Moon over Kailua

My friend Bob was in town this past weekend taking a trip with his girlfriend. She has friends that live in Kailua, on the windward side of the island, and they invited us over for dinner. They have this unbelievable place right on the beach with a pool and a hottub and a huge house that catches all of the best island breezes. It's seriously my dream house. Anyway, sitting out on the back patio was almost magical -- the air was balmy, the breeze caught the scent of plumeria, and then a full orange moon started to rise out of the ocean. Living in Hawaii definitely has its perks. I'm not a good enough photographer to do the view justice -- it's really hard to photograph the moon at night with a standard camera -- but here's a glimpse of what we were looking at:

Mt. Kilauea

Jason and Dean went to the Big Island last weekend and saw Mt. Kilauea erupting. Apparently it started firing about 2 hours before they got there, and by the time they went over it in a helicopter, there were rivers of lava flowing down into the ocean. Pretty freakin' cool.

Shark Week

My brother-in-law Dean is visiting us right now. This morning while I was upstairs working, he was chilling downstairs watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. At around 1:30, he went down to the beach to have a swim. Before he left, he said, "with all the shark stuff I've been watching, I'm almost nervous to go in the water." He came back an hour later because the beach had been closed and everyone pulled out of the water because there was a shark sighting. Too weird.

At last: rest

It's been a crazy week or two. First I was going nuts trying to finish and file a big brief that, for reasons that drove me crazy, came down to the wire. Then I was getting for my trip to Atlanta and New Hampshire, and getting the house ready for Jason's brother's visit (not that it took much, but I wanted to get some new bedding and rearrange a few things so he'd be comfortable). Then I took the red-eye on Friday night to Atlanta, got off the plane, went shopping with Kathleen, met a friend for lunch, took a brief nap, went to a baby shower that Michele hosted for me, which led right into a party. The next morning, I got up early to meet Michelle at the Y to go for a swim, then spent the rest of the day first at a wedding shower for Michelle, then at a massive party that Kathleen and Rich hosted for Addie and Lula that included a water slide, a moon bounce, tie-dying, face painting, and about a million little monkeys under the age of 6. The party started at 3 and ended at about 9. We went through 40 veggie corn-dogs, countless spinach pies and mini-pizzas, a huge bowl of crab dip, bottles of wine, bottles of water, juice boxes, and God knows what else. That night, Lula was having a really rough time settling down and it was freaking Addie out, so at about midnight I brought Addie into my bed to sleep with me. I had to be up early to get to the airport to make my 9:30 am flight, but like an idiot, I left my driver's license at Kathleen's house. I discovered the error early -- I only lost about 15 minutes -- but the 15 minutes was enough to make me miss my flight to Manchester because the fucking security line was an hour and a half long. I got to the gate about 2 minutes after they closed the flight, having run all the way down the terminal because of course my gate was as far away from the terminal entrance as it possible could have been. I see the ladies closing the door as I'm sprinting up there with my huge belly heaving, and I yell "NOOOOOOOOO!!!!" They look at me blankly and say, "sorry, flight's closed." At which point I burst into tears and stood in the middle of the gate area sobbing like a baby, with mascara running down my face. The next flight to Manchester wasn't for another 5 1/2 hours, so I had to sit there and wait. I was so angry and stressed and tired that it took about 45 minutes for me to calm down, so I sat there crying and doing that "huh-huh-huh" breathing thing that little kids do when they can't calm down, all the while trying to read my Harry Potter book. Finally I calmed down, got a new boarding pass for the next flight, and read my book. I finished it, too. When I got off the plane in Manchester, I took one look at my mother and Emma, who were meeting me at the airport, and promptly started to cry again. Oy.

But we got to the beach house and I got some food in my belly and finally, finally got a decent night's sleep, plus a 3 hour nap about an hour after I got up, so for the first time in I don't know how long, I feel rested. And I can reflect a little bit on my trip.

It was so wonderful to see all of my Atlanta friends and their children. It was a little bit overwhelming to have the activities packed in one after the other for a solid 36 hours, but I got a good love fix in. I miss those people so much.

But what really amazed me was how much I miss Jason. Of course I love my husband, but I will only be gone a week, so I shouldn't be such a sap. But sitting in the airport terminal, my first thought wasn't, "I want my mother," which is whom I normally yearn for when I'm stressed and tired. It was, "I want my husband." I just wanted him to come and give me a big hug and let me sleep on his shoulder. Thinking about it on the plane made me weepy all over again. He's a keeper, he is. The baby is kicking like crazy these days and all I can think about is how excited Jason and I both are to meet this little monkey and be good parents to him and teach him how to surf and read him stories and make him giggle by blowing on his belly. I can't wait.

It's alive!!

I have a terribly brown thumb. I love pretty flowers, but I don't have the patience to be a good gardener. I'll get really excited about gardening and go crazy planting and tending and digging, and then I lose interest and things start dying.

About a month a go, Jason gave me an orchid. It sat in its little pot looking pretty. I watered it a couple of times, but it didn't seem to be doing well, and then started drooping and getting yellow leaves and looking very sad. I didn't want to kill a plant that my husband had been sweet enough to bring me for no reason other than he loves me, so I went to KMart and bought a new pot for it and some soil and Miracle Gro, and I re-potted it. I even mixed coffee grounds into the soil, at the suggestion of one of our neighbors who has a yardful of beautiful orchids. Two weeks later, new shoots are growing, it's leaves have perked up, and the flowers are looking peppy. Maybe there's hope for me after all.

Grumpy

I'm so grumpy today. Grumpy grumpy grumpy. I'm working on a brief on which we've already gotten more than a two week extension, and yet 3 lawyers in the firm (me included) are busting our asses to get the thing ready to file on Monday. My problem is that I'm sort of the coordinator of the master document, so I synthesize all of everybody else's work product into one final brief so that it all flows and makes sense and is persuasive. Of course, this means that for me to finish what I have to do, other people have to finish what they have to do, and they've all been lollygagging and dilly-dalling and procrastinating and making me crazy. I know I have to just suck it up and do the work and get it over with, but I'm so irritated I'm having a hard time focusing. The only bright side is that for the first time since we moved here, it is grey and misty and ugly outside, so I don't have to be further aggravated by the fact that I'm losing valuable beach time by having to work.

I'm also officially over being pregnant. I'm tired of the swollen feet and ankles, the heart-burn, feeling like a beached whale, not being able to lie on my back without feeling woozy, having a fatter ass than I've ever had in my life, having my boobs back at their pre-reduction size, not being able to do the physical activities that I love, and having this little alien monkey inside me kicking me at all hours of the night and disrupting the few hours of sleep that I might otherwise have been able to get (which, as a chronic insomniac, wouldn't have been many in any event). And I don't want to hear about how it's only going to get worse over the next few months (duh, thanks for reminding me) or alternatively, how it's such a beautiful wonderful experience and pregnancy is such a miracle blah blah blah. Fuck off, jolly pregnant ladies. You're weird.

Willie

This is apropos of nothing except a song that just started playing on my iPod. I know that Willie Nelson has become something of a caricature of himself, viewed as a pot-smoking, tax evading hippie who never met a cheesy duet he didn't love. But I defy anyone to listen to his Red Headed Stranger album from 1975 and not recognize it as an absolute masterpiece and work of genius.

Apparently it IS an Aussie thing!

My brother Sam has an Australian coworker who explained that crocheted coat hangers are traditional Australian gifts, frequently given by older people ("aunties" and "uncles").  I'm not sure why my Australian husband was unaware of this. 

Is it an Aussie thing?

My in-laws are lovely people and they have always been incredibly kind to me and supportive of my relationship with Jason. I truly bear no ill will against any of them. So I don't want to sound like I'm being an ungrateful, snotty bitch when I say that they give the strangest, most random gifts I have ever heard of.

Today I went out to get the mail and there was a package for me from Jason's mom, Jan. The Australian postal service requires people sending packages to identify the contents of the package on a label. This package informed me that Jan had sent me a coat hanger. I opened it up, and sure enough, there was a small wooden coat hanger covered with pink crochet and decorated with a pink ribbon. The note accompanying the package talked about some travel she was doing, expressed wishes that we were doing well, and asked about Max (my dog). But nothing like, "oh, and I saw this hanger and thought it would be cute for the baby" (she doesn't know we're having a boy), or something explaining the motivation for the gift. Just a letter and a coat hanger.

This is not, incidentally, the first time I have received coat hangers as gifts from Jason's family. A couple of years ago his grandmother, Noonie (who, again, I must reiterate is an awesome, sweet woman whom I love dearly), gave me a package of three purple-satin-covered puffy hangers for Christmas. In Noonie's defense, she also recently sent me some little baby booties for Zeke that she crocheted herself. So cute. Anyway, I have also received from Jason's family styrofoam coozies and a bath towel. Not a decorative towel or something that said "Australia" on it or anything like that. Just a beige bath towel. I also once got bright turquoise socks so huge that they would hang off of Shaquille O'Neal's feet.

Last week, Jan sent Jason a birthday present (his birthday is tomorrow). It was a wine bottle carrier, like something you would take camping. Which is great, except that Jason doesn't drink wine.

The glamorous side of practicing law, part 2

It may not have been glamorous, but it did the trick. We got the court of appeals to reverse a really bad district court decision. Mission accomplished. I love winning. It's like, better than losing, ya know?*

**Extra credit points to anyone who can tell me what movie that line came from. And family members, if you can't figure it out, you lose points.

Jason + Max = BFF 4EVA

I can't decide if this is really cute or really disturbing...

pseudo-intellectual musings

I'm reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln.  I'm about 200 pages into it and am finding it incredibly interesting.  Two things jump out at me that I can't stop thinking about.  First is how uncertain life was back then, and how much we take for granted our health (and the high quality health care we get) these days.  Women routinely died in childbirth, people died suddenly of fevers, cholera, tuberculosis, the flu, etc.  Of the four central characters in the book, every one lost at least one child and many lost parents and spouses at an early age.  By the time Salmon Chase was 44, he had buried three young wives and a daughter.  Chase had another daughter, and in a letter he wrote to her when she was 11, he chastised her for not making more of her time on earth and warned her that she might not live another 11 years.  Edward Bates and his wife had 17 children, only 8 of whom survived to adulthood.  Lincoln lost his mother at the age of 9 and a 3-year-old son to TB. 

The other thing that strikes me is how intellectual pursuits consumed the lives of Lincoln and his contemporaries, and how they viewed themselves as having a duty to matter in the world and in society.  They were utterly dedicated to the principles of democracy and self government that the American "experiment" embodied, and they spent much of their time discussing the issues of the day in broad, philosophical terms, writing speeches and pamphlets, stating their positions through correspondence with friends and loved ones.  They lived deliberately, perhaps not in the way Thoreau meant it, but with purpose so that when they died, they could say that they had lived and that their lives mattered. 

ebbs and flows

Not much terribly exciting going on these days, but rather than write the brief I'm supposed to be writing, I'm procrastinating by blogging. Pregnancy is going pretty well -- had a checkup last week and the baby's heartbeat is strong and he appears to be growing as he should. I'm feeling lots of kicks and flutters these days. The past few days I've felt kind of yucky. I had felt great for about a week and a half, then yesterday all of a sudden I was crazy exhausted and queasy. Jason made this incredible dinner and I couldn't eat anything but a bite of mashed sweet potato. Kathleen says that nausea in the second semester means the baby is growing lots of hair. I guess Zeke will be a hairy little monkey, but that's not much of a surprise, given the thatches on the heads of both his parents. Anyway, I'm still feeling kind of punky, which sucks because I've got assloads of work to do and not much motivation to do it.

Yesterday we went up to a beach at Makaha, on the leeward side. I'd never been there before. The leeward side is much poorer than other parts of the island and many of the beaches are filled with homeless people living in tents. But there's a state park that we went to that has a beautiful beach -- the water is crystal clear. When the surf is up, it's a great place to surf, but yesterday there were no waves so we went snorkeling instead and saw lots of pretty fish.

I'm heading to the mainland in a few weeks to visit friends and family -- I'll spend the weekend in Atlanta and then go up to New Hampshire to meet my new niece Hazel and to hang with my brothers and parents. While I'm gone, Jason's brother, Dean, is coming here for a visit, so he won't be totally lonely and miserable without me.

OK, back to the brief. xoxo

baby music

I'm listening to Bob Marley right now while I work. I read on a pregnancy website that the baby can hear things and that it's good to talk or read or sing to my belly. So I've got my iPod speakers resting on my lap, and Zeke is bopping around - little rasta baby!

The glamorous side of practicing law

I'm in Pasadena, California, right now. We have a case that is up on Thursday for oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and I've been here preparing since Sunday with my boss, Charlie. Since checking into the hotel on Sunday afternoon at about 6 in the evening, I have left the hotel once, for 20 minutes, when we walked over to a grocery store yesterday to get some lunch at the salad bar. Other than that, I've been sitting in Charlie's hotel room for 15 hours a day, typing on the computer, reading cases and briefs, preparing argument outlines, and practicing the argument. My wardrobe consists of sweat pants and ratty t-shirts. Sometimes I put socks on, sometimes I stay in my bare feet. We have candles burning in the room to keep the stink of room service and us from getting too overpowering.

I bet it was like this for Clarence Darrow, too.

Pickin' and grinnin'

I used to think that bluegrass and communities of bluegrass musicians were found in small, select portions of the globe. Namely, the southeastern United States, with the odd geographic anomaly here and there (like the fact that Bela Fleck is from New York). Then I fell in love with an Australian whose father, like me, plays the banjo. One of the best bluegrass jams I ever went to was an open mic night at the monthly meeting of my father-in-law's Sydney, Australia bluegrass association. I did four numbers with some fantastic musicians there, and they even did me the enormous honor of surprising me at my wedding with an impromptu bluegrass performance (and they let me sing!). I've decided that bluegrass musicians are like the Jews -- they're everywhere, and they'll eventually take over the world.

Australia wedding bluegrass

Last night I picked up my banjo for the first time in dog years -- I seriously don't remember the last time I played. I haven't played with any regularity in 7 years, which bums me out because I used to be decent at it. Now I can barely remember the most basic arrangements that I used to be able to play in my sleep. But I got out my old sheet music and my metronome and worked through some songs, and I'm going to try to play more regularly. I even found, much to my delight, that Hawaii has a traditional music and bluegrass society that organizes regular jam sessions. So I put myself on their mailing list and plan on trying to get up the nerve to play in public again, after all these years.

Why my mom is the awesomest person I know

My mother works for the State Department, doing passport security and immigration type work. She was recently talking to some American business owners who were trying to get work visas for a bunch of Chinese workers they wanted to hire. They were complaining to her about the fact that sometimes there is a wait in the consular section at the American Embassy in China.

"We've heard some people have to wait up to two hours in the consular section. It's demeaning!"

She replied, "is it really any more demeaning than being told by your government how many children you can have, or what you can think, or where you can live, or what political party you can belong to? More demeaning than that?"

That's like one of those comebacks you think of an hour after the opportunity to say it has passed, and then you kick yourself for the rest of the day for not having thought of it sooner. Given the time, you can think of the best zinger in the world, but rare is the occasion when the inspiration and opportunity to deliver it coincide. My respect for her, which has always been considerable, is now in orbit.

Also, if the Chinese consider waiting for two hours to be an extraordinarily demeaning experience, then the DMV in China must be a magical, wonderful place.

Zeke's progress so far...

I *heart* Michael Chabon

I'm about three quarters of the way through The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and I'm absolutely loving it. Reading Michael Chabon's writing is the intellectual and literary equivalent of savoring the most delicious corned beef sandwich from the best Jewish deli in the world. I adored Kavalier and Clay, but I think I love this book even more. I don't want it to end. And I think I've got a bit of a crush on the author, though I'm sure if I were ever in his presence I'd feel too stupid to say anything, since he's so conspicuously brilliant.

Ripped

I learned how to swim when I was a year and a half old. People at our swim club in Venezuela used to freak out at the sight of a little two-year-old peanut leaping fearlessly off the diving board into the deep end of the pool, but my parents didn't worry about me because they knew I could handle myself in the water. I'm trained and certified as a lifeguard, including open water rescues. And until yesterday, I have never felt physically overpowered by any current or wave, whether in a lake or in the ocean.

Yesterday afternoon at around 5:30, Jason and I took the dog down to the beach for a walk. We do this at least 3 or 4 times a week. Sometimes we'll take our bathing suits and go for a swim, sometimes not. If one is in the water, the other stays with the dog because he tends to freak out if he can't get to us. He'll stand at the water's edge and bark nervously. It's kind of funny and kind of sweet.

I had done a hard workout just before we left, so I was hot and sweaty and wanted to go for a swim. The beach that we go to has a rocky shelf along the shore, so if you go out about 10 feet you'll be standing on flat rock, and then all of a sudden the ledge drops off and the water is 6 or 7 feet deep on a calm day. Yesterday the water was not calm. It wasn't crazy rough, but it was high tide and the waves were a decent size. We went to this spot where there's a break in the rocks about 20 feet wide, so you can swim without getting dealing with the rocks. But yesterday, the channel between the rock formations created a rip current that was very powerful. I waded out to the water until it was about chest high, and then all of a sudden a wave came and I was pulled back away from the beach. I tried to swim back to shore, but even swimming my hardest I was still moving backwards, and then being pulled sideways behind the rocks. At one point I tried to put my feet down to push off with my legs, but I was getting battered around so much that all I did was smash my ankle against the rocks. I gasped from the pain, and inhaled a huge mouthful of water.

I know enough about rip currents to know that you shouldn't fight them -- just let yourself be drifted down the beach until the current eases up and you can get out of the water. But I was scared of the rocks, particularly of smashing my pregnant belly and hurting the baby. and because of the water inhalation, I was coughing and having trouble breathing, plus I was tired from exercising. Jason, who was sitting on shore with the dog, could see that I was drifting out pretty far, and waved me in. I yelled that I couldn't get in, and he was up in a flash and ran into the water to get me. After a couple of minutes of struggling with the current, he finally reached me and grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the water.

When we were standing on the beach, panting and trying to catch our breath, we looked down at our legs, both of which were bloody with cuts. I had little blood spots on my ankle and the back of my foot, and Jason had hit his knee and shin pretty hard and had also cut up his toe. But we were safe and in one piece. I gave him a hug and told him he was my big strong hero, and he clung to me, still freaked out by the whole adventure. The poor dog was a mess as well -- when Jason ran into the water, Max tried to go in after him and was flattened by a big wave. The three of us decided we had had enough beach time and headed home for dinner.