We did our whirlwind rock star tour
of California (I didn't take many pictures, sorry). We saw our first
roller derby and it was awesome. We ate a lot of good food. I found out
that Hendrick's gin is as good as its ad copy. I fell hard in love with
otters and seahorses. I watched Golden Girls for the first time. I
found out what the dot over the I is called in the course of losing
(but not badly) at trivia night. I turbo-taxed. It was mostly very
good.

On the road to Monterey, we passed a car on the side of the road. Two
people were hugging beside the car. My first response was WHAT THE
HELL? My sister and my son both said AWWW. This, along with their cute
noses, blond hair, and general irresistibility,  none of which I share,
is further evidence that I am basically raising my sister in boy form.
I do not wish it any other way.

Now I'm home and singing "good morning, jet lag, here we go again…"
to myself. I am sorry that I did not get a full vacation while we were
there (two rush jobs) but I am grateful as anything to have today off
so I can wander from room to room in a half-daze. I may glut myself on
the New Yorker or on television for the whole day. Or both! Certainly I
am staying in my jammies. It's just going to be that wacky.

I was planning to let Squire stay home after I woke up at four and
found out that he had been up since three, but he insisted on going to
school. Ah, school. We have not missed you at all.

Uhm, I got a really awesome contract (editing medical, marketing, and
miscellaneous texts, mmmmmbop) with a Prestigious Hospital and I'm
pretty excited about that.

I have felt more precious and more disposable in the last two weeks
than I have in a year, and holding those two feelings at the same time
is a level of dissonance that I generally try to avoid. It will pass,
but probably not until I've watched an entire season of True Blood or
something.

The conversation with the principal about "Perhaps the school should alert parents to the fact that their kids are on facebook" did
not go quite as planned, since for example he did not know that his own
school has a facebook page. He thought I was warning him THERE IS PRON ON THE INTERNETS!! which I was actually on like, the fifth book in that series, but whatever: baby steps.

Last week there was also a conflict with the gym teacher; he apparently thought
that we were making fun of him with our very politely worded "Please excuse Squire from the whole-class detention" letter. The
guy has some respect issues, as do I, so we started at least with that
in common. I was kind of outraged about the whole situation; Friar seemed to be afraid I was going to go in and actually kick the
guy's teeth in. Apparently he didn't
understand that I have to get really angry as a form of girding. Maybe it's my Cold War upbringing but my thought is that I need
to be armed, not that I need to fire. Naturally when I went in there my
intention was to make sure that we're all on the side of getting my
child as well educated as possible. I was all California smiles and charm. My people skilz are unfathomable so now we're all best friends and stuff; I know
all about his daughters and his cottage and his 10 year break from
teaching and his blood pressure and alla that. And he has a better
understanding of Squire, and wheee, job well done awesome high five to
myself.

"Unemployment" (by which I mean: no longer collecting a steady predictable paycheck)
is not really all that bad; I've got enough work coming to keep my
devil's playthings busy. I do spend a lot of time reading and a lot of time looking up stupid crap that I have no actual interest in, and I watched the entire first season of GLEE in basically one sitting, but ehn, things are happening. The brain surgeons keep giving me work, and then fun little things along the way, like a job reading a book for a recording for blind people.

Yesterday
Squire and I cleaned his room. It's basically the first time I've set
foot in there since September (I call "goodnight" from the doorway,
because whoa! he is messy.) I generally
believe that you should be allowed to keep your own room, but like, not when you can barely open the door, so it was time for an intervention. FIVE HOURS, yo. Mostly
because the archaeological significance of many things had to be
appreciated for a few minutes, which my Pave The Earth housekeeping
style does not understand and so I had to have frequent breaks to keep from screaming. But anyway, it got done.

I am distressed by people who do not understand LOLCATS grammar and try
to make up their own, like they think it's just speaking English badly rather than any actual structure. Also
irritated all out of proportion by people who "loveeeeeeee" things. It
is a silent E; you are not emphasizing anything by typing it a dozen
times. Yeah, so I'm going to go to Prague for a bit and take care of an actual baby until I
can start thinking like a grown-up again. Wish for pretty weather for me! 

Hearty chortled greetings. How was your weekend? But first let me tell
you about mine. Friar had been having recurring nightmares about the
cottage. When I have nightmares about the cottage, I do not want to go
there in case they might be true. When he has nightmares about the
cottage, he has to go to be sure they are not true, so we bundled up
and went to the cottage this weekend.

I believe – no, I admit – that at some point Squire made a face about the trip, and I hissed in his ear that I did
not want to go, that I was going in order to be kind to Friar, that
periodically we do things we don't like in order to be kind, and that
the kindness is removed by our bitching about it, and I am going so
he's going and I don't want another word about it. I do understand that
my saying to him that I don't want to go is fundamentally no different
from his saying that he doesn't want to go. I'm balancing my hypocrisy
with a little self awareness. That could totally be my epitaph.

To be fair, the person who volunteered to be in charge of preparing
and packing the food failed to prepare anything for me other than
boiled eggs, which was a large factor in my dampened enthusiasm. Yes
okay also we brought bell peppers and tomatoes, but for protein: boiled
eggs. Mmmm, really, boiled eggs for lunch dinner and breakfast? That
causes brisk rubbing of the anticipatory hands! And heart attacks!

It was 20 degrees below. Celsius, but still: that is cold.
Fortunately we were bundled and had many, many pairs of extra socks.
Mostly the whole weekend I couldn't get warm. Even when the inside of
the cottage was a perfectly reasonable temperature I was generally
under a pile of sleeping bags and doing Inward Moaning. However, we
also played in the snow, which was very fluffy and unsuitable for
snowballs. It was, however, very nice to run in and also to fall down
in, which I did quite a bit. Squire made snow angels for his
grandmother, who had mentioned them (city snow is unsuitable, as it can
contain Surprises), and I took pictures. And that part was a lot of
fun, and coming back to the toasty cottage after that part was also a
lot of fun. And breaking out the wine and cigarettes and sitting down
to play games with a now-crackling fire at our backs, watching the
thermostat inside rise while the one outside fell, that was also also
fun.

We played every game in the cottage at least once, dried our socks
over the stove, and Squire and I started reading "A String in the Harp"
(1970s Newbery book), which is very promising. I have some ideas about
the 70s and children's literature in the 70s in particular, and the
contrast between what Newbery winners reflect and what bestsellers
reflect… but I'm really not probably qualified to expound on it
without at least a bottle of wine tucked under my belt.

Anyway. How was your weekend? I hope it was also good.

Dear Boys Across the Street,

Well, not boys. I assume that since you're living just two of you in those big rooms that you have incomes, and incomes usually mean jobs, and jobs mean some kind of grown-upedness, but now I am an old woman and any male this much younger than me is a boy. Anyway, dear boys:

Thank you so much for moving in. Thank you for being home pretty much whenever I am looking out the window in the evening. Thank you for dressing up to go out, or for staying home to have parties. Thank you for knowing that towels don't get you as dry as the air does. Thank you for having parties with beautiful girls, drunk already at 6 and everybody laughing to show all their teeth. Thank you for going out dancing. Thank you for dressing sharp. Thank you for not having curtains.

Love,
What I Am Becoming

COOKING:

Rice does not need to be washed or toasted before it is cooked.
Meat can be cooked in a tablespoon or less of oil.
Rinsing cooked pasta, especially in cold water, is a sin.
Toast should be brown but never black.
Sugar is not an appropriate second ingredient in any savory food.
Most vegetables taste better raw.
Potatoes do not count as "vegetables".
A meal should not take longer than 1 hour to prepare.

WASHING DISHES:
The person who cooks is ideally excused from doing dishes.
When washing dishes, it is important to wash at least all the tableware.
Sometimes this involves two loads, but it is part of "doing the dishes".
It is okay to soak pots overnight.
Dishes that are soaking should soak in the sink.
Emptying the dish drainer is part of washing the dishes.
Putting away the dishes is the last step in doing them.

Oh, hey! Hi! I'm so scattered I make the leaves look organized. I'm
actually getting a lot done, via plate juggling. On Monday, I went to a
concert and quilt show with my new dance partner, who is two years old,
because dating the inappropriately young is the new cocktail hat. He
was an extremely attractive conversation piece, which I appreciate in a
date, and he also clutched his sweet pudgy fingers around my neck,
which I enjoyed very much, as certain people in this house are Too Old
for cuddling. The music was good if you like hearing people sing folk
songs in not-their-native language, which I very much do. The quilts
were pretty much My First Real Quilt; not badly done but kinda boring.
When we left I was reintroduced to how awesome it is when people give
you their seats on the tram and so altogether it was a fine night.

On
Tuesday, Mr. H came and painted the bathroom. I have liked him since he
first laughed at one of my jokes 8 years ago instead of correcting my
Czech (My desire to anthropomorphize objects does not always
translate). We are mutually delighted by each other, and it is a
pleasure to see him now, eight years wider, with hearing aids and a
little slower on the stairs than before, but still so good at straight
lines it's like a superpower. Rulerfinger! I used to paint everything
myself but now I would rather have Mr. H come and show me pictures of
his grandchildren, thus saving my energy for the clean up afterwards.

Squire
came home Wednesday singing Lady Gaga's hit song, "Mah-mah-mah
pockmarked face, mah-mah pockmarked face" and that was pretty funny.
And then later he told me there was a Lidl store opening up down the
street and it took me like an hour to understand that it was the
supermarket chain Lidl, and not a leetle store, which explains his
weird accent. It's two blocks away so I imagine we'll be having this
problem for a while to come.

Today I am going to meet another
baby! It is good research and I appreciate all my friends having babies
at varying ages so that I don't have to. I smell their sweet heads and
read them educational articles from the paper and teach them some dance
moves and laugh at their jokes as many times as they want to tell them
and then hand them back to their moms when they start to smell funny.
I'm like a Victorian daddy. (I actually can change a diaper and like to
think of myself as somewhat useful but I like also this idea of me in a
morning coat; don't you?).

And that's it. I'm finishing up my
job at the educational web site in a week or so, following which I plan
to take a long bath in apple cider vodka,
and then fully devote myself to babies and brains (the separate study
of both, not the eating of either, although nomnom) for a year,
whereupon I shall either emerge entirely brilliant or pretty much the
same as always. SAME THING I KNOW.