Candid camera

This is real. I think it also shows how horribly out of touch with humanity I am.

I went to pick up salads from the Gaucho for Cary and my lunch. Studio City's Gaucho Grill is in the strip mall on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, just around the corner from TJ's, the post office, the nail place, the book shop, Urban Outfitters and of course Pinkberry. The restaurant is upstairs, bang next door to DSW shoe warehouse and you know me, I never can walk past a shoe shop without browsing. As I venture in (as I step one pink be-clogged foot inside the door) a spotty employee in a headset and green t-shirt approaches me with what has become my favorite greeting: "Er Mam?" I turn slightly left to face him. "Yes?" I say. "Could I give you a High Five?" he says, with menacing exuberance. I am momentarily frozen with horror (yes, I'm THAT bourgeois). "No," I reply, "absolutely not." He looks flustered. "Let me give you a special savings coupon," he says and thrusts it towards me. "Oh dear," I say, "would you mind awfully leaving me alone, I really just wanted to have a quick look." He skulks off and I feel awful. I realize that I was appallingly rude. Horribly rude. Have probably scarred him for life. But let me ask this: Who on God's green earth wants to be high-fived like a bloody lottery winner upon setting foot in a shop? Is this an American thing? I can just see my friend Lucy getting into it, giving him a hearty high five, and a low five for good measure, with that big ol' beaming smile of hers. But then she likes Vegas and Disneyland too. And she's nice. It is now official. I'm not.

I heart Julian Perry

JULIAN PERRY (b.1960)

Shed 54 and Rhubarb Diptych, 2007

Oil on panel
152 x 244 cm

Breakfast Burrito

Briar likes to supplement her diet with regional Mexican cooking from various hand-picked kitchens. I know this because when I return from the school bus drop-off, the spotted dog is wiggling apologetically, bending and scraping to cover up for her wayward friend. The black dog gets back maybe twenty minutes later. She takes her time. There's no rush and she doesn't bark at the door when she's back. We're in the kitchen making the third cup of tea and listening to a tedious report on the new giraffe at the Boston Zoo (called Sox after the World Series champs). All affect of guilt has evaporated but I don't have to be Sherlock to spot the chimichanga breath from twenty paces, and the self-satisfied way she's licking her chops.

Little took me to Target for her Halloween costume (she's going as a Ninja Turtle, with black leggings, a huge Turtle-power t-shirt, striped knee socks and red head band) and ended up buying spooky-themed tchotchkis for the eight people in her advisory. She spent most of the evening decorating the bags with scary stickers and filling them up with skull necklaces, pumpkin straws, orange play-doh and Reese's caramel peanut cups. "This is so much fun" she said as we wolfed down spaghetti bolognese at nine o'clock. She is such a kind person. I must remember this.

Goethe

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

~ Goethe

Parfait

It's seven ayem and I've made a pasta salad with tomatoes and basil and feta and olives, a granola and plum parfait, three cups of tea and have described the plot of "Sweetland" to my daughter who said "I don't get it" about five times before falling asleep in my bed twenty five minutes in last night. I've rescued an empty can of dog food and two gardening gloves from Briar's bed, and I've listened to the headlines with Steve Inskeep and Rene Montaigne, reluctantly though because I can't get 89.3 so I'm stuck with KCRW which irritates me. J is away, again. I shouldn't complain. Today he's in Mexico City. On Saturday he leaves for Vietnam. I'm planing a two week creative project. It's burgeoning.

From the New York Times

The Beaulieu family looks at a fire at the entrance of Camp Pendleton, Calif.

Photo: Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

(From the New York Times)

Plumage

Here's a disturbing image (from NASA via the New York Times) of Southern California from the air. The smoke is pluming most elegantly, it's true, but this can't be good for baby-tender lungs, such as Miss Mink's.

Seven hour lamb redux

The seven hour lamb is coming close to being perfected, not to Marine's level of course, but to a place where I don't have to think about it too much. Here is my current recipe.

1 boned leg of lamb (keep the bone and roast it for your doggles)
olive oil
salt & pepper
2 or 3 large onions, peeled, quartered, sliced not too thin
1 cup white wine
1 can chicken stock
12 cloves of garlic, smushed
1 large can chopped tomatoes
few bushy sprigs thyme
3 bay leaves
4 or 5 big carrots, peeled and chopped into big-ish chunks
4 or 5 stalks of celery, chopped into chunks
4 or 5 potatoes, peeled and quartered lengthwise

Heat your oven to 225F. Make sure the rack is low enough to fit your large pot.

Heat a large lidded pot (a big le creuset is perfect) on medium high and when it's hot add some olive oil. Dry the lamb, pat dry, salt and pepper it and brown it in the hot pan. I've just learned not to be scared of this, to do it hot enough even if it spits at you, and to wait until it's ready to move before turning it (as soon as it's browned, it will let go of the bottom of your pan). This takes at least 10 minutes. At least.

Remove lamb. Reduce heat a little and add onions and celery and let them color a little. Add thyme, bay leaves and then garlic (don't let garlic burn, it's frightfully volatile, rather like one's temper). Add your cup of wine (ie whatever you have left in the chardonnay bottle from the night before). Let the wine cook down a little and then throw in the can of good old chicken stock, although you can use beef stock but I didn't have any. Let this cook down a little and then add the can of chopped tomatoes, juice and all. Bring back to the boil. Put the lamb back in the pot and scatter the carrots and potatoes around. Let it bubble again. Salt and pepper for luck. Tear off a large piece of parchment paper, crumple it on top of the pan, pop the lid on and shove it in the oven. You can turn the lamb a couple of times if you like, and if you think it's bubbling too hard reduce the oven to 200F after 2 hours. Leave it in the oven for seven hours or so. Serve with chopped parsley and really good bread (which you can use to mop up the scrummy juices) and perhaps a nice garlicky salad of bitter greens.


With many thanks to MZ.

Governor

I'm embarrassed to admit that this fire is making me extremely anxious. But why should it? The fires aren't near us (so far). But people I know are being evacuated or are preparing to evacuate. And then I see these people smoking in the canyon and throwing lit cigarettes butts out of their car windows. Anything could ignite a blaze in this weather. The sky is hideously beautiful - thick brown and pink clouds hover around the glowing orange sun. It feels apocalyptic. And yes, I know these are fairy tales, I know "'tis the child that fears the painted devil" but today, Tuesday morning, everything feels very, very strange and very, very epic. I'm amused and somewhat assured to see our Governor on the Today show, talking about his relentless deptutizing. There are something like ten thousand people in the Qualcomm Dome in San Diego, and another few thousand in the Del Mar Race track stadium. They also have stabling for two thousand horses, Minks will be happy to know. It is a silly thing that in one's time of need, the Terminator, with his died auburn hair and his firm jaw, is actually someone who provides solace. It is the perfect storm here: very hot (100 degrees predicted today), very dry and very high winds. Al Roker says the Santa Anas will be diminishing late Wednesday into Thursday. A lot of burning can happen in two days. There are old people who have been displaced, mentally ill people, patients from hospitals, prison inmates and then there are the celebrities. It's quite a leveller, this fire.

Joan Didion on the Santa Anas

From Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.

I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

"On nights like that," Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, "every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom.

The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about "nervousness," about "depression."

In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn.

A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that.

Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.

Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place. The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects. On November 22 the fire in the San Gabriels was out of control. On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents, and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a box score of traffic deaths. On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons and himself. On November 27 a South Gate divorcée, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car. On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour. On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

-- Joan Didion

Doris Lessing speaks her mind

In an interview with El Pais, Doris Lessing told us how she really feels:

"I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning," El Pais quoted Lessing as saying. "Many of us hated Tony Blair, I think he has been a disaster for Britain and we have suffered him for many years. I said it when he was elected: This man is a little showman who is going to cause us problems and he did."

"As for Bush, he's a world calamity," added Lessing. "Everyone is tired of this man. Either he is stupid or he is very clever, although you have to remember he is a member of a social class which has profited from wars."

Brown smoke

From Mullholland, which gives me my early morning perspective, there is a thick layer of brown smoke hanging over the ocean, Santa Clarita to the north and Agua Dulce to the north east. Forty thousand acres are burning in Southern California and the furious Santa Ana winds are expected to keep blowing for another couple of days. It does make you wonder what you'd take with you if you were given five minutes to evacuate. I loved the quote from Lily Lawrence, owner of the Malibu "castle" which burned:

"My possessions don't possess me. My house does not possess me," she told them. "I'm thinking about our boys in Iraq. I'm thinking about you boys."

Fire

Firefighters tackle spot fires on the hillsides adjacent to Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.

(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

October 21, 2007 (copyright LA Times)

From Robert in China

My dear friends Robert and Daryl and their kids are in China picking up a little Chinese girl they are adopting. It has been a two and a half year process. This is part of their hilarious blog from the road (which can be accessed here):

24 hours and counting

Blogger bob here for first time. We really made the most of our last day as the parents of adult children. Daryl and I woke up early and went to some famous park where all the people do their thai chi in the morning. Daryl joined in and was complimented on her natural grace. Back to the hotel, grabbed the kids and our other kid - Daryl's mom - and off to the dirt market, where they sell dirt and other shit that daryl loved. fun and eclectic and dirty. Back to the hotel and then off to 798 - - the artist's community. Think Bergomont station with incredible architecture and great restaurants and very hip chineese people. Really really cool. Highlight of the trip. Then off the the airport to come to Ruby's provence. I'm sure we all got SARS on the plane, but if we don't die by tomorrow we get her in the morning. We met the rest of our group.. Checked into our hotel, where smoking is mandatory and the room has no place to put your clothes. but basically pretty good and i get blackberry service, so it works for me. Tomorrow is very exciting and they told us that she will cry for two or three days and since i leave in two, it shoud be great. The kids are being great, and handling the stress much better than I. All good. Love and miss.

Farm in ct

This press junket thing has now gone too far. As I wait for Ned to do his interviw at Wesleyan I wonder back to another admissions reception room with not a soul in it but a huge Four Seasons style spread of bagels, muffins, danish pastries and variously swirled cinnamon confections. There is a nicely rouched navy table cloth, three shimmering urns of coffee and three bowls of glossy brown coffee beans.

All the east coast mothers are wearing hose and skirts and shoes and carry Coach bags. The fathers sport waterproof jackets or fleeces and topsiders. Ned feels self conscious in his new blue blazer and Brooks Bros button down but he looks so handsome to me that I just stare in open-mouthed pride. We drove here from Springfield after a jolly detour through the drive-thru Starbucks and, armed with iced caramel machiatos, attacked the 91 freeway.

It is a fine day, the sky a little mackerelled, but blue peeps through which is a welcome relief from yesterday's monsoon-like rain. I am now the proud owner of a big white waterproof cloak, with the red and black Wesleyan logo on the front. Amusingly, when the rain pours down like that, you really don't care how stupid you look.

N is calmer now that he has two or three interviews under his belt. I tell him that he has so much to offer, that his world view is unique, and slowly, being here on the east coast, he is beginning to become comfortable with that. He wants to go to a school where he is challenged and I find that so commendable.

Being here, surrounded by these old red brick buildings, is very, very inspiring and it was worth yesterday's soaking.

Hum

What is this dark hum among the roses?
The bees have gone simple, sipping,
that's all. What did you expect? Sophistication?
They're small creatures and they are
filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not
moan in happiness? The little
worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.
Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand
that life is a blessing. I have found them-haven't you?--
stopped in the very cups of the flowers, their wings
a little tattered-so much flying about, to the hive,
then out into the world, then back, and perhaps dancing,
should the task be to be a scout-sweet, dancing bee.
I think there isn't anything in this world I don't
admire. If there is, I don't know what it is. I
haven't met it yet. Nor expect to. The bee is small,
and since I wear glasses, so I can see the traffic and
read books, I have to
take them off and bend close to study and
understand what is happening. It's not hard, it's in fact
as instructive as anything I have ever studied. Plus, too,
it's love almost too fierce to endure, the bee
nuzzling like that into the blouse
of the rose. And the fragrance, and the honey, and of course
the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over
all of us.

-- Mary Oliver

whoosh

It's a bit like an elaborate press tour; we've forgotten what day it is, are both dog-tired and we're shoved into large groups of people we don't have much in common with. Our adorable short, butch, crew-cutted tour guide at Bard won me over with her breathy enthusiasm. The campus is vibrant, colorful, varied. I drive and he takes pictures through the windows of our speeding rental car, blurs of red and orange and yellow. Ridiculously beautiful, the whooshing by of the trees. I'm waiting while he interviews and then off again, to Wesleyan, to Connecticut, to another 'orrible 'otel.

trees

After delicious dinner of 'gigot de sept heures' (lamb cooked with onions, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, herbs for seven hours) made by the lovely Marine, and a garlicky salad, we fell asleep in our little house overlooking the tree-padded hills. This is my first experience of upstate New York but it is in fact closer to Bennington, VT. I wake up and stare out at the misty dawn and the unfamiliar bird calls and I think i'm in Ireland. The house is beautiful, a remote farm down a long, winding tree-lined driveway. Everything is orange and red and gray and there are pumplins and apples everywhere. It is, I hate to say it, bliss driving through these pretty little towns and endless treed hills with my now less grumpy but sleepy son.

Sleepy in Ancram

fordham

fordham

We are at the first stop of the day, Fordham, surrounded by pale-faced, un-made-up Catholic girls and I could almost swear I am looking at a Burne-Jones window in the admissions office.

Double Tree

Nestled in at the really rather awful Doubletree at JFK, N is now grumpy after battling with a cab driver who was not entirely thrilled that we weren't going into Manhattan. I felt a bit sorry for the man, because as I announced "The Doubletree please," in my most pleasant voice, I think he thought I said "W" and of course perked up at the prospect of journeying into the city. The hotel is okay just really tatty. At least they gave us warm chocolate chip cookies at the front desk, which come in a nice brown recycled bag with a treatise (WHY A COOKIE?) written on the back of it. ("Simple. Cookies are Warm, Personal & Inviting.") I point out that if you have to explain why you're giving cookies, doesn't it rather defeat the point, but he's too grumpy to be amused by this and announces that he's going to bed and has settled down with his laptop and the high speed internet connection, rather like me I suppose. I can hear the hum of the lorries on the Van Wyck Expressway outside my window.

Plane

My son is doing his homework next to me on the plane to New York. We're on Jet Blue, I'm watching Queer Eye, and he's got complicated mathematical equations up on his computer screen. We're far enough into the flight that light-headedness has kicked in and I'm beginning to reflect with new-found, jet-bound perspective on the wonderful life we have. I find it hard to believe that we're off to look at colleges when the image of that cone-headed, still bloody little baby being put gently on my chest is still so clear in my mind. I know I'm suffering from 30,000 feet fever but we seem so damned fortunate to be doing this, to have this opportunity.

Tomorrow it's Fordham and Sarah Lawrence and then the drive up to Skidmore, through the Hudson Valley. We're taking the scenic route, along the Taconic State Parkway. The weather promises to be clement and I have to say, I'm really rather excited.

Feist

Maybe I'm a little late to the party, but I can't help falling head over heels in love with this song:

Monday morning mist

It's a cold, damp, misty morning, no doubt a foreshadowing (Minks' new word, not mine) of our east coast trip tomorrow. I'm in my pajamas when I drive her to the bus, hoping that I don't have a flat tire or have to leap to the assistance of a motorist in need on Mullholland. It's foggy on the road and people are unusually polite in the jostle of early morning traffic. Dotsie likes to sit next to me while a work, a by-product of my smart Aeron chair being broken. We sit on a dressing table bench together staring out of the window, Kuan-Yin watching over us.

After breaking a butternut squash (the phallic one that's been sitting in my kitchen for two weeks) by throwing it across the floor ("there's your f-ing butternut f-ing squash") J served up a most delicious Sunday night supper - roast chicken and mashed potatoes with truffle oil, peas, sugary baked carrots and roast tomatoes. And all was well. Now he has bacon spitting in the pan, no doubt his evil way to win me back. I don't want to cave but the bacon does smell very good.

From "In the Pines"

I am losing my because. In the pines.
In chance, in fortune, in luck, there is no because.
Once I had, and now I don’t.
In love there is no because.

-- Alice Notley

Just like jelly roll...

Half a mile from the county fair
And the rain keep pourin down
Me and billy standin there
With a silver half a crown
Hands are full of a fishin rod
And the tackle on our backs
We just stood there gettin wet
With our backs against the fence

Oh, the water
Oh, the water
Oh, the water
Hope it don't rain all day

-- Van Morrison

Rain came down

The rain came down last night, enough to make J neurotic about his beloved grill, enough in fact that practically the only conversation we had after he arrived home at 11:45pm from Chicago was about the damage the rain would cause. All I want to do is sleep at 11:45pm and so I make the right kind of grunting noises in agreement with his rant, wait from him to finish his salami and cheese sandwich, and listen to the rain pounding on the skylight above our bed.

Minks and I drove back from Santa Barbara singing Radio Nowhere at the top of our lungs and generally loving Bruce. She rode beautifully, didn't place, but came back with a sleeveless fleece emblazoned in a yellow SFVHSA 2007 Medal Finals logo, and she's happy, which makes me believe we made the right decision. It's her first final and she's smiling. The mare was fine, poking her little nose, ears flat back on her head as is her wont. The cheering squad was out in force - my friend Julie and her daughter Mandy who'd flown in from college on the east coast just to watch. I was proud of her.

From CNN

BREAKING NEWS
 The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to former Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Doris Lessing

"Either they were going to give it to me sometime before I popped off or not at all."
DORIS LESSING, after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Caw-fee

It's 11 o'clock and Briar's been gone for an hour and a half. N and I have walked up the drive, down the street, into the swale. We've whistled out of every window, called her name loudly even though we know she's deaf, pissed off our neighbors with our calling. I've tried to rouse the dalmatian into looking "Where's Briar" I say in my most encouraging voice. I sit in bed and wait and think the worst. At least I haven't heard the coyotes. Yet. I think. Suddenly I hear the faint bark of the dog who lives on Lookout below us and then a very quiet jingle, but enough to be familiar - it's her collar. A few minutes later on the deck appear a puffing, tired Briar carrying an almost full cup of Starbucks coffee, still warm, with the lid coquettishly off to the side. The cup (it's a grande, definitely not a tall) is firmly between her teeth and she refuses to give it up. So she's fifteen years old, and according to the vet has a urinary tract infection that needs to be treated by antibiotics, and she has a penchant for lattes.

More Meth

My dalmatian, the Meth-Head

For the first time I can remember this year, it's so cold in my office that I have to grab an old brown sweater and throw it on over my t-shirt. I'm surrounded by college books and maps and brochures and I'm planning our routes. Quite interestingly, I'm excited to go to NY with N, excited for our road trip. I imagine it like a movie and wonder if I should take a video camera just for a laugh. I've eschewed the 87, to take us from Fordham to Skidmore, for the Taconic State Parkway, so we can do a drive-by of Dutchess and Columbia counties on the way and scout out lovely farms to live in a year or so from now. I think I've wangled it so we can tour Fordham at 10am in the Bronx and make it to Millbrook for lunch at 1pm, but you never know. It IS meant to be an adventure afterall. TZ's parent have very kindly invited us to stay with them in Eagle Bridge, near the Vermont border, and I think they have an old farmhouse, no doubt with a crackling fire.

Dotsie went to the new vet, Dr Richter, to have her teeth cleaned, and has come home looking like meth-head, her two very front teeth missing. It would be so sad if it wasn't so funny, but miraculously she now has Colgate-fresh breath, complete with the ring of confidence.

I am vaguely in love with Phedon Papamichael who has made this little movie look so gosh darn gorgeous that I want to lick the screen or go stand in a river in Maryland surrounded by willow trees. We remain cautiously optimistic but oh me oh my, I screamed and hid my face in my hands in the screening.

J called me on his way to the airport. It's Chicago this time. "I'm outside our old house" he reports. "Nothing has changed, except the door, which has been painted red. The brick path we put in is still there, the old gate, the palm tree which is now twenty feet higher than the house. Do you remember how happy we were there?" he says. "I remember falling asleep in my hammock in that garden one day and feeling so stupidly happy." "We're happier now," I say. But I do remember that little garden with the apricot and lemon trees, and the massive flower borders we planted ourselves and the wild tomato vine that climbed over the garden fence like Jack's beanstalk. And that damn James Taylor playing over and over and over again.

Debussy

Debussy reminds me of sunny summer Saturdays in England.

The kibbeh was a great success and despite the most eclectic mix of people, everyone got along famously. I want to lay outside in the sun and listen to Debussy. I walked Fred in the sun and the wind today, and as it blew over us gently, I realized how great it is to be alive on this earth. I thought he was sharing this sentiment too, until he leaned over and nipped me on the shoulder.

My house is full of flowers from my lovely guests, creamy roses and violet hydrangeas and white lilies. I have bottles of wine, some champagne, some mulling spices and a book by Charles Wright.

Brioche

With a characteristic cavalier swagger, I announced to my girlfriends that I would be making Lebanese food tonight. How difficult can it be to make Kibbeh afterall? I've watched Jumby do it a thousand times, and I know all about squeezing the bulgur and the iced water. After poring over Claudia Roden's The New Book of Middle Eastern Food for a while last night (after the children forced me to watch the quite excellent "Chucky" on tv), I've realized that it's incredibly complicated, especially if you want to fashion those silly-putty shaped meatballs with it. I've been searching for the old family recipe but J has secreted it away in his olden wooden recipe box so I'm left to my own devices. He is in Boston and won't be home until later tonight so yes, I am completely alone with my incompetence and my Middle Eastern cookbook. I will never be able to match his hummus, which he makes with room temperature garbanzo beans, a tad more tahini than one usually tastes, and top with glorious green glossy olive oil. I'm certainly not going to grind my own lamb for the Kibbeh, but I'm sure Aunt Josephine would be appalled.

I made french toast with brioche for Minks this morning - fat slices of it, crispy on the edges, soft and eggy vanilla-y in the middle, with maple syrup. "This is such a treat" she says, "you should try it." But I'm having my own treat. Harrod's loose leaf tea - Knightsbridge blend - strong and just slightly bitter. I find it quite extraordinary that these things make me so happy, but there it is.

Coppola is now producing a Malbec with the most beautiful Yves Klein blue label that I want to only drink that wine and dot the bottles all around the house (as a chic interior design statement, not because I'm succumbing to latent alcoholism).

Off to see our movie now. Can't wait. ("A horror movie - what fun!" a rather snooty ex-client wrote to me the other day eliciting in me the rather childish desire to stick my tongue out at them).

Froody

Fred, pictured here in better, happier days, is still lame. He went back to work for a day and it felt as if I were riding a lumbering elephant. He is now going to be off for the rest of the year, taking a well-earned vacation in Lisa's backyard, making friends with Timmy, Wilbur and Opie. I sat in his stall yesterday and rubbed his bad leg and cried. He bent his head down like a swan, making a C with it, and nibbled my hair. The suspensory ligament is so, so fragile. Never in my life have I loved a horse like this one and I hope and pray he makes a speedy recovery. If not, I'm going to find a big fat green field and turn him out there, with lots of friends and rabbits and apple trees.

Optimistically I had a white baby pad embroidered at the show for him - it says Froody in girlish script. So silly. So cute.

David Cameron

Giving what the Telegraph calls "a largely flawless tour de force" of a speech, Tory leader David Cameron spoke for over an hour at the conservative party conference without an auto-cue. It amuses me to imagine the President of the United States doing the same thing. It makes me shudder actually. Of course my mother LOVES David Cameron. "He admits he grew up in a privileged environment but he wants everyone to have those privileges." Like my grandmother, she is a socialist at heart, and that's why I love her. You can watch parts of the speech here.

Death of a Monk

From George Packer's blog, in the New Yorker.

The Hudson Valley

From a NY Times story on the Hudson Valley:

David Nellis is one of those New Yorkers who ended up extending his search radius, buying a two-bedroom cabin on the side of a hill outside Livingston Manor (in Sullivan County) for less than $100,000 in 2005. The house overlooks a valley in the Catskills, was in move-in condition with nice hardwood floors and came with rights to use a lake nearby.

In some sense, his search was easy, Mr. Nellis said. “Because of my financial limitations and what I wanted, he said, “there wasn’t a lot to look at.” But like many city dwellers who find something close to their dream house up in the country, he described the purchase as a life-changing experience, including his discovery of the Friday night prime rib buffet at a banquet hall nearby.

I can't help but feel that Jumby and Mr Nellis are going to become firm friends and enjoy the Prime Rib with or without the help of The Palm and its point program, when we finally move to the Hudson Valley.

My friend Jess tells me that Al Roker lives near him, up there in Upstate NY, and it fills me with such a sense of giddy adventure. Al Roker for goodness' sake! He's virtually a legend.

Bridge of Sighs

Paul Bogaards at Knopf who must remember me from the old Clive Barker days occasionally sends me books, always very good ones. I think the last one was the Cormac McCarthy. I am so grateful for these surprises and especially the latest, Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs, which I'm carrying with me wherever I go. Thank you, Mr Bogaards.

A certain beauty

J has foregone his 6am bike ride because it's cold and dark and wintery outside. I'm thrilled because it means he gets to stay in bed with me, with our hot cups of tea, our jingling-collared dogs, our dueling macbooks (his is a pro, of course) propped up on our knees, the New Yorker between us, opened to a particularly good cartoon involving a dog. Briar is sniffing at me and wiggling her bum which means either 1) she wants to go out and hunt down her squirrel nemesis or 2) she wants to jump up on the bed and play human. The dreaded colonoscopy came and went and all is well. The demerol had a particularly soothing effect on my nervous type A husband and we giggled together at the nurses when he came to, and I drove him home in his delirium and ministered sausages and cups of tea and Harry Potter. The bloody sausages, which he brought home from Germany or some other frankfurter haven, have been sitting in a jar in the pantry cupboard for a year now and every time the cupboard he stares at them with plaintive and palpable longing. Finally yesterday, emboldened by the demerol no doubt, he said, sheepishly "I think I'm going to have one of those sausages," as if he were about to embark on a feast of the world's most expensive white truffle.

I dreamed of my grandmother's beef stroganoff and tried to recreate it for supper, using a partial recipe from the City cookbook (which uses julienned pickles) but added onions and some tomato paste, which is of course verboten in the hallowed world of Stroganoff connoisseurs. It did taste dreamy though. Each mouthful creamy, sweet with tomato and crisp with pickle. And I overcooked the noodles. Which worked, in this case.

An email arrived yesterday which asked "how is your life of domesticity?" and they all but included the word "dull" in that sentence. There is a beauty to this stuff, to listening to my husband rouse my 17 year old son from his slumbers ("I'm awake, goddammit. I'm UP"), to driving the 12 year old to the orthodontist and having to sit in the waiting room for an hour practicing French vocabulary, to stopping off at susiecakes for red velvet cupcakes for a birthday party at school, to making sure the older one has registered for his SAT 2s, to nursing my smacked-out husband after he's had a camera up his bum, to telling the insurance man who won't pay for my rental car (after his damn client smashed into me) that he's not dealing with an idiot although I do a great imitation of one, of stealing hours here and then to sit at my desk and do some work, to write a Good Poem for my class tomorrow so I don't appear to be a complete dilettante...yes there is certain beauty to all of it. I just don't always see it. That's all.

A Monk's Tale

Here's a rather terrifying piece in the Independent about the awful situation in Burma.