Baby Goats on a Hill... and Jonathan Richman

Today was a full day. The man and the boy had breakfast in the Western Addition (that place I continue to refuse to call "NoPa") while I worked. Later we drove over Grand View and saw the amazing collection of cute woolly grazing goats hanging happily on the side of the hill. We had Bursa kabob with friends Sandi and Mark, and then headed over to the Miraloma Clubhouse for a short Jonathan Richman set and a whole bunch of jazz that impressed the hell out of Des. I think the kid is going to be a trombone player-- he was hypnotized. I tripped over my tongue talking to Jonathan and his pretty date. I wish I weren't so shy but those are the breaks. We had a great day and Staycation has officially begun. Now: grilled cheese and spicy salsa sandwiches with a nice glass of pinot noir. Tomorrow, Eat Real in Oakland with Megan and Brian. The sun is out and life is good.

Happening at the Zoo

On Friday night we went to a party benefiting a midwives’ education group and celebrating Abby Epstein and Ricki Lake’s new book about choices in childbirth. It was fun to see our homebirth education teacher, a whole mess of pregnant ladies, some interesting art, some brand-new babes, and our beautiful midwives. we snapped two pictures of the baby with midwife Nancy and wish we could also have gotten some with midwife Michelle, but the room was way too crowded by the time we saw her.




We took il Ducino to the zoo for the first time yesterday. We had a great time, and watching him crawl around and take in all the sights around him had me, for the thousandth time this week, all boggled and and tearing up about the millions of ways that this little boy I see has overtaken our little baby, seemingly over night.






Today it's cleaning and preparing for the week ahead. No news, goood news. It's been too long since we've had a productive Sunday at home.

My Baby Blue is a New Star in the Sky

Saturday we celebrated the anniversary of my labor at the hospital we planned so fervently to avoid. We bought an ice cream and a coffee at the UCSF cafeteria, then took the lift up to 15 Moffit and walked the long hall down to Labor and Delivery.

Easily walk a long hall—carrying 20+ pounds of another person!— that you could barely cope with in a wheelchair or with a walker when you last encountered it and you are bound to feel some gratitude.

In L&D a very kind nurse let us into the birthing suite where we first met our boy. The city view was glorious, bathed in the same 5pm sunlight that it was last year when I was admitted. The grownups toasted eachother, feeling happy and grateful, and then went home to eat some chicken katsu loco moco and listen to Air.

Sorry I'm Broken

The man's birthday celebrations continue. Tonight should be the last one, dinner with yet more family, hosted - how can this be? - at our house. I'll make a sole picata, spinach salad, and cream cheese frosting for some choco cupcakes that after a long story are chillin' in our freezer, and call it a day. Pictured below is the delicious (!) if blurry cake I made for him on the actual day. I was going for a tropical theme since we're kind of dorks for tropical. It was a basic yellow cake with a layer of kiwis in the middle, topped by a key lime icing and strawberries, mango and macademia nuts. So totally delicious. The limes made an otherwise supersweet cake into something really nice and special. I mean, sure, my teeth still wanted to fall out of my head when I ate it, but there was a tanginess there too, which made me think of Vitamin C and someday getting back to being healthy.


So perhaps I've been eating too much sugar. (Cake of some form every day since Easter. What?) My weird hand thing has broken out into a weird face thing too. Again, ironic and hilarious, considering I work with my hands and make people's skin pretty for a living. Anyway, that weird 100 degree weather last week that was followed by days of brutal and irritating wind brought with it some serious allergens that my sugar-loving, sleep-deprived immune system was totally unprepared for. And so this week, I feel like this:


We spent last weekend having family birthday dinners and then celebrating with our friends at Lucky Juju Pinball in Alameda. What a fun place! It's all volunteer-run and so friendly and welcoming. A $10 cover ($5 for kids under 12) buys you "all you can play" games on some classic vintage pinball machines, including

4 Million BC

Monaco

and that old fave,

Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy


and a buck buys you all-you-can-eat popcorn. Jukeboxes are free to play, too.

When we walked in, my favorite room (painted minty blue with gigantic 1950's Space Hotties murals) the jukebox was playing Patti Smith and the baby and I admired a poster of 1930's Alameda amusement park called Neptune Beach.


People who know me at all know that places like Neptune Beach (the fact that they once existed and are gone now) make me lose all control. Seriously, every time I see this:



and think that it used to be a short jog from my house, and that people once actually left their houses and TVs to swim and bathe together, I want to cry. Okay, I am tearing up a little just thinking about it now.

So now you know: I am a dork. And this one is the dork of the future





This weekend, it's rainy and cold. A friend's birthday brunch is toaday. (Waffles and crepes and Nutella and friends and champagne! It would sound heavenly if this weird allergy weren't making my face look like I somehow magincally skipped two decades and smoked two packs a day my whole life. I want to hide in my house and do crosswords.) I have organizing to do in my new studio space and the dinner tonight with the 'rents. After that, I hope for many long moments drinking hot beverages with my bum surgically attached to the sofa. It's been a busy couple of months and I miss that sofa so.

Hot Summer Nights in Spring

Last weekend we began celebrating the husband's birthday by spending a couple of lovely nights "staycationing" in our own back yard. Our view looked like this:


and we spent the days reading the paper, lounging in the park, riding the cable cars and eating delicious Italian food in North Beach. Our good friends came by the hotel to look after il Ducino while we went out for much-needed Thai massages. Mine was good. Even the part when I told the therapist that it was too much and she had to stop. "I can't take it!" I whimpered, and she whispered, "You can take it," elbow firmly implanted just south of my cringing left scapula. The weekend was fun, though I won't lie: a real vacation would be so, so nice right now.

So on Tuesday, we got our Polynesian Pop on and attended a fun and spirited (har har) class on the History of the Tiki Bar and the Rise of the Exotic Cocktail at Bourbon and Branch. We tasted a lot of very nice rums, mixed some exceedingly good drinks, met some nice folks and generally had a great time. It made me miss being in Hawaii, and it made me really miss the imagined 1950's Hawaii that never existed, but you'd be surprised at how much that mood is improved with a little good hooch and fresh juice.




The next day was Earth Day, a sober one back in Recession-era 2009. After buying the makings of a nice birthday dinner (and a yummy cake with lime icing, fresh mangoes and macademia nuts) for my honey, I saw this guy handing out resumes outside the Ferry Building.


It was a genius schtick, and amazing to me how no one would even take the man's CV.

Things are so tough right now and I know we are incredibly lucky. Even with global warming and 90 degree weather in fair, foggy San Francisco. So I count my many blessings and I turn the extra lights out and wear my sweater rather than using the heater, now that it's cold again.

Spring Sprang Sprung

This past weekend my little family poured our everything into our traditional holiday ritual.

It is our four-seasons ritual. We do it in the summer when it's hot. We do it in the winter when it's not. And always in the springtime, always in the fall. In woolen undies, pink pajamas, and with nothing on at all. The ritual happens in all weather and for all state- and church-mandated occasions.

We do it, our special holiday thing, though we can't always remember why. It's the thing that defines our sacred family moments. It it our shared heritage, and as the youngest generation it is our birthright.


We spent this holiday weekend as we spent all holiday weekends: in a rented car, schlepping from parent's house to parent's house to parents' house. It's just what we do.


The upside, of course, was three separate Easter baskets for il Ducino. And more sugar than his two grown-up servants have been able to sleep off in three days. I'm enjoying the fact that the kiddo as yet has no idea what candy is. Or what presents are, for that matter. Next year, perhaps we'll have no such luck. This year it was all about the grandparents' cuddles, the sunshine just a little way's out of our socked-in town, and listening to the radio.

And the car. And baskets full of things. And the car.




Life -it's true!- is sweet.

Sweet sweet sweet

While I search for healthy cake ideas for a child who isn't strictly speaking allowed to eat cake just yet, I have come across these delightful candy platters from www.bonbonsconnexion.com . All the old sugary favorites of my young childhood: the coke bottles, the Swedish fish, the gummi bears and their gummi cousins, the worms... I would save my allowance and buy them by the scads at Buttercup, we sticky-fingered kids digging into our sweet bags of booty under the bridge in Creek Park.




(This was before I discovered Mrs. Grossman's stickers and the Sweet Valley High novels that forever burned into my brain thoughts on wearing a watch, when the party starts, and what constitutes a "perfect" sized figure - hint: it's a lot smaller than mine, and significantly larger than the zeros I see in every Gap and Banana Republic in the universe).

Sweet, sweet party platters. Will they go with my tamales and lemonade party theme?