badgerbag

Moomin all excited over pirate store, but then fell asleep in the car on the way there, at like 3:30… and was groggy and miserable and demanded to go home all the way through the pirate store. Dammit! He liked the drawers and especially the music box innards and the trap doors and the fish. I have the feeling that though he was grouchy he will be talking about it for a while.

We took his new glider-rubber-band-launching airplane to Dol0res Park … ran into beccastar on the way there and tagged along with her and her dog. It was nice to run into someone I sort-of-blog-know (though, one way). Her film projects sound cool and when they are up on her web site I’ll link to them!
Moomin hugged her dog. He is over his fear of dogs! And he flew the airplane and loved the boat thing. We walked all the way up the hill for him to climb the very gnarled twisty low trees that are easy to climb. For a really long time he pretended to be a squirrel and sat there talking in a squirrel voice about how the city and the dogs and the park and the trains going by and everything were all so beautiful. He is so cool!

Then we pretended he was a Crime solving tree-climbing detective dog. He crawled across the bridge from the park to church st. while looking for clues. I think it took us 20 minutes to go across that bridge.

Also keep in mind he had on his “black fox” outfit, which is the black turtleneck, black pants, and… newly… wraparound sunglasses. Crawling across the bridge. He looked like an insane midget beatnik. I will post photos tomorrow.

did I mention that I walked about one zillion miles in the hilly part of the city while pushing Moomin?! I overestimated my own stamina – and underestimated the distance to everything… and forgot where the hills were…

A gift shop… a light-up necklace, pink… sushi in a warm restaurant with no hills.. suddenly realized I was utterly brain dead. Editorial meeting… there was no smart-Badger left… Hmmm!

In the pirate store and at dinner and the park and the meeting I kept feeling like people were thinking I am an awful parent for hauling my kid all over creation and not having a better dinner for him than rice or ignoring him while I lamely try to suggest ideas about why magical r3alism sucks and should be mocked. Moomin laid on the floor and played with bristleblocks and hamtaros (bijou, the femmiest ham-ham, in a spaceship, with guns, shooting invisible tie-fighters!) I thought of how I got dragged along behind my mom to 8 zillion boring-ass errands where I would just sit in the car reading if not forced into wherever it was. (The fate of everyone, I know.) At least he gets to be bored in cosy cafes while being stuffed with cookies. And… perhaps shamefully, rice, fruit, cookies, and being slightly ignored is often his dinner experience whether he is out on the town or at home here with us…

He had a blast with Leeann, who made fascinating fart jokes, talks about aliens, and by some miracle, persuaded him that eating a soybean would be “cool”. He spit it out, but still. That was amazing!

I should be getting in the car right now to pick up Rook but I am toasted… my knee hurts.. I have cramps still, or again, or something… I keep having flashbacks to early labor. My sweetest rook is going to be dissed in a cab. But I think better a cab than me dying in my truck on the way to the airport. Also I just realized my truck is stupidly full of wet junk that I loaded into it to go to the dump and then it got rained on again last night. So… putting his luggage back there amidst the moldy old clthes and cardboard boxes….

Pilot and Acrobat are asleep and I have no heart to try to leave Moomin with them… there’s no way i’m waking them up… Moomin coughing, not realy asleep.. Rook is hosed. Aaaa! forgive me for not sentimentally swooping down with my chariot to bring you home, Rook!!!

Errands and gardening- I swore to do only homework today but then decided to finish the weekend projects. A little cooking and gardening is healthy exercise right??

My garden strategies are working fairly well. My philosophy is to tend the dirt not the plants. The areas I focused on the hardest now have nice soil and lots of earthworms. Dig a little to aerate, let some weeds grow (birdseed, dropped by the birds, is perfect), pull up the weeds and use them as mulch. Worms come and eat the mulch. Certain things always do well for me in really horrible, acid-and-clay soil – oregano, rosemary, this one ground cover called apt3nia, and salvias. This has worked yet again. I’ve left this legacy of rental house gardens behind me with little rockeries full of oregano. Parseley loves me; basil hates me in CA, where the snails come with the worms. Handily I can use the oregano and parsely in nearly everything I cook.

IF ONLY the cilantro will grow this time. The snails are licking their radulas in anticipation.

I am now trying to expand the area that I am sure I will tend throughout the summer. Not too horribly ambitioius… just the courtyard… I tried the back courtyard last year but then just ignored it and everything pretty much died. Alas but if I don’t naturally walk past it every day, it will not get the attention!

Pilot and Acrobat have been doing the compost heap and it is quite glorious!

Now to the homework. I am making bread again. Newly in love with the bread machine! Rook was right about it.

A morning of intense yardwork. Weeds were whacked. Junk cleared (mostly). Moomin and I painted the sandbox covers with some goopy, gloppy, half-driedout green outdoor-latex paint. Tomorrow I’ll try to finish them and bolt on the handles.

The afternoon improved vastly as soon as Dr. Bit came over and we had some coffee. Afternoon coffee! How I miss thee!

Someone at Rook’s office gave him a bag full of little plastic ninjas, so we spent much of the afternoon painting ninjas with acrylic and model paint. Inside-out t-shirts on the kids! Paint everywhere!

I baked some bread. Eliz. put together an animal fashion show and animal-trainer thing… Little-J (Dr. Bit’s kid) was train-obsessed as usual… Peanut was over for a while and I made her take bouncing-on-the-bed lessons from Moomin and Sophie.

What a zoo! But I swear… once I had the coffee, and was meticulously painting gold leaf onto the swords of ninjas and tipping the points with blood-red, and Bit and I were gossipping (attempting decorum and g-ratedness and not-too-homo ***) then it was all incredibly peaceful! No one had a real meltdown. Everyone ate chocolate cookies. I was no longer in a foul mood. Rook would have enjoyed this party atmosphere and I wished he were there to make it even more fun!!!

And finally I started bleeding everywhere, which was a relief, and probably means my mood-lift had some hormonal component to it.

So it was super extra nice for Jo and Manny to take Moomin for the evening! I hope he enjoyed watching the oscars. Manny’s blue mohawk looks divine, and made me instantly want to flirt with him; I will forever be a sucker for shaved heads and silly colors. Perhaps my grandma’s generation feels the same way about Brylcream, which would explain a lot that was previously incomprehensible!

As I drove up to Chula’s it started raining intensely with big fat raindrops and I was driving up her street and had some kind of weird false-deja-vu flash while at a stop sign and looking at the motion of some washing machines in a laundromat through the driving raindrops. There is no way to explain the strange epiphany of staring into the distant poetic washing machines or perhaps they were dryers as they were front loading with glass windows.

We hung around at a cafe and worked incredibly hard… I translated 2 very difficult poems by Perlllongher. I swear to god almost every word..I had my big dictionary but still have holes in the poems where I am going to have to look in 6 different dictionaries and french slang and … something… god! And nearly every poem… it’s either historical-political or it’s like… I’ll be wondering what all this lush piled-up word-layers mean and then halfway through go, “No, no, it can’t be … ANOTHER poem about hustling some sleazy cocksucking in a rainy alleyway?” And then it is. At least I think so. Or, I’m just incredibly dirtyminded and they’re all about birdwatching in the moonlight. I think the very first of his poems I looked at I had this “Whaaaa.. no it can’t be” feeling as I came across the word “frenillo” and was like… does that mean what I think it does? Yes it does. His poems are all really violent and SLIMY. There is always mud and snot and grease and you get the strong impression of smeared lipstick, gold lamé, and slobbering. It is incredibly luscious beautiful language and very complicated. I had this sudden realization of what they mean by calling him “neobarrrroso” instead of neo-barrroque. Baroque, but without the clean-lined labyrinthyness of a lot of lat. am. writers that are often translated… instead, STICKY and visceral in this super-cool way.

Chula did mad crazy book-tour-promoting and magazine stuff. At one point I looked up realizing…”You know what…we’re having a Study Date! A Library Date! It’s so virtuous!” If you don’t consider the x-rated photos and the blackmail, it totally was!

We had some chi-chi chinese food. The (anglo) waiter tossed me a very smooth piropo when he saw my book in spanish and I was just not expecting it and so cracked up laughing and was stupidly tonguetied. I realized suddenly I must have some prepared answers for if I go to B.A. or M.V. this summer as there will surely be smart-alecky comments coming my way.

Moomin fast asleep when I got him at 10 – and for once stayed all the way asleep thru the truck ride home!

tomorrow: homework and must quit translating new Perlllongher poems and finish up versions of the ones I have.

*** note: by “not too homo” I mean “trying not to gossip about our mutual ex-girlfriend’s complex, active sex life and the flesh-h00k suspension thing she just had yesterday for her birthday and also how Bit brought me a giant bag of candy and an old Hitachi Magic Wand leftover from another old girlfriend and secretly put them on my desk when no kids were watching”. The bag of candy was not queer and not x-rated, yet still clearly not a good idea to mention.

From 5 year old Sophie:

“When MY blood ninja sucks people’s blood, they DIE and then they disappear and then they become BLOOD NINJAS too.”

Moomin:

“When MY blood ninja.. when my, when my…. When a blood ninja bites me and I become a blood ninja then I get MAGIC POWERS and can become a cheetah, or a tree.”

paraphrased and probably translated from spanish:

… the intelligent and honest man who felt alienated in the communist world had only three options open to him: demagoguery and public acts of contrition, jail, or exile.

(by a cuban, G. C4brera Inf4nte, who left Cuba in the 60s)

Once again I fell asleep at some ridiculously early hour like 9:30 or 10. All was quiet on the Moomin front. Aside from early pregnancy and times when I’ve been sick I never fall asleep this early.

Now I’m up at 5am… maybe with my hot microwave pillow I can get back to sleep.

By the way – Rook if you are reading this, please email me your flight info! I don’t know what day you’re coming back. I think you IM-ed it to me but it never got onto the calendar. I don’t have any way to get in touch with you. Monday? Tuesday? When?

Call collect, my dear!

You know that thing where you are sort of exasperated – impatient – exhausted – and yet are trying not to be a bitch and are calling your kid “honey” and “sweetie” but start to lose it halfway through the sentence as in “Sweetie bun, please stop singing that over and over.” or “Honey, do NOT run into the parking lot. Hold my hand. Honey, sweetie, cutie, put that down NOW.” so that you really if being honest are actually saying “ASSHOLE! QUIT IT! Or I will FUCKING KILL YOU with my BARE HANDS!”

Yeah well I’m kind of doing that today. Trying to keep it together. Jo and I had a nice time at the park and Moomin is being fine but I’m just losing my ability to be responsible and answer all questions. It is possible to do houseworky things or organize stuff and move bookshelves with Moomin helping, but not possible (surprise) to think for more than 10 seconds in a row.

So we got Moomin a light for his bed… a cheap fluorescent one that sticks/screws onto the inside of the bedframe that runs off AA batteries that he can operate himself. Perfect! No wires! Fairly unbreakable and sturdy! He picked out a shirt (this was at T4rget) that says “super robot”.

Also to the hardware store to get stuff for a sandbox cover. I think I will return the stuff I got, though. It is too thin and flimsy. When I put it on top of the box I realized kids will automatically want to walk on it and it will just break. It DOES need the super hard thick plywood clunky cover. I also bought a weed whacker.

Then my mominlaw called and talked to me for about 2 hours about Rook’s sisters and their parenting mistakes and mayhem. I spent a good long while dealing with mi suegra this week and her pestering emails and phone calls to make me do the research and deciding and booking of a place to stay in April when they visit. We are going to.. um… “Lochness” up on T0males Bay. Anyway she’s flipping out over Moomin’s cousin Norman. Norman’s dad now in the doghouse for — I have to say, it was idiotic of him — signing the paper that the school district stuck in front of him that waived Norman’s right to be mainstream3d. This was very stupid. The district has to pay for Norman’s classroom aide if he is in a regular classroom, but if they can put him in the spec1al ed room or special ed school, then it will cost the district way less. The whole point of the team meeting and evaluation was to get him mainstreamed and Norman’s dad just … why? he just fucked up hugely!

Drove to the Flea Temple to meet Jo but then realized there is NO parking. A huge parking lot, fenced off… And parking completely illegal everywhere for a mile on either side. Sanctimonious hippies want to make me walk everywhere.

Returned movies… got groceries.. many errands. Moomin had lots of playtime and park time and book reading and I involved him in everything and let him do stuff like flip his grilled cheese sandwich. He is getting suddenly, scarily adventurous.

I also mowed the lawn.

I’m trying not to be pouty about not getting to go to Dotty’s party… I might try to hire Miki, new backup babysitter, tomorrow night… I am taking Jo’s kids for the afternoon as no matter how mad I’m going over here, she is at least twice as mad with her dueling duo. And neither of us can complain, compared to Squid. (It comforted me a little, strangely, to think of her saying, “It tastes like a fucking potato chip! Eat it!” This, my new motto.) How do people do this?!

And how did they do it pre-washingmachine when they only had like 1 thing to wear? All those old books where little RuthAnn gets a spot on her party frock and cries for hours because she can’t go to the Sunday School picnic: pinafores suddenly make sense.

Thank god it is bedtime now as I can’t answer ONE MORE question about bad guys, good guys, why Curley is bald, what the word “Scrawny” means, and how many miles in diameter Pluto is. Nor do I want to talk in D-ish, or Z-ish, or think about how it is funny that maybe Harrrison street is made out of HAIR. Maybe the real PMS is finaly hitting me. I can’t fucking take it, today! Sticky! little! hands! constant wiggling and talking! can’t take it!

I hate it when people are later in life very sniffy about it all and say things like “Oh! Well I had 5 kids and got my PhD and wrote three bestselling novels! Dinner was always on the table, steak and potatoes, in my sparkling clean house! And I took the bus everywhere, too! My children are now the happiest people in the entire world!”

All babysitting has fallen through. Ex-g will be pissed off at me for not showing up to the thing she invited me to like 3 months ago and reminded me about every few weeks to make sure I am coming. FUCK. If she would have let me know the details of the dinner thing, I could show up witih Moomin in tow, but despite the 8 million emails about it all, she never said where we are supposed to go for dinner after the all-day-long other thing.

However… I hope that A.’s grandma and C’s mom will be okay. It sounds like she is in the hospital but going to get better.

Oh and irritatingly I only was bleeding for ONE DAY so that I had all those super-intense cramps and afternoon of non-productivity lying around groaning, for NOTHING. This must have been the “possible between-periods spotting and cramping” thing mentioned as possible for the 1st 3 months. ARGH. This means I have to go through a whole nother round of cramps and bleeding? CRAP.