still alive when I woke up.

I’m a little embarrassed: my dreams aren’t usually quite so transparent.

Kathryn: I read your blog but lately it’s just poetry.

R: Yes. Well. The best thing about studying English is…

Mark: Ooh, this oughta be good.

R: …is that the poems stay with you.

Big: That’s worth four years of your life?

R: Six. Well, okay, the best thing about studying English is spending six years doing no work at all and drinking on two continents, all at your parents’ expense.

Mark: That’s what you do now.

Big: Yes, but she’s paying for it.

R: Good point. The second best thing about studying English is getting a job where you don’t have to do much work and you can fund your own drinking. The third best thing about studying English is, no wait, it’s that I get to mock Colin for saying “gifted us with” instead of “gave us”.

Big: Still don’t see why that’s wrong.

R: It just is. Trust me. Anyway. The fourth best thing about studying English, but it’s still good, okay? Is that you get to keep the poems.

Mark: That’s nice, dear.

“The good news is I found out my ex-boyfriend isn’t my biological brother after all.”

“The first time was terrible, then we both fell asleep. The second time, on the plus side, he had a hardon, but on the minus side, also a strong gag reflex. So it was better AND worse.”

I was angry with my friend.
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe.
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears
And I sunned it with my smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night
Till it bore an apple bright
And my foe beheld it shine
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole.
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Since there’s no help, come, let us kiss and part.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me.
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart
that thus so cleanly I myself can free.

Christian Science bookstore on Mission Street:

“We’re Christian Scientists! NOT Scientologists!”

Graffiti, Shotwell and 17th:

“If you hit her once, you’ll hit her again. Then you’ll kill her – Teardrop”

Graffiti, Alabama and 19th:

“I MISS YOU TERRIBBBLY”

to which someone else has added

“MOM”

Liz the mordant freelancer: Do you ever think the world would be a better place if we just wiped men out altogether?

R: Ayup.

L: Oh, they’re not that bad really.

GRRR – there go, my heart’s abhorrence.
Water your damned flowerpots, do.
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence
God’s blood, wouldn’t mine kill you!

Claire sailed through her AFP tests and ultrasound, and is hitting developmental goals right on time. At this rate, she’ll surpass her puny parents at age three, and rule the world by 2007.

Can’t say I wasn’t warned about changed sleeping patterns and weird dreams, but even so, things are getting a little odd. I jumped perkily out of bed at 2am – believe me, this never happens – caught up on the Twiki and wrote some very bad fiction. (Yay for first drafts.) Accidently woke J by making too much crinkle-noise pouring myself cornflakes at 4am. He came out to check that I wasn’t rearranging the kitchen cupboards again.

Eventually got back to sleep around 5, knowing I needed to make a teleconference call at 9am. Woke at 8.45 from possibly the worst dream I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some doozies.

A good friend of mine, a musician, had called us all to his apartment for one last party. He lived in a red brick complex on an escarpment, with a beautiful sea view. There were excellent chocolate brownies, as you’d expect, and masses of whipped cream. After we left, this friend of ours intended to commit suicide with sleeping pills and lye.

I became more and more distressed. The rest of our friends supported his decision, and they frowned on me when I tried to remonstrate with him. Crushed by grief and the weight of social opprobrium – literally crushed, in that I was finding it difficult to breathe – I burst into tears and had to be led away.

In the courtyard his black kitten was rolling on her back in the sunshine. I wondered if he’d arranged for someone to look after her. She had a white whisker.

When I woke up, I was still crying. I only just mopped up in time to make the call.

Bebe, Cat Scientist just slays me. She’s unearthed an ancient tennis ball, bigger than her head. She bats it around the apartment, growling fiercely with joy. Then she hooks her teeth in the green fluff, and carries it.

I have adopted new terms of approbation and disapprobation.

From henceforth, my enemies and the various ogres that stand against me shall be known as “luminists”.

My fellow fighters for truth and justice, “scurvy dogs”.

Wiese Street was once described in our local paper as a “crime-darkened alley”, an epithet we have embraced. Adorable urchins have painted cheery, saturated-color murals of inspiring figures like Sojourner Truth, but one was recently defaced. It now reads “Mahatma Ghangi Fuuk Yu”.

This morning as I was coming to work a police officer was searching one of the locals, looking in the pockets of his vinyl jacket. “Do you have any needles?” he asked. The local stared into space. “Well?” asked the officer. “Do you have any needles?”

“Um… yeah?” said the local helpfully.

Right now the crackhouse across the street is blasting Transglobal Underground. “Egyptian pharaohs, fell from the sky, fell from the sky and played the blues.”

Jeremy asked me to pass on his Rule Number One For Road Trips Along I-5:

1. No lattes.

Midsummer Mozart, Monterey Bay Aquarium and Frankie and Tina’s new beachside pad in Santa Cruz formed the rudiments of a splendid weekend. Slept on the deck and woke to the sound of waves and barking seals, before the brass band got tuned up to cheer along the runners in the Wharf to Wharf.

Knoa cut her second tooth.

I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

R: I’ve got a great idea for a Burning Man costume. I’ll wear a sailor suit and hang an albatross around my neck.

Kathryn (smiles, politely but blankly)

R (at her most codger-like): And that’s what’s wrong with kids today! They don’t read! Peter, at Burning Man, I’m going to wear a sailor suit and hang a stuffed albatross around my neck.

P (laughs his head off)

R: See? See? I am funny! You just have to catch the references…

(Those crazy kids sure know how to rock the Lush Lounge, though.)

I mailed Susan at Kerncrest Audubon. She replied in mere moments, saying that the bald eagles that show up every winter are gone by this time of year. On the other hand, there are ospreys nesting at the lake right now.

I like eagles and ospreys, so this is a win-win from my point of view.

Swimming hole on the Kern River near Lake Isabella last Sunday morning. Two big raptors flying low, heading east. Very dark bodies, distinctive snowy-white heads and shoulders.

“Did you see those?” asked Jeremy.

I did, but I was swimming, so I didn’t have my glasses on. And now I doubt the evidence of my own eyes. The only white-headed raptor on Buteo is the bald eagle – rare, spectacular, and if in fact in Lake Isabella, hundreds of miles south of its usual range.

But this site also lists a sighting by a couple in Lake Hughes, another 130 miles south of Kernville. So it’s not impossible…

Don’t get me wrong; I want to believe those were eagles I saw. But I also saw a huge raptor soaring over McWay Beach in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park last December, when we went down for J’s birthday. That one had great patches of white under its wings, right up against its body. Just like this.

The California Condor is one of the fifty rarest birds in the world. Either I’m the luckiest neophyte birder who ever trod this earth, or I need to get my glasses cleaned.