With little difference to the stiff neck I felt yesterday morning, I drove the kids down to the beach. All the elation that nearly winded me on the drive down to Half Moon Bay fizzled once I started lifting Chas out of deep tide pools and stretching to capture fossils embedded in the rocks. I remember the swirling panorama of beached seals and hungry surf, thinking, This is a very bad place to be with a stiff neck and two exploring preschoolers.

So I let both of the kids clamber their way back to the beach on their own (Chas is getting surprisingly nimble) and then rested in the tent while they bouldered and threw rocks at the incoming tide. This overexposed shot is taken from my little infirmary. I like the way it captures the heat, unforgiving light and pain (although I might be the only one to look at this picture and feel it). It also has a nice retro tint. What’s your impression? I’m obliged to use these flickr tools for SPC’s current challenge but I’m not sure I’d use these tools in my own. It lacks authenticity. Not sure I like that, although it has a home somewhere.

My advice to anyone waking up in the morning with a stiff neck is to traction yourself to a board for the rest of the day and hook yourself up to an IV and catheter. Don’t drive a long, winding road to the beach, set up a tent, wrangle children across the rocks at low tide and then press reverse. That was a recipe for disaster. Damon says it wouldn’t matter; that the muscle would spaz no matter what.
I wonder if he’s right.

If you want to learn more about online photoediting tools , check out a gallery exhibiting some at SPC.

I read somewhere, ten years ago when we were puppy-surfing, that a Jack Russell Terrier is like having a perpetual three year-old in the house. Well, that’s pretty true. Seti, our dog, is all about the “now” and the “me” and balls and toys. He doesn’t always share; in fact, he’s always hoarded his own ball at the dog park, fending off dumbfounded pit bulls and retrievers five times his size, just by the obnoxious tang in his snarl. And, just like any preschooler, you can distract him off the nasty scent of a dead rat in the backyard just by saying the magic words “where’s your ball?” It’s so easy.

Ball. Ball is life. Well, ball is second to frisbee, but we’re out of frisbees right now. We have two chronically wet tennis balls (you can see why, above) and one racquetball (a far superior choice to all manufactured dog toys for the medium dog set). Seti will carry the ball around the house, right under your feet, hoping you will throw it. When you sit down to talk on the phone, he will drop it at your feet. When you try disapppearning into the bathroom for ten minutes, he’ll unlock the door with his razor sharp Jack Russell perserverence and drop the ball at your feet. And certainly, when you slip into a nice warm bath, ready to erase the day’s grime off your body and soul, Seti will come and drop the dirty ball into the bathwater. Then he’ll sit and stare at you imploringly, his brown eyes now big obsidian orbs, penetrating their voodoo into your weariness, and there’s no way to resist him: you find yourself throwing the ball this way and that, trying to outwit the bastard but damned if he doesn’t catch your every curveball! He’s a machine. He’ll do this all day. And here he is, twisting Chas’ arm in the new bath.

Birthdays. They just keep getting sweeter. Alis and I celebrated our birthdays tonight by having a fondue party up at her place in the Santa Cruz mountains. I think we both might be missing the absence of the yearly Red & Chocolate party, which used to include a few more guests than just the ten of us that were there tonight. It’s normally such a wet, cold time of the year here, especially up in the mountains, where the rain freezes and sometimes turns to snow. But the weather is warmer this year. I cut a quince branch, already in flower, and attached it to the bow on her present. Fruit trees along the Saratoga avenues are white with blossoms, rolling hills at the open space preserve, where I run, are adorned in special corners with tiny pink and white buds, showering petals along the path. It’s already Spring and it’s righteous.

Every time I think it’s a beautiful day down here in the valley, I’m blown away when I step out of my car in her driveway up on Skyline ridge. For starters, there’s the quiet outdoor air there that’s almost deafening, like the sound of nighttime in the suburbs after two fresh feet of snow. After the birds have gone to roost, near dusk, I can almost hear my ears ringing (thanks due in part to Chas and to a lesser extent, Ford, the loudest children I’ve ever known). And then there’s the view. The breathtaking view that, were it not for the fog, would include the Pacific, beyond Santa Cruz.

Birthdays are sweeter and sweeter. I can cook in the same kitchen with my college buddy, smile about where we are right now, and look into the living room to see benchmarks we’ve left over the years since we met: solid ties with men that became important to us along the way; the three beautiful, vibrant children that this love made possible; our two little dogs who are getting older, followed by the ghosts we’ve grieved to tell goodbye, recently: three other dogs, a horse; a mother, a grandfather.

Turning 35 this year is the sweet little nudge in the arm, reminding me about babies and books and other priorities that can’t wait behind my hedonism. But I think this year I might start lying about my age. Alis and I made a deal: it’s not important for anyone to know. Except for the clerks at the grocery store, but I’ll tell them my age any time because they still card me when I buy groceries (which, I now realize, tells me that I buy entirely too much booze). 35 used to be old. But I’ve never carried myself better (thank you, yoga. why didn’t we meet sooner?) and my smile, most often, has a careworn grace to it that I am proud of, suggesting achievement and the attainment of purpose. I think motherhood did it to me.
…The rest of time I think I’m frowning, though, and I can attribute that to motherhood, too 😉

Damon, thanks for the photos! You’re getting gooood!

Ford is poking a sea anemone, again, at Moss Beach, again. Because I can’t get enough of the beach, and after all, it’s a new moon (very very low tide). I’m in heaven here, atop briny algal mats and whirling fogscape, closing in on us at twilight.
We arrived too late in the day, as the fog shut the door on sunset. Quickly yielding to the cold and dark, we left with this one unruffled shot. We’re learning to use available light, so Damon and I swapped the camera back and forth the whole fifteen minutes we were there. One of us would hold Chas (who was freezing) and the other would frantically stand still in the blue light, hoping that Ford would do the same.

at the Academy of Sciences Museum in San Francisco.

Chas asked me to make a nativity scene like the one on the table at our local church. He has played with it the past few weeks and I’ve rounded up the little figures for many evenings. I’ve found baby Jesus in the bedsheets, under the nightstand and in a shoe, among other places.

Ford wanted a houseful of gems, “Gems, Everywhere!” he mentioned many times. Santa met him somewhere on the way to halfway. But he got a microscope, so the handfuls (or little felted bowlfuls) of miniatures seemed pretty magnificent.

All Chas wanted were balls, which he was very pleased to recieve.

Our favorite Christmas book this year was Christmastime in Noisy Village, so I thought it was cute that, instead of skiiing on Christmas day (as the children did in the book), we instead skateboarded the rest of the day. I think it might become a new tradition, and the book is so wonderfully loaded with old family traditions that we continue today, anyway. have you read it?

We skated into the night and until eleven. So, that’s moonlight. We don’t have streetlights on our rural road.

I feel like that rocket in the picture above.

On Saturday morning, we rediscovered our old college schedule of getting up early and hauling ass to class, except this time we went to Elgin for a Sausage Run. I loved the morning drive, creeping out of night across the hills, still blanketed in fog. It’s so breathtaking, this yawn of daybreak. I usually sleep through it, as do my children; we are a family that wakes up twenty minutes before school starts, and somehow this works for us. But to see what I’ve been missing makes me want to curb my nocturnal habits. Passing by our neighbors along the road, little glowing windows inside each shadowed house reminds me of forgotten habits: frosty morning jogs along Balckburn avenue in Providence, cats on the prowl in driveways that I pass, concert flyers waving on telephone poles, and showering before breakfast; the opposite sequence to my current routine, a thousand miles south.

Ford, quietly pouting in the center of the universe, was disappointed that the race didn’t include him. So we pulled back, letting him sprint every now and then through the old town streets and across train tracks. I even gave him my number, and trailed behind him through the finish line. I want to be the family that runs together. It’s a lifelong sport. And my hip was killing me so this made good pretense. He ate it up.

A proper fun run, this race divvied up a kegger at the finish line along with steaming pork sausage (note: the best in Texas) and while I dislike eating pork, I couldn’t resist pints of beer and hot sausage to follow the trail of woodsmoke that carried me from start to finish along the uninspired smalltown route. Even better: a bounce house for the squirts to decompress while we shotgunned refreshments.

Ford is really, really into circuit boards. Sadly, I’m not. But his father steps up to the plate in my stead. When I walked outside before dinner, he and the boys were elbow-deep in chalk dust, reviewing their designs. So pervasive is the circuitboard concept in his everyday speech that I’m unsure where to begin elaborating on this current fascination. (oh, I just did a funny, did you get that? Because I just did) And, seeing as I’ve already had a day chock-full of the stuff, I must admit that I really don’t want to discuss it any further. Maybe another day. Or maybe I can transcribe something from the engineering mini, himself?…

At any rate, I thought the grandparents would really love to see some of Ford’s creations and I wanted to mention that I, for my part, am thrilled that he’s finally beginning to enjoy drawing and sketching more than he used to. This is so important to me, that he always feels comfortable letting go with paint or pen, whatever medium. You see, for a long time he seemed to have little interest in this kind of activity, preferring to flip through books or pretend he was blowing things up. I tried never to push it, while always having accessible materials. Somwtimes I’d try getting him to work through a freeform “assignment” but it still didn’t break any barriers (of course, knowing me, you’ll understand that I’m certain it only made them!) I think that his seeing me spend more time at the desk doing my own work (which has been more frequent lately, as well) may have something to do with his increased comfort in expressing himself on paper.
Whatever. This just made me smile.

No time. Gotta run. More SPC. More later.