I just finished reading The Piano Tuner which is one of those short novels that everyone who reads the New York Times also read. It’s a fine book. The main character meets a woman who intrigues him and they have some time together in a new city. He tells her to “take me to your favorite place” or something similar and they’re both a little breathless of the intimacy of this gesture, in 19th Century Burma. In any case, that line works great here in San Francisco with people I already knew. I got to eat a sandwich on a beach with my pal Gordon [and suffer painful sunburn because I’m too stupid to wear sunscreen in early June, heck I’m a New Englander!] and have some great Vietnamese food with my friend Judith and then go watch the sun set at some other rocky beachfront park.

Today is sitting inside and recovering from too much sun, doing laundry, and quality time with cats where “quality time” means reading near where they are sleeping. The other day I walked and walked around with my friend Peter, culminating in a steep hillclimb back up Potrero Hill where I had to ask myself whether $1.50 was too much to pay to avoid climbing four blocks seemingly straight up. I decided yes.

This evening I’m going out with library friends from the Prelinger Library and elsewhere to talk about Big Library Ideas and eat more good food. Usually I come to San Francisco planning ot eat a burrito a day, but this time I’m trying to save the mega-meals for eating with friends so I don’t get that oogy feeeling that can accompany the burrito a day diet. So far so good. Roasted garlic leftover from the party for lunch, iced coffee in the afternoon, hungry for dinner.

One of the side effects of using blogging software is that I don’t say “Oh, it’s the beginning of the month, I should archive and update the new page.” just another interesting [to me] observation of how our choice of tools affects our behaviors.

I’m in California, after an easy [and cheap!] flight out here Friday night. Saturday I hung out with the cats a lot of the day and then headed in to the city with no particular place to go. I got on a bus with a bunch of chattering Google employee hipsters. I went, naturally, to the library where I ran into my friend Jane and this guy Alan who I had met when I was speaking at San Jose last year. Alan is starting a fast today, so he invited me over for dinner with some of his other friends “to eat the rest of my food.” We went to the Rainbow Grocery where I introduced Alan to my cheesemonger pal Gordon.

I helped Alan do some cooking, met his friends and hung out until my East Coast internal clock was begging for mercy. Came home with even more food — sort of nice because there’s no handy corner store up here on Potrero Hill — and went out to what I guess is the Dogpatch area with James and Shinjoung for brunch. Now I’m back and uploading my pictures, planning to get outside into the sun at this point. I think between my library stop and food today, I have filled up my social calendar for the week. I’m not sure if this is the good nes or the bad news. Seems good so far.

Everyone has said that living with someone who is studying for the bar is a recipe for disaster. While Greg and I both feel pretty blasé about it, I figured it might not be a bad time for a vacation anyhow. I’ll be down in Rhode Island giving a talk next week and then getting on a plane to the Bay Area where I’lll hang out and catsit and eat burritos for a week. June 2-10. If anyone wants to get together, drop me an email or leave me a comment.

My Mom got me a pair of orange earrings that she brought with her to the Graduation Weekend Fiesta. It was a nice acknowledgement that I’ve done a lot of work in this whole Greg-get-his-degree project (moving, taking a larger share of the household tasks, grad student poverty etc). I’d gladly do it again, but there are always times when I wake up in the middle of the night thinking “What the hell have I been doing? What about me?”

The good news is, I mostly have a ready answer. I’ve been working at my job where I’m appreciated and respected. I’ve been travelling to meet other librarians who have been for the most part receptive and intelligent and enlightening. I’ve been exercising and am in better physical shape than I’ve been in in the last few years. I’ve been helping people in town and elsewhere get a grip on new technologies and how they can put them to work in their lives.

Just yesterday I helped my 95 year old student type out an email to the editor of the local paper expressing her displeasure over the firing of one of the managers of the pool that I swim at. Useful! It’s a nice long list of accomplishments, but when one of my nuttier older students started going after me about the fact that I don’t wear makeup or, as she puts it “take care of myself” I realized I don’t have much left in the way of emotional reserves. I get so involved in being a handholder and a person on the sidelines saying “You can do it” that I don’t always have a fallback plan if I need someone in my corner. There’s a certain amount of instability involved with working with the elderly, the unbalanced, and the small coterie of people who are both. I’ve always felt that it was partly my job to help these people because, with few exceptions, other people don’t. However, my ability to help diminishes dramatically when I’ve got my plate full of other stuff. I’m hoping to get a little better at balance in the second half of 2006.

The countdown to the Jessamyn Vacation is at T minus eight and counting.

Greg’s graduation from Vermont Law School was today. He is now a lawyer, which means he is someone who went to (and graduated from) law school. He is not, however, an attorney because he hasn’t passed the bar. I am somewhat embarassed to admit that I didn’t know this distinction before a few days ago.

I’m back from Ohio — did I mention I went to Ohio? — and I’m in town for about ten days until I head to Rhode Island for one last talk (at least until July) and then to San Francisco for a much needed vacation. Greg has to stay put and start bar review classes which, seemingly cruelly, start four days after graduation.

Happy Mother’s Day, Jess & Kate
this is Muffet’s picture.

I slept in on Mother’s Day and woke up to find that my mom had posted a picture of me from 1971. That’s me sitting down and my sister Kate in the baby carrier. We’re sitting in the kitchen of the house that my mom still lives in. The blur in the lower righthand corner is our old cat, Betty Duck, who was a kitten for a very short amount of time, so it’s neat to see him show up so small and cutelike.

Kate and I have gotten bigger and moved away, the cat passed on some time ago, and the kitchen has been totally redone but my mom stil sits around that table and I think at least one of those chairs survives. Even when all the individual parts have been altered or replaced, I can still look at a picture of this and think, as my mom tagged it, “home.”