What a thing to wake up to.

John: Did you know anyone in Bali?

Rachel (mystified): Bali? No. Why?

John: Oh… surely you’ve heard…

I only thought of the name on Wednesday night at the Crimson Club, but by Saturday there were sprog-a-palooza cookies, a sprog-a-palooza sponge cake (delicious!), and sparkly red and black letters suspended between two trees spelling out sprog-a-palooza.

The Australians laughed. The Americans had to have it explained that “sprog” is Australian for baby, then they laughed too.

Claire’s not even born yet, and she already has lots of cool friends. Thanks, everyone!

I love books as much and maybe more than I love food, even. After a dry spell earlier this year, I’ve had a fiercely wonderful last few months in reading. Every new book seems to interlock with and comment upon and deepen my understanding of the one that went before. I think it started with Throwim Way Leg by the wonderful Tim Flannery. (Links to the books down there on the right.) I’d tried to read it years ago but never got stuck in. This time it swept me away, most memorably to the murder of two children by Rio Tinto security guards, an incident for which Flannery clearly hasn’t forgiven himself.

From there it was a short step to Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, because Flannery and Diamond share a passion for the fabulous strangeness of the Papua New Guinean highlands. I also read Flannery’s The Eternal Frontier and Robert Sapolsky’s heartbreaking A Primate’s Memoir. Thanks to all of these, and they’re all great, I started thinking pretty hard about people as animals, and about the instinctive roots of much of our behavior.

Evolutionary biology revived my interests in feminism and psychology, hence Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born and DW Winnicott’s Home is Where We Start From. Rich is great on anger, and Winnicott has some reassuring words on being a good enough mother – your faults, after all, are what prompts your child to grow up and get over it. But I’m much more interested in science and history than theory these days – I’ve become that thirtysomething that used to annoy the piss out of me by saying “Fiction just doesn’t grab me any more” – so I drifted back to A Peace to End All Peace.

Though it took me weeks and weeks to get through it (I took holidays in Mating and in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair), I have to say it’s one of the best and most illuminating books I think I’ve ever read. I look at maps of the Middle East with new eyes, and you can’t ask fairer than that. I also learned a great deal about TE Lawrence and – much more interestingly – Winston Churchill, so that puts Seven Pillars and The Second World War on my list of things to get to.

Most recently, I plowed through the first volume of Janet Browne’s Darwin, which she jokes she should have called Darwin: Another Biography. She’s way too modest, because it’s just wonderful, like reading Jane Austen or Patrick O’Brian. Browne pulls off the astounding trick of making Darwin’s intellectual life absolutely gripping. You get to watch him look at the world and think about what he sees and wrestle with the awful consequences – to himself and to the people he loves – of telling the truth. Honestly, I can’t praise it highly enough.

How unbelievably lucky, then, that the very next thing I picked up is just as good, in its way. It’s Oliver Sacks’ memoir, Uncle Tungsten, and it describes a boyhood strikingly similar to Darwin’s, though a hundred and ten or twenty years later. Both were solemn little doctor’s sons, privileged, much loved, but exposed to loss and horror far too young. Both sought refuge in chemistry labs. Sacks is tremendous on the history of chemistry, and his book reminds me of the two great classics of the genre, Atkins’ Periodic Kingdom and Levi’s Periodic Table. It’s that vivid, that perceptive.

Nelson Denoon, the hero of Mating, comments somewhere that when your life is proceeding according to plan, happy coincidences and serendipity confirm the choices you are making. Sacks mentions that it was his aunt Alida who worked for Chaim Weitzman and translated the Balfour Declaration; as this is a key document for A Peace to End All Peace, I choose to take this as proof that I’m on the right track intellectually.

Still to come: the second volume of Browne’s Darwin; Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, about Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Wedgwood, James Watt and others; Seven Pillars and The Second World War, as I mentioned, and I think I’ll have another crack at Lawrence and the Arabs now that I have more context for it. And The Voyage of the Beagle and On the Origin of Species, since I really have no excuse for not reading primary sources. And some more Dawkins, who I’ve never done justice to. (Speaking of Dawkins, there was a great piece in the New Yorker about his bete noir, Stephen Jay Gould, and the influence on him – for good and bad – of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I wonder idly whether Stephen Wolfram has read any Kuhn?)

That ought to keep me busy, at least for a month or two.

(I haven’t even mentioned Copenhagen, Arcadia and Hydrotaphia. I love plays but if a 500-page biography is too short for me, and it is, a two-hour play is barely one bath’s worth of reading. Anyway I think Michael Frayn is most interesting for being married to Jane Austen’s best biographer, Claire Tomalin, who has a very beautiful name.)

One thing I envied both Sacks and Darwin was their apparently-unconscious ability to take their intellectual lives very seriously, by documenting their reading, for example. Hence, in a way, this entry. Two or three years ago I was examining with great optimism several newish, post-surplus social organizations that seemed to me to offer hope for the future. Those convictions haven’t faded, exactly, but they’ve been tested pretty hard. I’ve been forced to face up to the continuing presence of scarcity, both real and artificial, and to its human consequences. Ursula Le Guin says somewhere that good fiction is a set of provisional answers to the question How are we going to live? I’m more worried about this now than ever, and my provisional answer, my Charlie Ravioli, is somewhere in these books, this history, these birds, this botanical garden, this collection of shells and stones.

(As I write this, the Blue Angels are flying directly over my head, practising for Fleet Week. I used to love their perfect lines, the roar of their jets rattling the windows. Now they sound like the Four Horsemen of the military-industrial-entertainment complex, and I have Laurie Anderson’s sad O Superman lodged in my head. “They’re American planes, made in America… so hold me now, in your long arms, your petrochemical arms, your military arms.” How are we going to live through this horrible, inevitable war? How are we going to live with each other? How are we going to live?)

Peter’s the best. He bought Claire a newborn-sized NASA flight suit, complete with Space Shuttle mission patches. Did I mention that Peter is the best?

Fresh Crimson Club! Highlight of the night was Keely, Brian and Spencer reading actual excerpts from their journals at the time they met.

Keely: I have made a commitment to the Lord to keep myself pure until marriage. Oh, and Brian has fallen in love with Spencer.

Brian: How is it that I live in the gay capital of the world and can’t find anyone, then I come to a cowtown in Northern Arizona and meet the perfect man?

Spencer: Now that he’s gone, I have three words to say. Fuck. Brian. Knecht. That asshole.

Keely: I did coke for the first time! How ironic that I am recording my drug exploits in what used to be my prayer journal.

My brother pointed out that my husband is still the number one Google hit for the search string “endearing personal touches”.

Pleased at his continuing ascendancy, Jeremy danced around the bathroom this morning, wearing a towel and singing: “Endearing personal touches! Endearing personal touches!”

Other things that make me happy –

Sunday was a good day. Woke up early, dragged my best boy out of bed, drove Hedwig the wonder car to the bakery behind Liberty Cafe on Cortland, breakfasted on coffee and brioche. Drove to Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park, wandered homesickly through the Eastern Australian garden, settled beside a duck pond and read. Jeremy had Dan Savage’s The Kid, I was reading Janet Browne’s biography of Darwin. Same thing really. Several squirrels came down to drink at the pond. The ducks socialized and grazed. Just before we left, a red-tailed hawk darted through the clearing, no more than ten feet away from us.

I was leaning against a tree that turned out to be exuding sap. It glued me to its bark for a while. Jeremy helped pick the globs of sticky amber off the back of my shirt. For the rest of the day, we both smelt deliciously like tea-tree oil.

I said to Jeremy: “Don’t you feel these are the last days? The calm before the storm?” “Of course,” he said. But the gardens were full of breeders, human and otherwise, and it’s not impossible that we looked longingly at other peoples’ chimpanzee cubs. “It’ll be a nice place to bring the sprog,” he said eventually. “My parents used to bring us places like this all the time.”

Lego makes me happy. (Link via the null device.)

It’s hot, I’m heavy and so I slept more or less all weekend. On Saturday afternoon I had a weird, gross dream. They’d changed the zoning laws for Bluegum Crescent, where I grew up, so that there was a newsagent selling sweets – lollies – candies – on the corner. I tried to buy milk bottles and kool mints, but the owner said they’d rotted, and sent me away with this nasty little strawberry cake.

I stuffed it in my mouth but it was disgusting, and I had to spit it out. When I woke up I was still spitting. There was saliva running down my chin and a puddle of drool on the pillow.

What? I told you it was gross.

Lawrence of Arabia, 2002. Five hours on the iron maidens the Castro is pleased to call seats.

Peter the rocket scientist: It’s just the most wonderful film in terms of cinematography and scale.

R: It’s riddled with historical inaccuracies. (Stamps foot petulantly. Then, relenting) But the horses were pretty.

Signed up for Nanowrimo. Working title: Charlie Ravioli. Now I’m thinking of buying ViaVoice for Mac OS X.

It’s useful to be reminded every now and then that I am a stranger in a strange land, whose people and customs are alien to me.

I was joking around with a couple of cool work contacts on the phone. They both have kids, and they were trying to describe the shambles my life is about to become.

Guy 1: You’ll be thrilled when they get up and make their own breakfast.

R: I’ll be more thrilled when they get up and make my breakfast.

Guy 2: Kids don’t cook so well.

R: The plan is to live near a French bakery, so they can bring me perfect pain au chocolat. And they will learn to make good coffee, oh yes. Y’see, I don’t think of them as kids, so much as tiny slaves.

DEAD silence. Then eventually…

Guy 1: We’ll see how that works out for you.

Bryan’s friend Jsam, also Australian, has a business card that reads: “In my country, my behaviour is considered normal.”

Claire’s growing her brain, and also packing on many layers of fat. For brain growth, she needs to generate a lot of myelin, which is the fatty tissue that covers your axons. Myelin loss is a feature of some particularly nasty genetic and acquired diseases like leukodystrophy and MS. The rest of the fat is just so she doesn’t look too much like a spider monkey when she’s born.

The upshot is that right now I am craving fat. What I particularly need to eat are omega-3 fatty acids (found in green leafy vegetables and cold-water, high-fat fish like salmon) and omega-6 fatty acids (plentiful in meat and dairy).

This is not at all bad news, and has renewed my obsession with my favourite fat source in all the world: French cooking. We’ve been dropping by Absinthe for lunch on the way back from regular prenatal visits. On Monday night, to my joy, we discovered Le Zinc, a perfect little Parisian cafe just around the corner from our birth prep class.

And last night we made our first, absolutely splendid tarte tatin. Except to stock up on apples, flour, butter and cream, I need never leave the house again.

We’re at birth prep class, holding ice to practice our pain management techniques (ow. Ow. OW!) and Summer the teacher asks us what visualization we used.

R: I was going to use generic ocean imagery, but I ended up using McWay Falls, where there’s this waterfall onto the beach at Big Sur.

J (grinning): Get out of my *head*.

He’d used the exact same image. It’s like the time at Red, White & Blue Beach in Santa Cruz, where I picked up an interestingly shaped stone, and we walked on another 25 yards or so, and he picked up another stone and said “Is this the other half?” and it was.

A perfect Sunday. Waking up at Kat and Ian’s country estate. Sitting in the sunshine, drinking coffee, reading the New York Times and petting Bunny the cat. Brunch in Burlingame with Bryan, Shannon and Cian the Giant Baby. After brunch, Bryan’s friend Nat regaled us with poo stories.

“My son William comes bouncing out of the toilet saying ‘Daddy, Daddy, come and see what I made!’ And I thought, ‘This’ll be good.’ So we go in and he says, ‘Look, I made a bridge poo!’ Sure enough, there’s a turd that starts on one side of the bowl, arches over the water and lands on the other side.

“So I’m thinking, Share the joy, and I say to William, ‘Let’s call Granddad at work!’ It’s 9:30am and my father gets called out of a meeting to talk to his grandson, who still has a sound grasp of New Zealand slang. And William says ‘Granddad, I made a bridge grogan!'”

I asked Nat if I could have Bridge Grogan as a character name for my Nanowrimo novel, and he kindly agreed.

Today’s precious marketroid kept interrupting her CTO, who was also on the call, so that she could paraphrase the answer he’d already given.

R: God, I hate these people.

Jim: It’s the hormones.

R: So how long do I get to be this rampaging bitch? (pause) Oh yeah, all my life.

Jim: But for the next three months, you have an excuse.

I dreamed that Goldman Sachs defaulted on some loans and went under, rather like Argentina. What made this especially tragic was that Colin had finally made some money off his Sun stock, only to invest it in Goldman. Someone mentioned that Morgan Stanley had already failed, so I guess Matt was feeling Colin’s pain.

As these events unfolded, a group of us, including Colin, my father and Emer the donkey rescuer, watched CNN on a huge screen on the roof of an apartment in Soma. We drank Corona. The sun set behind us, and the Bay Bridge was cast into twilight.

Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white
Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose
Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night,
A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose.

The legions of cruel inquisitive They
Were so many and big like dogs: he was upset
By Germans and boats; affection was miles away:
But guided by tears he successfully reached his Regret.

How prodigious the welcome was. Flowers took his hat
And bore him off to introduce him to the tongs;
The demon’s false nose made the table laugh; a cat
Soon had him waltzing madly, let him squeeze her hand;
Words pushed him to the piano to sing comic songs;

And children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.

Me (scolding, to belly): Stop kicking me in the bladder! You’ll never get to Stanford at this rate.

Jeremy: That’s her football scholarship, right there.

Kat’s making me pavlova. She is my new favorite person in the whole entire world.