arrives a Montreal - holiday blog entry!

Ooh, looking at the phrase "arrives a Montreal," (as in "nous sommes...") I wonder if it's possible to compose a grammatically correct sentence in one language that uses words that exist as real words in another language? too much to hope, I think, that you could get a sentence that was grammatically complete in both languages. If I knew someone who worked in language translation at Google, I would totally ask them to apply their massive brain to that entirely trivial problem. In the meantime....

New Experience numero un: hurricane! wow. we didn't actually experience full on Hurricane Irene, I don't think, but that was rain that meant Bidness with a capital B. We are getting to be seriously savvy baby-travellers at this point, a well-oiled babycare machine travelling at 600 mph at 37000 feet, safari pants-pockets stocked with extra pacifiers, sanitizer gel, spare nappies, tupperware containers of mashed fruit, etc. - and I get extra points on this trip for having a second dependent, as the usual hefter of heavy bags was too busy popping Percocet for his two-day-old appendectomy incision - but I have to admit that we were inadequately prepared for the gigantic wall of water that sloshed down on us as soon as we left Logan airport for Vermont in our trusty rental car. It was I think the scariest driving I have ever had to do: rental car + unfamiliar roads + dark night + precious if somewhat cranky cargo + tired from long flight + jetlag + long way to go + sketchy directions once we got into vermont + HUGE ASS QUANTITIES OF WATER, like someone had turned on a giant faucet pretty much right over the car. Windscreen wipers going frantically, multiple near spins-out-of-control-from-hydroplaning, tidal wave every time a truck passed us, etc. I don't think my back touched the backrest of the carseat once the whole way. We stopped briefly for dinner at a Burger King, where the baby flirted with the Latina lady mopping the floor, and babydaddy and I ate a meal which we lived to regret. I have not eaten at a fast food restaurant since watching the movie SuperSize Me, and even our feeble attempt at squeezing a 'healthy' meal out of the Food Industrial Complex felt like a total sellout (we had a "garden salad" (wilted iceberg lettuce with three slices each of a tomato that died of anemia long before we got to it), and half a minitray of "chicken tenders", about which the less said the better. I renewed my vows never to eat at a place like that ever again, and I don't think it will be a difficult vow to keep. Not entirely sure how/why we lapsed, other than we had five hours in the car without the prospect of anything else being open. Five hours without food would have been better. Ennyways.

Drive drive drive drive drive slosh slosh slosh slosh rain rain rain rain until we arrive at Caspian Lake in northern Vermont, where, after a short stint of pootling around dirt country lanes in the dark cursing the sketchiness of our directions and the absence of cell phone reception, we pass by a house with lights still on and voila! magic! through the darkness, nice friends can be seen having a convivial time framed in the lit window. Hooray!

We unpack car, baby, piles of stuff (no longer raining, but it is one a.m.) and get bundled straight into bed after lightning tour of the house (old creaky wood new england battered sofas old piano ancient kitchen sliding window shutters no noise at all except lovely little tree/lake related night time noises) and sleep the sleep of the catatonic for ten hours straight, baby included hallelujah. we really have the best behbeh ever. she's cute AND she sleeps. have I mentioned recently that I LOVE her???

ok am going to hit publish post now and continue adventures another day because it is bedtime delicious bedtime. bonne nuit (that's a foreshadowing of montreal :))

day 1/5 sans bambina

so far so good. i have gotten my adequate quota of

1) sleeplessness (due to the vagaries of san francisco cell phone reception, i received a text at 4 a.m. from my sister that had been sent twelve hours earlier and then couldn't get back to sleep)

2) fatness (i went over to dinner at F.'s house, and she made pasta carbonara, which pretty much hits all the high-calorie peaks I know of: cream, bacon, cheese, eggs... you could maybe throw a donut and a couple of strawberry daiquiris in there while you were at it, but it's hard to beat for sin:volume ratio. F just got back from visiting relatives in Calabria, and I am suffering snits of jealousy that I am not stylish and Italian with a summer villa on the Adriatic and big piles of cousins)

3) happiness (last day of working fulltime clinic for a wee stretch. i'm on call this weekend, and there are a couple of ER shifts upcoming, but i am temporarily done with answering histrionic calls from neurotic middle-aged ladies throwing tantrums (I am not making this up) about how they called in a refill request for their vitamin D supplement over TWO HOURS AGO (**we ask people to give us a turnaround time of 3-5 days**) and they haven't GOTTEN it yet, and they are crying and hysterical because they feel noone is LISTENING TO THEM and how are they supposed to last the weekend WITHOUT THEIR VITAMIN D SUPPLEMENT. which, not to be unsympathetic, here, but this always makes me think, huh? what about global warming? what about the war in Afghanistan? what about all the toxic chemicals leaching into the food supply and how we're all twenty years away from turning the planet into an overheated nuclear waste pesticide dump populated entirely by SUVs? if running out of your entirely nonessential vitamin supplement for two days causes you this much stress, how to you even get out of bed in the morning?

I have had running through my head all day the lovely lovely John Dowland song, Come Again, which is such a sweet combination of sexy and sad all at once:

"Come again, sweet love doth now invite

Thy graces that refrain to do me due delight:

To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die

With thee again in sweetest sympathy.

Come again, that I may cease to mourn

Through thy unkind disdain, for now, left and forlorn,

I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die

In deadly pain and endless misery.

Gentle love, draw forth thy wounding dart!

Thou canst not pierce her heart. For I, that do approve

With sighs and tears more hot than are thy shafts

Did tempt, while she for triumph laughs."

I am extra impressed with myself that I could reproduce all three verses after more than my fair share of a bottle of red wine...

projects for tomorrow: landlady-type fix it things around the house, and I am going to start on my master copy of a Michiel Sittow portrait of a lady who might or might not be Catherine of Aragon. a beautiful beautiful painting. why have i never heard before of michiel sittow? i just randomly found this painting poking around on art.com. i think my art goal is to figure out how to paint portraits of people I know in the early flemish style. as in, actually identify and be able to reproduce the elements of a van eyck/rogier van der weyden/memling/etc etc portrait without simply copying directly. sort of like the gerhardt richter paintings that are so intensely evocative of vermeer.

until then: good night, everyone. goodnight baby. your mama she meeses you.

Misunderstandings

I was crossing Octavia Street today on my way to Flax (yay Flax!) and a woman leaned out of her truck to yell, "Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to California?" I was initially bemused/tickled (how delightfully absurd to be that lost that you don't know what state you're in!) and then pleased (how fun to be the one to get to tell her, "You've made it! You're here!"), and then ashamed: you twit, she means California Street. Oops.

I was asked by a woman on the street when I was an undergraduate where I had gotten my enormous and very colourful jersey; when I told her, "Ecuador," she said, "Oh, is that one of those shops down by Pike Place Market?"

My baby

1) has five teeth

2) can crawl

3) understands "where is the little duck?" and "where is the flower?" in chinese (we know this because she reaches for her plastic duck/the dahlias on the mantelpiece respectively)

4) is going to be in a different town from me for the next five days.

filter bubble

I just watched the following profoundly depressing TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

While it is no surprise at all at all that the Internet has both facilitated instant global communication and increased insularity with the diversification of news sources, I don't think I realized to quite what extent my online habits shaped the information which I received. The benefit of getting what you want is obvious; the downsides to being given _only_ what you want are more insidious. Out of curiosity, I did a search for what some of the algorithmic "signals" that Pariser talks about that Google might use to alter search results; below is a list generated by a random German blogger dude that doesn't contain any real surprises, I suppose, but it made me wonder if there is a market for a purposeful search engine scrambler that will always throw in a few 'wild cards' into your search results to make sure that you are getting more of the whole picture. My understanding was that the filter was designed to try and take you to the most _relevant_ page (i.e. if you type in Britney Spears, the number one search result should be the official Britney Spears website, not a creepy stalker's website that just consists of the name 'Britney Spears' repeated five thousand times), but if that were the case, then _anyone_ typing in "Egypt" (as in Pariser's talk) should get as their first hit a Wikipedia type article with a general run down on Egyptian history and current events, not ads for travel companies, right? If any of the Googlers in my life want to weigh in, I'd be very interested to hear what they have to say.

Oh, and my baby has a TOOTH!!! so exciting.

Proposed possible filter modifiers:

1. our search history
2. our location
3. the browser we use
4. the browser's version
5. the computer we use
6. the language we use
7. the time we need to type in a query
8. the time we spend on the search result page
9. the time between selecting different results for the same query
10. our operating system
11. our operating system's version
12. the resolution of our computer screen
13. average amount of search requests per day
14. average amount of search requests per topic (to finish search)
15. distribution of search services we use (web / images / videos / real time / news / mobile)
16. average position of search results we click on
17. time of the day
18. current date
19. topics of ads we click on
20. frequency we click advertising
21. topics of adsense advertising we click while surfing other websites
22. frequency we click on adsense advertising on other websites
23. frequency of searches of domains on Google
24. use of google.com or google toolbar
25. our age
26. our sex
27. use of “i feel lucky button”
28. do we use the enter key or mouse to send a search request
29. do we use keyboard shortcuts to navigate through search results
30. do we use advanced search commands (how often)
31. do we use igoogle (which widgets / topics)
32. where on the screen do we click besides the search results (how often)
33. where do we move the mouse and mark text in the search results
34. amount of typos while searching
35. how often do we use related search queries
36. how often do we use autosuggestion
37. how often do we use spell correction
38. distribution of short / general queries vs. specific / long tail queries
39. which other google services do we use (gmail / youtube/ maps / picasa /….)
40. how often do we search for ourself

weird dream

I dreamt last night that I was taking an exam in an outdoor classroom with mountains in the middle distance. There were lots of chairs with fold-down desks in rows, but I was the only student, and Javier Bardem was proctoring. The exam was an essay question on the Odyssey in which you had to take a stance on whether you thought Penelope was faking a major illness or whether she genuinely had something organic wrong with her, and you were supposed to back your arguments up with medical details hidden in the text (which, please note, I have never actually read). I freaked out because I had no idea how to answer the question, and so I ran up the road into the mountains to escape, and Javier was cross with me.

rain rain go away

SO, it's absolutely pouring down rain here in gorgeous (not) sunny (not) San Francisco... flights from Seattle are delayed which is both:

- bad (parents have to cool heels in airport for hours, will not get to spend _quite_ as much time with baby as previously hoped, I can't f****** go OUT because it's so incredibly wet out; ironically one of the things I need to go out to do is buy a replacement brolly) and

- good (I have more time to cross things off my to-do list before everyone arrives, including think about supper for tonight. Notice I am using my valuable to-do list time while baby is hallelujah praise the lord sleeping to send blather into the blogosphere... hmm, maybe not so sensible).

I had my first day back at work on Tuesday of this last week; it was sort of a calm fiasco in that nothing went as planned but it didn't particularly bother me. I was slightly offended (but not really) that I had multiple new patients on my schedule - you'd think after four months away, there would be at least one clinic-ful of faithful stalwarts who'd been saving up all their rectal boils and disability paperwork and oxycontin refill requests specially for me, just because they love me so much - but turns out that, no, the underworld of Belleville can cope just fine without me, and in most cases, probably didn't even notice that I was gone.

(Pumping milk at work is a grotty experience, I just have to say - I have to lock myself in the lab to do it and then smuggle my bottles of milk through the back hallway to stick them in the freezer, so it feels somehow as if I'm doing something reprehensible and pornographic. So much easier if I were allowed to bring the baby to work with me - of my two boob decompression devices, she is more efficient than the pump anyway...)

My disorganized day in clinic was then cut short by (hoorah!) an admission, so I drove half an hour to the hospital in pouring pouring bucketing bloody miserable wet wet wet rain to admit a guy to hospital who had given himself a raging urinary tract infection by (squeamish readers beware) catheterizing himself to relieve his blocked-up prostate with a Foley catheter he had pulled out of the rubbish (worse: the rubbish bin of the Sonoma County jail). eeeeeuuuuuuuuwwww. And then home to see how my lovely baby had gotten on with the babysitter, and it turns out she'd been happy as a little piglet in shit all day (with photos to prove it) without me. Hunh.

Yesterday I went w/ babydaddy's friend A. to go see the Voyeurism exhibit at the SFMOMA - a collection of mostly photos w/ a handful of videos of people photographed without their knowledge and/or consent and/or awareness of the photographer - ordinary people out and about, factory condition exposes, sex stuff, military stuff, etc. Some of the images were unexpectedly lovely and/or interesting - my favourites were a series of women from the 1940's on a train, a photo of a fake Arab town constructed for Israeli military purposes, a series of stills of a couple sleeping, and a bizarre little illustrated narrative in which a woman hired - via a third party - a private detective to follow her for the day.

I also had a mini-revelation about moving image "art" and why it is that I can never be bothered to sit and watch video installations in art galleries: the indeterminate duration annoys me. What I mean is this: I always want to give every piece of art a fighting chance to convince me that I like it, and I don't think you can judge a piece of art until you've seen the "whole thing". That takes at most a few seconds with still image, and once you've seen it, you can then (if you like) spend more time in front of the ones you like appreciating the details. With a moving image, not only does the _artist_ decide how long it takes to view the whole thing (can be seconds vs minutes vs hours vs days...) but the viewer isn't given that information and thus has to either be willing to stand there for potentially hours OR decide at some point that based on the first few minutes/seconds of this video installation that this piece of art is _probably_ a piece of shit and therefore not worth wasting any further time on, risking missing what might be a phenomenal exciting/beautiful/interesting twist in the video that comes up seconds after you have cut your losses and abandoned it.

One hour later: I am now the proud owner of a clear bubble umbrella, something I have been coveting ever since my trip to Japan last year. Which reminds me: everyone who reads this please think good thoughts for the people in Japan right now - and consider donating e.g. at http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/japan_57914.html. It is hard to not to think that our collective chickens re: irresponsible environmental policy are coming home to roost in the form of natural disasters...

cabo wabo woot woot

Day three or possibly four or possibly even five (?) of lowest ambition holiday ever: we are on Operation: International Travel with Baby: Start Low, Go Slow.

We were met at the airport on Saturday afternoon by

1. Glorious warm sunshine

2. The knowledge that our daughter had poo’ed through every layer of clothing she was wearing

3. Five thousand guys in polo-style corporate T-shirts wanting us to go on time-share real estate presentations, and

4. Our limousine (I am not making this up; I promise I had booked only a “private car” from the airport, but turns out “private car” means full-on stretch limo, complete with plastic champagne glasses in holders, paper napkins, television, and faux-leather seats in the back. My only regret was that I hadn’t thought to wear a shiny magenta satin prom dress, preferably with ruffles.)

Onwards through dry deserty cactus-y hilly rocky landscape on one side of the road and gorgeous blue ocean on the other; as you get closer to town, there start to be more and more giganto-mega-resorts on the beach side of the road, some more architecturally innocuous than others. The town itself (or what I have seen of it so far) is a tourist schlock-o-rama, catering to drunken spring breakers (two-for-one Tequila Happy Hour at Senor Frog’s!) and middle-aged large-middled middle-America (Sport-Fishing Cruise - We Pack and Ship Your Catch!), with grubby run-down Mexico evident around the edges. The hotel we are staying at is a higher end, even more giganto-mega version of the other resorts that line the shoreline; it’s all polished granite and koi ponds and gleaming blue swimming pools and mini-golf course. We are the VIP area of the hotel - accessible only by special key card - so we feel extra fancy, although I am disappointed to report that we have yet to spot Britney Spears or Celine Dion. The crowd seems to be mainly wobbly wrinklies with loud voices, mid-range I.Q.‘s, and a much higher tolerance for continuous pop music than I have…

Saturday evening we spent just settling in: dinner at one of the resort restaurants, followed by our Welcome Margarita at the bar (I would be really interested to know how many jillion liters of tequila gets consumed per 24 hours in this town; I have never been anywhere where they are so eager to get you sloshed on cheap liquor except for perhaps my brief stint as a pole dancer in a frat house (joke)). Sunday morning we held our noses and spent an hour and a half with a schmoozy paunchy real-estate agent called Scott M., who did his earnest bonhomie-ish best to chat up babydaddy (“So! You golf at all?”) and wild papa H. (“What do you do, sir?” Papa H.: “Ping pong! You got anywhere to play pingpong here?”). He took us to buffet breakfast and tried very hard to sell us on the joys of living part time in Cabo (our favourite was when he described the enormous dome over the lobby of the hotel as “an architectural marvel from 2002”. We have a miniature version of the brick dome over our bedroom, and it’s kind of fun, not unlike being inside a tandoori oven) but his desperate chumminess was no match for our snarkiness. Baby began to cry at exactly the ninety-minute mark, proving that she has a good instinct for schmooze-avoidance, and we escaped with our coupons for $420 in free food and spa services, despite poor old Scott M.’s protestations that he ‘hadn’t had time to show us the floor plans yet.’ Whatevs, dude, you should have been more efficient.

The rest of Sunday afternoon we spent taking a quick spin around the town to see what there was to be seen (not a ton that we couldn’t have guessed at) and buying groceries at the Soviet-style supermarket (which almost makes up for the very depressing manky produce section by selling fantastic fresh salsa and playing Chopin on the overhead loudspeaker). We also went for a little walk down the length of the beach from where we saw WHALES!!! Wowee!! So cool. Right off shore, too, maybe a hundred yards away (it gets very deep very quickly) breeching or breaching or whatever it is that you call it. We also saw a sign warning in English and Spanish not to swim for danger of riptides, and I was interested to learn that the Spanish word for riptide is the same as the word for hangover - clearly both occupational hazards of residence in Cabo San Lucas.

Monday the grandparents took the bambina, and babydaddy and I went on a mountain climbing expedition - we found what the real estate agent had referred to as ‘the Mexican beach’ (i.e. the little beach where the locals hang out - grubbier but much friendlier feeling than the mega-resorts beach), from where we did some bushwhacking and rock scrambling over the big hill towards the point of the cape, where the famous arches are, passing some magnificent little deserted white sand coves along the way, until we arrived at Lovers’ Beach, which was taken over by a party of sea-kayakers and water taxi touts. I snoozed on the sand in the sun with my book (which I am hugely enjoying - a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay) and babydaddy went for a run (aren’t you impressed? I was) and then we scrambled back over the rocks to get home just in time to go on a Sunset Dinner Cruise that mama & papa H. had booked for us. The less said about that the better, I think - beautiful water, beautiful sunset, beautiful boat ride, food OK, drinks vile, blaring music and DJ person horeeeble. My favourite part of Monday apart from seeing the whales was that wild papa H. randomly came home with forty pounds of fresh-caught tuna and started cooking it up. We’ve been eating a lot of tuna the last few days.

Tuesday we decided we were going to opt out of the Tourist Industrial Complex completely for the day - we sat by the pool with books, swam, snoozed, sunbathed, garnered compliments on our delisquicious baby, and ate fish tacos (mmm) in the morning, and then to the beach in the afternoon for more of the same. Exciting events of the day were mainly baby-related: baby has now officially learned how to roll over from front to back (rendering us unsafe for elevated flat surfaces), and she has gone swimming (full immersion in the pool, partial immersion in the Pacific). I would also like to report that my Chinese vocabulary is getting positively expansive: I can say, “good morning,” “Did you sleep well?” “stinky,” “thank you,” “hello” and “pineapple.” I think I’m pretty set for linguistic survival.

OK time to go see if I can get the internet connection to work…also, I just re-read this, and realized that it is sounding very snotty and as if I am not enjoying myself, when in fact the opposite is true; the tourist infrastructure here is icky and non-sustainable and disturbing, it's true, but it has been absolutely blissful to have several days to just sit in the sunshine next to the water with my lovely baby and babydaddy and a book and feel happy.