Hi! I haven’t abandoned you or the site. Well, any more than usual, at any rate. Toni, on her blog, mentioned some brouhaha over at The Usual Suspects, which I had never joined because, as I put it, “I don’t need another thing in my life that I’m ignoring right now.” (I went ahead and joined anyhow, because I can’t stand not knowing what everyone else is talking about. Now I know.)

I have been letting a lot of stuff slide. Not just now, but over the past couple of months. This lackadaisicalness has shown up a lot of places. I managed to get myself removed as co-host of the Screen conf on the Well for non-participation. (I wonder how hard it is to get yourself removed as co-host of anything on the Well. But I managed it.) I haven’t been posting here very often. My appearances at the gym have fallen off precipitously in the last few weeks—some of that is because I was sick or the kids were sick, but some of it is because I just don’t wanna.

I’ve wondered if I’m depressed. Depressed is not a word I throw around lightly, the way I would have once. A close family friend has been suffering from a bout with severe clinical depression for over a year now, with hospitalizations and medications and God only knows what, and that kind of depression is not something you can just “snap out of.”

If I am depressed, it’s not like that. In fact, I feel pretty good. I just don’t want to do anything. I don’t call Sophia’s friends’ mommies to arrange play dates. I haven’t gotten the rest of these verkakaete moving boxes unpacked. I haven’t tidied up our master bedroom closet, which would help a lot.

Maybe it’s just winter. I don’t know. But at the moment I’m having trouble working up enthusiasm for almost anything.

(Update: A friend wrote me to suggest that perhaps I am in mourning, without really being aware of it. And I may very well be: I haven’t yet had any sort of emotional reaction to my father’s death, so maybe this is the way my subconscious is making it happen. I don’t know.)

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Every other Thursday I take the kids up to San Francisco to visit Grandma. This week I thought, She still hasn’t come to see our new house, why don’t I take her away for a short vacation? I called Darin first (some of you out there may remember why having my mother come for a visit was not an automatic option), and he said it was fine. So I called Mom, she packed a bag, and came down to our house for two nights.

I have to admit that one reason I wanted her to come visit is that I really don’t like San Francisco much these days when I drive up there. This is not an isolated opinion on my part; mayoral races get fought over San Francisco’s problems. Getting into the City is a PITA; the freeway system got jumbled up after the 1989 earthquake and they never found a way to fix it. And the homeless—call it compassion fatigue, call it severely uncaring on my part, but San Francisco is covered with homeless people, panhandling at every intersection, and I don’t like it. I don’t like the way they come at me with their signs asking for money. I don’t like seeing filthy, unkempt people on every corner. (At least, every corner from the Mission Street exit up Van Ness Avenue.) I am all for getting government services for them, I am all for paying more taxes to get these people taken care of.

That, and the garbage on the streets.

And the parking.

And now that I have kids? The school system is a disaster, and the private schools are $20,000 a year. The parks are more designed for dogs than kids. And, especially since the Gold Rush, there’s a huge population of single people without kids who would be just as happy not to have the little rugrats around, so if the place isn’t conducive to children, so much the better.

San Francisco: not kid friendly.

I used to want to move back to San Francisco. But now…you couldn’t pay me to live there.

Anyhow, so I brought my mom down to our bucolic wilderness. Darin was out at a business dinner for his group Thursday night, so Mom and I watched Survivor (well, she watched it; I was uninterested) and The Apprentice (because my Mom likes Donald Trump—no, I don’t understand it either). And on Friday we went to Sophia’s preschool and we walked around the downtown and we basically had a pretty relaxed time of it. Plus, I got an hour to myself while she sat with the kids.

Today my sister and her family are coming down to celebrate Sophia’s fourth birthday—

Four years? How in the hell can she be four years old? I just brought her home from the hospital!

—which means that my quest to eat within my allotted Weight Watchers points will be following the pattern of everything else in my life: it’s sliding to the wayside for the time being.

I guess I can’t really call a sick day on a blog, but… I’m going to anyhow.

I was sick a few weeks ago. Simon had tummy troubles last week, throwing up a few times. Darin came home from work on Friday and said, “I should have come home hours ago.” He was pale and sweating. Sophia has been complaining about her stomach hurting for days, without anything really conclusive (like passing up a piece of chocolate or something) to convince me she was really in a bad way.

Then, this afternoon, she managed to throw up last night’s dinner. Simon, not to be outdone, promptly threw up as well.

So I’m going to be home all day tomorrow with the kids, not risking them (or others in the vicinity). I’m kind of hoping Darin stays home as well, but that’s not likely—he’s no longer passing up the chocolate.

(I’ve begun a couple of entries recently—one entitled “The Age of Unseriousness,” in homage to M. Rittenhouse, who coined the phrase, and another on the Oscar nominations, which I actually started the day they were announced and never got around to finishing. Sigh.)

I’ve been busy recently, and not just with the kids. No, I threw caution (and $13 an hour) to the wind and hired a babysitter for Friday afternoons so I could take a class. (I feel as though I’m living some kind of decadent lifestyle, having a few hours away from the kids, and if you knew my life down in Los Angeles you’d think, “Wow, has her life changed.”)

I don’t know specifically where my interest in doing illustrated journaling comes from. I’ve avoided art classes since my age was in the single digits—I always catalogued myself as a “I can’t draw or do art” person. I bought Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain a million years ago; never got too far into it. I read some about nature journaling in Wild Days and the amazing Keeping a Nature Journal. I wanted to run out into my backyard and start sketching everything, but the writers of those books were talented and I, being at the stick-figure level, didn’t know where to start.

Tried painting a little bit with the kids’ watercolors. The pictures came out…watery. Washed out. Uninteresting. And I kept my journals in books with lined pages, text only, no sketches.

But then I noticed the local rec center was having a class on “Illustrated Watercolor Journaling.” And I thought, a rec center class! I can do that!

The class is taught by Gay and Christina, who do this sort of thing full-time. Their journals are right there in the class for us to page through, and they’re very inspiring! The class (two sessions so far) is fabulous. I highly recommend it. Except for the way it’s introduced me to a whole bunch of new stuff to investigate at an art supply store. We paint (I have a little Winsor Newton kit now), we draw, we share various things we’ve found.

I’ve discovered that I’m quite good at blind coutour drawings—drawing something without looking at the page. It’s when I look at the page that the “symbols” (as Betty Edwards puts it) take over.

At home I hauled out my copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and started doing some of the exercises. I even started going through Drawing With Children by Mona Brookes, figuring if she can teach children to draw, she can teach me to draw.

But in the interests of working at it, I have moved from my lined Moleskine to an unlined one. This is practically like changing my name and moving to Antartica in terms of keeping a journal. I take it with me everywhere, and I’m sketching. Yesterday, out with Darin and the kids, he went into Cho’s to get some dim sum and I sketched. He and Sophia went into Rick’s Rather Rich Ice Cream for cones and I sketched.

I’m really excited about this. (I was also excited about the Latin class and that’s going nowhere for this year—schade. But Latin isn’t going anywhere.) I’ve started a new listing of visual journals over in my Neverending List of Journals.