Baby!

The other night I got a phone message that began with a growled, “Baby!” It turned out to be my mother, trying to compensate for Arthur Penhallow, the WRIF DJ who was in The Upside of Anger, not having said his trademark word in the movie.

Thelonious is still barfing pretty regularly and still has diarrhea. I called her vet and we have an appointment this Thursday.

One pile of cat vomit ended up on my new bathroom rug last week. I used to have a perfectly good little pink bathroom rug which hid dirt reasonably well. The day must have come when I said, “I’m going to go get exactly the bathroom rug I’d like to have,” after which I bought a beautiful bright yellow rug made of cotton with a rubberized bottom. It was lovely, but it showed dirt like crazy. It needed washing again about two days after being laundered.

Back I went to get a rug in a more forgiving color. I bought an all-cotton rug—shag on one side, loops on the other—in an olive green that is the best dirt-hiding color of all. It seemed like a less substantial item than the rug with the rubberized backing, so I thought it would be easier to wash in that it wouldn’t cause the load to become unbalanced so often and make the washing machine come shuddering to a stop.

That turned out not to be true; once all the cotton got wet, it was actually heavier than the previous rug and it stopped the washing machine several times, with the usual horrible thumping and crashing. I forgot to mention that this rug was by far the most expensive of the three; it cost more than the other two put together, probably. So I was slightly bemused when it came out of the dryer looking like a fright wig.

I absolutely can’t stop eating these days, I mean really stuffing myself until I think something (like my stomach) will rupture. I know it will pass in time, and also that it is a way of telling myself that I think I did something wrong. “I shouldn’t have eaten X” isn’t about food at all; it means “I shouldn’t have done X,” but it’s not always clear what X is.

One thing that often helps, besides issuing myself a blanket amnesty for all actions, is to sit down and think about what tasty things I would like to eat in the upcoming week and then make all of those things. The more choices there are, the better. It’s nice to look in the cupboard and realize there are three kinds of cookies that are sitting untouched because I have way better homemade cookies, and chocolate, and frozen desserts, and hard peppermint candies, and Bumble Bars ... . Once upon a time, no kind of cookie was allowed in the house at all, ditto nuts, nut butter, sugar, bread, etc. Now everything is allowed.

This weekend I made bean and corn salad and I roasted potatoes and sweet potatoes and I made oatmeal-raisin cookies. Today (having forgotten I had a lunch date) I brought to work roasted potatoes and sweet potatoes, an apple, some bean and corn salad, and a peanut butter and tomato sandwich. In the end, I ate Hunan House Bean Curd at Henry’s Hunan.

Saturday evening Tom and I went to Berkeley for the Bay Area Comedy Festival, where we saw Big City Improv, Improv Slam Singing Contest, Ali Wong, and my favorites, Kasper Hauser. It was fun.

On Sunday we took the ferry to Sausalito for the second weekend in a row to have lunch with his mother, Ann, and her husband Mac, and Tom’s brother Steve, and his wife Julie. We went to The Spinnaker, which is right on the water and has huge wraparound windows; you aren’t outside, but you can watch boats going by constantly. There are some pretty fancy boats around there, plus people in kayaks, some of whom go right underneath the restaurant, which is on stilts.

Steve and Julie live in Sacramento and reported that it has been miserable, over a hundred degrees for eight or nine days in a row. It can get very hot there, but Steve said what has been unusual and unwelcome is that, while it’s usually dry, it is very humid now, and it’s not cooling down at night. He said one night at 10 p.m. it was still 96 degrees.

San Francisco is a good place to be in the global warming era, as it’s probably one of few places in the entire country where you can live without both heating and cooling. Tom and I enjoyed being on the ferry, sitting out front in the wind, which usually is pretty cold, but yesterday was just right.

Thelonious is virtually not eating. I keep telling her, “If you want to live, you have to eat.” Her little spine and hipbones seem to be more prominent every day.