Sonoma: Driving With The Windows Down

This weekend we drove to Sonoma in the wine country where we'd rented a house. Kevin was away so I had the kids on my own. Thankfully our friends visited because the house was one of these places you arrive at and say: "Oh the photos did it way too much justice." We had fun anyway.

The kids and their friends at Girl and The Fig, best mussels ever (they don't heap too much garlic on them)

Back to the fabulous Scooteria coffee shop

Paella at El Dorado Kitchen

And the triple threat lamb

Scarf from French Nest

Re the house: There were coyote statues near the pool, not really an animal that I want see poolside alive or in concrete form.

Swimming with the coyotes (or is it a dingo?)

Inside, all the glasses were smeary, the drawers full of crumbs and black bits, and the windows were dirty. I told the owner's Person Friday. "Oh, this is the country" was her reply as though all of those things were tres charmant and I was a clueless urbanite. Outside I showed her the bottom of the pool which was strangely scrapey and multi-coloured. Dirt? I asked her. She gave me a look. "This is the country" I replied for her.

This was at the entry...setting the tone?

Enough of my complaining. (Why is it when I complain it's legit consumerism and when my kids complain it's just whining... )

Sonoma is the place where the songs on the radio come alive. And especially that cheesy-genius country one called Cruise where baby you a song you make me wind my windows down (resurrected by Nelly sticking it at the end of his equally dodgy Hey Porche and then with a re-mix) which I now know all the words to and so do the kids. If you want to feel good about your life, just picture me, 51 year-old crazy mutha driving a bird-pooped ugly Dodge Minivan with four bickering kids in the back, singing her heart out with the window down.

Before we drove home last night I stopped at the Chocolate Cow on Sonoma Square and gave the kids $10 to buy a couple of gobsful of candy in nuclear reactive colours. Cy, 9, came back to the car with his left cheek bulging. Whajaget? I asked. Chewing tobaccy, he said. Bless.

The White Jacket

What is it with white jackets - they are really incredibly hard to pull off.  The vision is Bianca Jagger, and so why do I think Big Ang in Mob Wives when I try them on?

I bought a dress for Jackson's graduation - I loved the pattern and the colour. The sales woman in the store said a white cardigan would look good with it. I agreed but I don't have a white cardigan. This was disobeying my first rule of shopping: don't buy an item which necessitates buying something else...finding the something else will drive you crazy.

Then a friend said: a white jacket and because I'm so suggestible I spent an hour looking for a white jackets here and here.  I neglected of course to take the dress because that would be too easy. Hey friends...come along on this roller coaster ride and see how I drove myself crazy, as noted above. There was the Alice and Olivia's sparkly ironic take on the "Ladies Who Lunch" jacket, but I just looked like a wanna-be lady who lunches.

Alice and Olivia

There was the Theory one; well cut but too much jacket...As you can see I always shop without makeup and wearing jandals or UGG boots and scruffy hair. Not a pretty sight. Note to clothes in shops - if you can get past the ugly, you're a keeper.

Theory

Then there was a little pointy guy which was kind of waitery. I liked it but they didn't have my size.

Pointy guy. The photo doesn't show this but I also started doing ballet feet positions, not a good sign.

Then I tipped over the edge...

Alice and Olivia's peach jacket. Ok, time to go home, you were looking for white jackets

Then I found the linen one in the top photo which I know I will wear again and I won't feel like hospital-restaurant-dental office staff. (I gave away a white trench last year after everyone kept profering me their wrists)

But the dress under it didn't sit right and I kept fiddling with it all day long. My fault I'm sure rather than the dress: I'm freakishly long waisted. I think I'll have to take in the top of it.

Not quite right

Oh brother.

Worstest End-Of-Year Mum Ever

About five of my friends have send me Jen Hatmaker's funny account of being the worst ever end-of-year mother, which has gone viral with more than 4,000 comments. Not being competitive but I'll take her "limping" across the finish line and raise that to a: "Where are you Mum?" In my race, the finish line ribbon has been wrapped up and put away for next year, the orange bollards have been removed and the white-jacketed stewards have gone down to the pub for a pint. I'm still somewhere round the corner.

Mt Vesuvius of further effluvia: Filling the mudroom with a year of crapola projects.

*With Harley, 15, I hadn't actually realised he had finished school a week ago. Yes, I thought it was funny he was sitting around watching TV all morning as well as all afternoon...but who knows? He's at private High School and let's face it, the more you pay the less they go. A neighbour strung out balloons and "End of Year!" signs and I sort of got the picture. Harley has always maintained a consistent "insouciance" when it comes to school work. Why do a whole bunch of work when B's are so round? His report card came through and I was delighted that he got two A's....in Religions of the World and PE. I guess if all the Gods are on your side and you run really fast you've got the bases covered.

"What about some improving academic courses over the summer?" I suggested optimistically to Harley.
Better not, he said explaining further: "Someone's got to go to community college."

*I turned up to Tallulah's (12) end of year party last night totally fried. "I'll look at your things and then we're going home" I said very grumpily, asking the teacher "This is just a ten minute thing right?" No it's an hour thing she said. It turned out to be an hour of the most heart-wrenching, tear-plopping poems and speeches and slide show. Of course I felt a complete asshole for being such a grump at the beginning and kept trying to catch the teacher's eye, mouthing "Thank You!" waving and smiling and laughing crazily.

*Cy, nine, ended the year with their traditional 'How-To"project. He told me last night his was "How To Make Rice Krispie Treats." My heart sank at the thought of all the cleaning up. But he knows me so well.  We're buying them ready-made, he said.

How to Make Rice Krispie Treats

*Jackson, 13, is graduating today after being at his school for nine years. His older brother's jacket looks huge on him but I couldn't face taking him to buy another. "In the Eighties everyone wore their jackets like that" I said showing him pictures of A Flock of Seagulls "Start a cool trend!" Mum, he pleaded, I look like a clown.

There's a chance I could raise my "F" to a F+ though. On Saturday night we had our final school fundraiser of the year (for parents) at our house. Sunday morning I made the kids help me clean up.
"Cy!!!" I heard Tallulah scold her younger brother: "Carry that vodka bottle with two hands." Making end of year memories?

Solid F.

We're Not In Kansas Anymore, Toto

Good things over the weekend: Kevin's cousins from Kansas came to visit (let the alliteration begin!) The weather was so shiny, I brought out my Ohope Beach outfit.

My Ohope Beach outfit

Oakland kids (back) and Kansas cousins' kids

We barbecued some sausages (expensive ones) and were not impressed. I'm sorry, but you cannot find good snozzies here. Kiwis and Brits take note - gap in the market.

Tallulah turned 12 (not 32?) and continues to entertain us with her deft impersonations, one minute Glinda, the next Elphaba.

Tallulah in Mauritius

Tallulah turns 12

We started boot camp for Teddy the 6lb teen dog. He continues to have the heart of a lion (and body of a bunny) and he gets frothy angry when he sees the big dogs, especially when they disrespect him by peeing in front of our house. The dog trainer said he was very spoiled and it's going to take a lot of work to get him obedient. (Please don't fire us like the piano teacher did! Don't give up on us Tammy!)

On Monday Kevin took the boys to what for Oaklandish people is the Emerald City - A's baseball. I thought I'd seen the end of watch-sports-like-it's-your job when I flew out of New Zealand at age 25, but here I am living in Oakland which has three top US sports team; the A's baseball team (immortalised in Moneyball) the Raiders football team and the Warriors basketball team.

Kevin and the boys take off to the A's 

The sort of thing I hear all day long: "The A's lost in the fourth quarter on a Steph Curry interception." Or something like that...When the flying monkeys come, let them take me.

What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?

What would you do if you weren't afraid?  I've spent hours discussing this with friends walking in the hills and at the schoolgate and my bloggy friend Marlene just did a thought-provoking post on it.  The question, asked by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, is the most challenging one we face in our lives. I'm cold-sweat, skin-searing pee-in-pants terrified of heights so you'd think forcing myself do bungy jumping, sky diving and climbing down Mooney Falls would have made me good to go. The truth is, my fear of writing seems much more unconquerable.

SkyJump: Jumping 740ft into Auckland City traffic should have been the hardest thing I've ever done...

A screen full of horseshite ...much more scary

For the past three years I've been working to get back into journalism. After a ten years break, trying to re-enter has been terrifying and humbling...and sometimes humiliating. I've started in a new country with few contacts and no influence. My initial emails and calls went largely unreturned even from the tiniest local newspaper in New Zealand. I'm still clueless how not to take it personally.

And like many women I'm a bit of a perfectionist so I tend not to take on something unless I can give it my all (or is that more fear of failing?) and the whatifitsawful is a damning tape always playing.(Blogging helps that a bit because you'd never post anything if you keep primping, though I'm often tempted to press the delete button.)

Since Christmas when I had the germ of an idea, I've written 20,000 words of a novel (at least 85,000 words are needed apparently) Cy, nine, is impressed "All those words!" he says. "But are they the right words?" I grumble. And then I wander into the abyss of: Even if I finish it, will I find an agent, publisher, readers...? Every day I plot to give up. But I don't, mostly because I have little else going on in the career side of things.

A seminal moment for me was reading the fabulously funny  "Be Wrong As Fast As You Can" a New York Times piece about how successful people are the ones who can drive though the mucky middle of  a project - the ugly, messy, lookslikeabloodybomb middle. 

Editor Hugo Lindgren recounts all the ideas he's had, including a Mama Mia-esque rock opera and a sitcom set in Brooklyn that inverts "I Love Lucy," some of which sparked a flurry of emails from Hollywood but in the end never go anywhere, while his lazy, less creative friends got things made. Everything looks bad when you first write it: "I was surprised how mortally embarrassed it can be writing something nobody else will read." Ideas and dialogue that are vivid and genius in your head are inert and alien on the page. Luxurious abstraction sinks into mediocrity and it takes work to pull your project out of that.

John Lasseter, a founder of Pixar (which is just down the road so I feel I know him) said "Every Pixar film was the worst motion picture ever made at one time or another....People don't believe it but it's true."

I found more inspiration today with Cy's book report on Stuart Little, the little mouse that could: "T is for tofness, never giveing up"

Cy's book report on Stuart Little, the mouse with "sofnifogent braverey"

What are you afraid of? How has it stopped you doing things - or are you working to make sure it doesn't? 

A Moment With Great Gatsby

My husband Kevin travels a lot for work and last week he was in London. Due to my new regime of not drinking during the week (unless "going out" or "emergency") I was a bit wobbly by Saturday. My friend Monica rescued me from my hausfrauserie with an invitation to a pizza party she'd won in a school auction.

Selfie, old top you've seen it before

My friend Monica and me

The Oakland house

Looking over to the pizza oven area

The owners are into punk rock and Chinoiserie 

Their vege garden

The pizzas were made in a outdoor oven at a lovely Oakland home, a 1920's Tudor remodeled five years ago using reclaimed 100-year old wood and employing a number of local artisans as well as others who flew in Italy.

For a moment, sipping Prosecco on the lawn lit brightly by the sun even at 7pm, I could imagine myself in a Great Gatsby  scene chatting to my friends Muffy, Cricket and Charmeloy:  "Darlings, darlings do come to The Island next weekend, it'll be desperately dull without you!" Frocks with a dropped waist and a mid-calf length do nothing for me, but I notice in the movie they've hiked the hemlines to above the knee. 

Kevin arrived home yesterday afternoon to cries of relief all around and turns out he'd been receiving texts all week from my disgruntled tenants.
"Mum's so unfair"
"Mum's so mean."
"Your wife is seriously crazy." When he's really mad, one of the kids refers to me as your wife. And if you're wondering what the  word "seriously" adds to the "crazy" (I asked in the past and was met with a pitying stare) it elevates it to a technical term that can't be disputed.

Something about that last paragraph is similar to last weekend's.  Aiming for Great Gatsby and getting Groundhog Day...

I woke up this morning with a crick in my neck from reading Rules of Civility on the sunlounger at the pool yesterday. A chaise lounge injury...wee bit Great Gatsby, n'est pas?

Angelina's Choice

There's no doubt now that Angelina Jolie is superhuman. Just four days after she had a double mastectomy she was back at work doing storyboards for the movie she's currently directing.

Angelina Jolie Photo: Jody Brettkelly, Berlin Film Festival

On Tuesday in an Op-ed titled "My Medical Choice" for The New York Times, Jolie wrote that she has spent the last three months undergoing a preventative double mastectomy and breast reconstruction. She'd lost her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, to breast cancer at age 56 and after learning from doctors of her own elevated risk of both breast and ovarian cancers (at 87 percent and 50 percent, respectively), elected to undergo the major surgery for the sake of herself and her children.

I wondered today what I could add to all the voices. In the Bay Area, one in seven women (and in some parts one in five!) get breast cancer so it's something that is very much part of our lives or our friends' lives.

Angelina's decision is one I hope we could all make. Some have said it's not really "brave" because it's the only decision you could make but I've seen friends who've had reconstructive surgery and it's a bitch. Those same friends have told me that Angelina's statement has really helped them come to terms with it. (On the other hand, is some of what underlies the "Angelina's so brave" comments is that she's beautiful and so the sacrifice and pain counts for more? I hope not.)

One thing that's always fascinated me about Angie, as she's apparently called by her friends, is that usually she's seen as not relatable.

Why is that? "It's great she made this statement, but otherwise she doesn't interest me" is the comment I've heard this week.

She has beauty (Those eyes! Those lips! That skin! That hair!) and talent beyond the normal order of things but her beauty manages to eclipse her talent. (Elizabeth Taylor seemed to circumvent that somehow.) I find myself passing on her movies. Girl Interrupted being the exception where she almost succeeds in making herself less attractive with the aid of badly peroxided hair, allowing you to concentrate on her character. In some ways, now, she could only play herself, one of the ten most famous, most identifiable people on earth.

Why is that? Is it partly because she hasn't been forgiven for "stealing" Brad from "our Jen"who is the most relatable woman on earth who we just know would make us the best margarita ever and gossip and giggle all night on her white couches, if only we knew her. That of course is blatant sexism because it was Brad who owed loyalty to Jen and he seemed to walk away blameless.

Do we suspect Angie might be a loyal friend but not a cosy friend. A woman who's never taken any shit from a man and if we complained a-la-Bridget Jones about our hopeless boyfriend, she would just say "He's not into you." End of discussion.

In Berlin I went to the premiere of Angelina Jolie's directorial debut, In The Land of Blood and Honey, a love story set against the backdrop of the Bosnian war. Though overly long and featuring actors who lacked charisma, the movie was incredibly searing (horrific rape scenes) and honestly and uncomfortably portrayed a woman who slept with the enemy to save her life. The movie was pretty much panned and seen only by critics but I think a lot of the criticism was because Angelina Jolie made it.

Well, whatever our complicated "relationship" with her, this week she used her superpowers again for good. Yes, good on you Ang.

The Lazy Song

I am the laziest person I know. If I had my druthers I would lie in bed all day and read and watch movies, which I did on Sunday. Which makes it really tricky to live in the Bay Area where every third person says to you: "I am an Type-A person." Not sure what that means, but I think it's something to do with them having the go-go-go of a Steve Jobs-Hilary Clinton love-child.

Wore top half of my "Central Casting for Shrek3" outfit five days in a row. (sorry about the weird look on my face)

I did manage to line up these cleats

I spent most of my teen years lying on my bed reading, or outside sunbathing and eating un-ripe nectarines nicked from the neighbour's tree. I read indiscriminately, going through all the works of Somerset Maugham, Jilly Cooper and all the Greek tales and legends and...I won't go on. We laud great writers but what about us...great readers?

I keep hearing about how high school kids are staying up to 12 midnight to finish their homework. Not happening at our house. Now that tennis is finished Harley,15, is home by 3.30pm to take up his position on the couch yelling at the Sports Channel. Yesterday at 8pm he transferred to his computer, ear buds in, to watch a movie.
"Don't you have any homework?" I asked.
"Mom, I told you, no more homework, it's the year end."
"So it's all over?"
"Well... we have finals."
"What about studying for those?" I know, that was impertinent of me. Quite rightly met with a hurt look. Ear buds back in.

Cy, nine, deals with his homework as soon as he gets home. By putting it in the re-cycling.

Apple. Tree.

If you had your druthers, what would you do all day long?

My First Mother's Day

Harley was born in St. Mary's in Paddington, London, a scruffy public hospital where you brought in your own diapers and the beds on the ward were divided off with shower curtains.

Me at our flat in Pembridge Square, London, 1997

Harley, three months old, my sister's house, Auckland, NZ

Me and Harley last summer,  Isla Vista, Santa Barbara

Looking back I realise that even at the end of my labour I never fully believed that a baby was going to come out of me. Even when I was screaming with the pain, focusing solely on the picture on the wall in front of me, a faded print of three rabbits wearing bonnets.

But after that searing pain had taken me to the depths of what I could bear, and then, so, so far beyond, Harley was forced out - bloody and slippery. His skin was taut and plump and his curly defined lips seemed to be almost smiling.

“Yes, he came out perfectly formed” my mother would say later “other babies come out so mushed up and scrabbled. But Harley was perfect.” I realised later that every mother around the world thought exactly the same thing about her baby.

That was a moment where everything else in the world falls away. To see the creature that was inside you now outside of you. To smell the sweet stonefuit of their skin. And to put your palm under those tiny soles that have yet to touch the earth...

What is your strongest memory of that day?  Happy Mother's Day to you and your mother.

Call Me On The Conch

It was a heat wave last weekend and a $25 "gold" bracelet from here revitalised my "penis" dress. Remember this DVF dress from last year?... someone said the flowers looked scarily phallic.

Uptown Oakland

Flora in Uptown Oakland

 

Make Westing: A bar so hip you don't need to wear undies!

Cafe van Cleef: And this is before the big band and the Showgirls!

Flora restaurant, in Uptown Oakland (which let's face it, is one block from Midtown Oakland) is an art deco restaurant with the best quail and Corpse Revivers, my new favourite tipple.

 
These days you'd think it would be easy peasy for Kevin and I to slip out for dinner...it should be. But the problem is the youngest three are challenging the authority of the eldest, 15 year old Harley who also happens to be the babysitter.  Jackson is a teen now and Tallulah, 11, has been training to be a teen all her life. The nine year old, Cy, takes orders only from Teddy who is a 6lb Maltese teen (dog).

Bottom line, it's a shit show, people. While we're at dinner, it's Lord of the Flies back at our house. And without those fabulous British boarding school accents. Which would be fine if the kids just sent us conch signals but there's the little matter of the phone. And the phone calls come. And they come. It's lies, tears, accusations and recriminations and that's just on the first course. Bring back the conch I say, the cellphones must go the way of Piggy's glasses.

We're usually out the door at 5pm and back home by 8pm, auld that's us. Sat night we did a whoohoo and stayed out an extra hour, drinking first at the hipster bar Make Westing where they have bocce ball court.

We said to the barman:"Wow we are the oldest people in this bar!" The barman replied:"You'd like it during the week, it's a more mature crowd."

After dinner we "hit" the jazz bar Cafe van Cleef (remember it from here?) but we just couldn't keep our eyes open until 10pm when the big band and the Showgirls come on.
 
What's a late night for you?