Sammy modeling baby's overalls

Goat Rock

Here we are about two hours north of Berkeley at Goat Rock. Mike bouldered and Sammy and I walked along the cliffs above the Pacific. Sammy got to chase deer--he immediately started mimicking their bouncing action--it was too cute. Then we went to Nash and Tanya's house in Sebastopol for food and friends and music. We slept in a tent--our baby's first night "outside." I used two mattress pads!

Eastern Sierra

As the sage brush flew by at 70 mph, a finger of nimbostratus reached down into the Owens Valley, and I thought back on the last day and a half of nonstop exhilaration. I had climbed at the world-class Happy Boulders near Bishop, fished the middle Owens River and pulled nineteen trout out in under three hours, skiied waist deep powder and taken numberous face shots at Mammoth, cooked homemade gnocchi with fresh sage, lemon, and bacon, and soaked in geothermal tubs near the Green Church - all in less than thirty-six hours. I had been drunk on dry mountain air, and best of all, I enjoyed the company of my brother and favorite sidekick for all the aforementioned.

I bolted Friday after work, sped back to my house and loaded the car with the gear I had packed the night before. I called to Sammy the dog, "Load up!" and he hopped in his seat in the rear of the 4-Runner. Sammy was to be a surprise for my parents, whom I still thought I would be picking up in Reno, half-way through the drive. We were gone by three, headed at a slow crawl through Friday traffic east on the 80.

I did not arrive in Mammoth until 11:30 that night; escaping the Bay proved brutally difficult, as it often does. Throughout the drive I felt the creeping anxiety of my aloneness, and further still when I learned my folks had missed their flight. It would be just the brothers then, and what my brother called the "Hippie Triathalon."

We would wake early Saturday, boulder for a few hours, fish for the next few, then hike a nearby peak and ski down to a hot spring. In true hippie fashion, we made it through the climbing and fishing (yes, nineteen fish in just a few short hours!), and opted to skip the skiing, buy a six-pack of small batch beer and head straight to the springs.

While I reclined in the liquid biproduct of volcanic activity, wind and building cloud cover confirmed what Alec had told me upon arrival: snow was on the way. The next morning we woke to over a foot of new snow. It would be epic, and the hand-rolled gnocchis of the night before would provide ample sustenance for us to charge. With Alec as my guide, I skiied from nine til noon, dipping into glades, skirting powdery faces, and generally reaping the fruits of a frozen Eden.

I was out of town by two, as my bro had to go to work, and I had the task of a long drive in front of me. All said and done, I drove sixteen hours - exactly a third of the weekend - which is too much...in most cases.

Happy at the Happy Boulders

This is Alec and Sammy in the Eastern Sierra, where Alec lives these days.

22 1/2 weeks

Adi asked me to be better about updating everyone on the pregnancy. It's hard! My body does change every week, but I don't find the joy in it that some women describe, and I don't want to be a complainer. The truth is that I feel very heavy and off-balance, and if I am not incredibly conscientious about my eating, I feel sick all the time. I know that my belly looks beautiful, and I am very much in love with the life growing inside me, but being pregnant hasn't exactly been "fun." Teaching surly seventh graders hasn't helped! Two things that have helped are our meetings with our amazing midwife, Amrit Khalsa, and new friendships with pregnant women in our neighborhood. If all goes well, Amrit will deliver our son into the world in the comfort of our own home in Berkeley, just as Cristina my sister and I entered the world in my parents' home in Cincinnati in the late 70s and early 80s. I know this could be considered a controversial decision, but Mike and I feel very comfortable with it, and would appreciate if you do not try to "talk us down" from it! Amrit has being delivering babies at home for 40 years, and has attended about 1,500 home births, an average of 3-4 per month. She is a force of nature and we trust her implicitly!

What else can I tell? I have surrendered my full time position at Prospect Sierra School for next year and hope to find a way to work part time, either there or elsewhere. It will be a financial stretch for us, but Mike and I want for one of us to be present for those precious first months of life of our first-born! We can only guess at the ways in which our lives will never be the same!

California live oak

This is Mike's mushrooming basket. He's been obsessed with mushrooms lately. Ah, fungi!

Our dog Sammy

We love this guy. He turns six on Sunday, the ides of March. Six years young!

Sammy and the Cat

In the fading light of this Wednesday afternoon, Sam the dog and I ambled back from the dog park. He lagged behind, out of breath from a brisk game of Frisbee, I in no hurry to get home and put on the water for dinner. We passed a bunch of dried-out mushrooms, the stems withered so only the dessicated caps remained, graying in a hilly lawn. I paused for a moment at a box on a neighbor's curb, in which was a small give-away pile of books: The Whale and the Reactor and two books in a series named Judaism for Young People. Sammy the dog took interest in an all-black cat preening in the subtle light of late day on a low wooden railing. The cat sat erect and proud, took notice of Sam but did not budge as the gap between them diminished. I, in no hurry, stopped to let Sam marvel at this mysterious and wild creature whose owner released to the suburban wilderness, who was seeming to do better than thrive, was the king of his domain and to whom a dog much larger in stature posed no threat. Sam the dog minded his manners, even as I paid slack into his leash - never letting go, but tempting his instinct. The regal cat eventually lost interest, his eyes gazing elsewhere, and we moved on.

Baby's first stylin' duds

Thanks, Kristin! Can't wait to nerdily match the baby!

Corporate supporters

Happy robot

The mothership

It's a boy!

Today we had our 20-week ultrasound and found out that our baby is a boy. Mike is all starry eyed.

Rainbow on the way to work

Teach to Live

What will happen when once wealthy parents pull their children from private schools and place them in the public system? How will the already underfunded bureaucracies of urban public schools deal with this influx? I especially wonder how these parents, accustomed to being heard by administrators and teachers and used to paying for a say in the way their children's school works, are going to adjust to disenfranchisement. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be their head mistress; good luck getting a private audience. I have heard that two in three private schools with under four hundred students will close in the next few years. I do not know the statistics, but I do know that means my school is likely to close. I am likely to be looking for a job, along with the other good and bad teachers that have lost their jobs. This is the first time in my career I have felt subject to a possible institutional failure, and I should be grateful - I have heard so many times (every year?) of public school layoffs for lack of funds. When one signs on to be a part of a culture of the wealthy, even as a minion he or she nevertheless becomes subject to that culture, and the culture of the rich that has seemed so invincible for so long all of a sudden feels vulnerable.

Rainy Monday

Mondays are always rainy, I suppose, yet this one, with its deluge that started some time before dawn, seemed somehow tranquil. The time-sensitive emails some thoughtful being composed over the weekend were replaced by raindrops - a simple inconvenience for which Gore-tex provided an elegant solution; I have not yet found such an effective repellent for those multi-paragraph, carefully-worded emails. I love inclimate weather, because routines are swept away in the overflowing gutters, and life is what one does beneath a tiny umbrella.