We’re back from England.

(hi.)

I was standing at my kitchen counter, slicing ham, when I felt little fingers messing about at my rear end. Hobbes was wandering around the kitchen, and for the last five minutes he’d been actively running interference on the dinner-making operation. By comparison to his earlier activities, poking my butt was a relatively innocuous entertainment; I ignored him, and kept on chopping.

And after a while, he started to chuckle.

There’s something so — categorically mischievous about a preschooler’s private mirth. In quality, it is somewhere between Big Bird’s laugh and the Roadrunner’s tongue-waggle, right before something drops on Wile E. Coyote. It behooves any intelligent, nearby adult to wake up and pay attention when such a chuckle sounds in the nearby vicinity.

I turned around and looked at him. He was hugging a half-opened stick of butter that he had somehow snuck off of the counter. He beamed up at me with obvious self-congratulations.

The stick had divots in it.

He’d been buttering my ass.

“He’s like the Eye of Sauron,” said the Guy, observing him. “Everything’s so peaceful when his attention is somewhere else, but the minute he focuses on you, everything goes all pear-shaped.”

England was just fine.

All irritations aside, the Delta gate staff in San Francisco were absolutely brilliant, and I mean that in both the American and the British sense. I interrupted their gossip at a different gate to inquire whether they’d be able to do something for me. I started to ask them if they’d be able to “help us with our seating on our flight to England, sorry, I know it’s not your gate–” but they interrupted me to promise they’d be there in two minutes and that if I just waited, they’d be happy to take care of me.

Beggars can’t be choosers, and it wasn’t as though they’d been rude about it. I obediently went over and stood by the counter.

Eventually, the gate staff wandered over and started setting up. I hovered uncertainly around the desk, unsure whether they were open yet. During my moment of uncertainty, another man cut in front of me and began to request assistance. “Just a moment, please,” the Delta man said politely. “I just need to finish setting up the computer.” Which seemed to answer that.

I hovered some more, until the clerk looked up with that bright, shiny-eyed enthusiasm that used to be part of the hiring criteria for airline staff back in the ’80s. He motioned me to the counter. “Oh good,” I burbled, and bounced up to the head of the line. “I have this problem–”

He placed three boarding passes on the counter and just looked at me with shiny eyes.

It took me a while to catch on. I examined the passes. I read the names on them. I looked at the dates and the destinations on them. I processed the seat numbers and the fact that they were all in a row: 27A, 27B, 27C….

I am not, perhaps, the brightest bulb on the marquee. You could practically hear something turn over in my head when enlightenment hit. I opened with, “Holy crap.” And then I followed up with the insightful, “That’s us!” And then, just to drive the point home that he was dealing with the bottom of the IQ tree, I said, “Those are tickets! For us!”

To be fair, it wasn’t as though I’d ever told him our names, or what the actual problem was. There’s also the fact that the airport experience up to that point, which had included the impersonal and inefficient treatment dispensed by the TSA’s unloving hands had not, let’s say, engendered in expectations of independent or proactive customer service.

“Holy crap,” I said again, because it needed repeating. “I think I just fell in love.”

The Delta guy smirked.

In a couple of minutes, he sorted out the rest of our flights as well, with the exception of the Atlanta to Manchester leg, which it turned out was booked solid. “But you can ask at the gate in Atlanta,” he said, “and things happen.” He left unspecified what those ‘things’ might be, but the optimism with which he said it indicated that they would be good things, which might work out in our favor — and so it proved, actually.

While we were waiting for the plane, I sat down in the gate lounge, stole the Guy’s laptop and the airport wireless, and sent the following to Delta.

Just had the most wonderful customer service experience at the
gate of Delta. The entire experience up to then was horrible — up to
and including the lackluster performance and unenthusiastic-with-shades-of-outright-hostility attitudes exhibited by the phone customer service,
the baggage check-in staff, and — well, nobody can do anything about
TSA. But the staff at the gate were outstanding! They were the first
ones to smile at us and look as though they understood what the phrase
“customer service” stood for. A gentleman with the nametag ‘—-’ took
excellent care of us, and even had our problem solved before I’d
finished my caffeine- deprived attempt to explain it. He reduced out
travel stress entirely. Up until that moment we were swearing we would
never travel Delta again; now we’ll give it another shot. Thank you!
Submitted: Mon Jul 18 2011 06:47:27 GMT-0700 (PDT)

By the time we landed, I had gotten the following reply.

Dear Mrs. Hirata,

RE: Case Number 3915377

Thank you for sharing your thoughtful remarks. On behalf of everyone at
Delta Air Lines, we appreciate your kind comments regarding the service
received from one of our team members who was working at the boarding
gate.

We believe our employees are our most important assets, and I am happy
to learn that —- exceeded your expectations. Please know I will be
sharing your comments with our Airport Customer Service leadership team
so appropriate recognition is extended, on your behalf.

Mrs. Hirata, again thank you for writing. As a valued Delta customer,
your business is important to us and given the opportunity of serving
you in the future, I am confident Delta will not only meet but exceed
your expectations.

I note that they avoided remarking on the complaint portion of my comment, but at least good performance will get some recognition.

Yes, it’s a boring story. Leave me alone. I haven’t written a word in — what month is this, anyway? Shit, October? And my last post was in July? 10 – 7 =… uh.

…hold on, I’ll get it in a second. Give me a break. I went to music school for college. Music school. I majored in piano performance.

3! It’s 3!

Told you I’d get it.

I’ve lost track of this somewhere. Stop.

Start again.

(never mind.)

I think my math is right. I should probably double-check that come morning, though. Ten minutes ago I put my checkbook in the washing machine.

Anyway, that schedule is why we’re awake right now at 1:15 AM, the second to last night before we leave. Ostensibly, we’re packing. What we’re really doing is– well, I have no idea what the Guy is doing. Brooding, it looks like, over his laptop. And tablet. He does that. It’s something tech-related; he’s discovered a bug of some sort, or he’s feeling defied by his gadgets, and has therefore dropped everything to wrestle them into submission. It’s a Silicon Valley thing, I swear to God. I don’t know why women go to clubs to meet men around here. All you have to do is hold something with a monitor in an empty room, say, “It’s not working,” and immediately twenty guys will swarm out of the woodwork with the fire of righteous outrage burning in their eyes.

Of course, what they say about Alaskan men — the odds are good but the goods are odd — goes double down here. If you try out the scenario above, you probably deserve what you get. I don’t know. The only reason I met my husband was because my friend Amanda tricked me into thinking he was a starch-heavy casserole.

What the hell was my point with all this?

Oh. Right.

When I’m talking– wait. Back up. On those occasions when I listen to myself talk, as in hear myself, you know, the voice thing, echoing in my head — on those extremely rare occasions? I sound like Lauren Bacall dealing with an incompetent waiter. Low and growly with authority and sexy gravitas, a mix between Edward James Olmos and Jessica Rabbit. I sound like I have a gun and I’m not afraid to use it; like I’ve seen it all and done it all; like I straddle galaxies and drink black holes with my highballs.

Strangely, digital recordings of my voice utterly fail to capture this quality. I think there must be something wrong with our answering machine. If you go by the way it rendered my last message home, in real life I sound like the offspring of Fran Drescher and a mainlining hamster. I sound like the last of my species; like a matched pair of socks flailing around the dryer; like the lemming jittering on the turntable, wondering if she remembered to turn the oven off before she left and was it really a good idea to sign that contract with Disney before reading the fine print?¹

I went to bed a single one.

Some days are just like that.

So let’s backtrack about 7 years.

It was the evening of my wedding, and a good time was being had by all. We didn’t have a wedding and reception so much as we had a catered party with a boring ceremonial prologue. Beyond the marriage itself, there was little else in the way of formal events: no first dance, no speechifying (beyond some charmingly short ones offered by a couple of friends) and all that other stuff that came with.

And then there was the open wine bar. People were enjoying the wine bar, which we’d stocked with random assortments of wine we’d picked up over the course of a week or so. “It’s like being at a wine tasting,” one guest told us happily, “except we get to swallow without being yelled out.” I think she meant ‘yelled at,’ but she’d really been enjoying the aforementioned swallowing, so who knows.

In other words, the marriage was important, but we’d given a lot more thought to how we would entertain our guests. Which is why the caterer, who had gotten to know us over the past couple of months and had developed a fairly accurate assessment of our intelligence, thought to ask while he was packing up: “Did you get the paperwork done?”

“What?” I said. “What paperwork?”

“You know,” he said. “The marriage license. You need to get the minister and witnesses to sign it.”

“…oh,” I said.

I looked out over the dark garden and thought about the wine bar. “Uh oh,” I said.

So by the light of a car’s dome light, our minister — one of the Guy’s best friends — and two of our witnesses signed off on the paperwork. I would like to point out that only one of them was completely sober, and that was the one from the bride’s party.

Adding to the complexity was the fact that there was Britishness to take into account. Also the fact that we weren’t entirely sure what county Saratoga city was in. “How do you spell–” got mixed up with, “Maybe San Mateo? Or Santa Clara?” and in a burst of enthusiasm and bonhomie, our British friends cheerfully wrote in both.

“Good enough,” someone decided, and toasted our marriage.

I just have to say this. The state of California has no absolutely no sense of humor when it comes to marriage licenses. Ironic, when you consider the constantly revolving state of marriage in California.

“You can’t do that,” the clerk told us in Redwood City when we came to turn it in. “You can’t cross things out or use whiteout on the form.”

“They were British,” we said apologetically.

“Can you get it fixed?” she asked.

We looked at each other. This is the problem with British people. Eventually, they go home. Ours had gone home. Or gone traveling. Or — generally speaking, were no longer available, mostly. “Um,” we said.

Now, here’s what I will swear to my dying day happened next. The clerk accepted the form, and informed us that while she would record us as officially married, we had to submit a corrected form in order to get a certified copy of the marriage. This would be something we’d need for assorted legal reasons in the future, but was not critical at present.

Okay, we said, we’ll take care of it. And then we went away. And in subsequent months we actually did try to take care of it, but two of the witnesses were traveling all the time, and neither of them were what you’d call conveniently situated in the same country as the others at any given moment, and eventually we just sort of … gave it up as a wash.

“We’ll see them all again eventually,” the Guy said. I was fine with that.

Fast forward to this week. We are headed to England on Monday, and for the first time since 2004, we will be seeing all the guilty parties in the course of two weeks. It was a perfect opportunity to get delinquent signatures. With that praiseworthy motive, I called up the San Mateo County Clerk’s office on Tuesday to find out how to get a copy of the paperwork and a new form.

“When did you say you were married?” the clerk said after doing some investigation in their system.

I told her.

There was a long, long silence.

“And what did you say your name was?”

I told her again.

“Could you spell that? Is that your married name or your birth name?”

I repeated it all for her. Reader, I hadn’t changed my name at marriage. “–so now you’re just making me nervous,” I told her.

“Well,” she said. “Let me spell that back for you to make sure I got it right.”

And a few seconds later, she said, “I don’t have any marriage recorded for you.”

“Under that date?” I finished helpfully, in case she’d gotten something mixed up.

“At all,” she said.

I have to say, there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room in that statement.

After the not entirely unreasonable burst of hysterical laughter, I made several thoughtless statements that I will never live down with the I/T department, who sit next to me in the office. To wit:

1. “Are you telling me I’m not actually married?”
   
2. “Now I just feel cheated.”
   
3. “Aw, my poor little bastard kid.”
   
4. “Shit. I wonder if he’ll marry me again.”

The background hum of conversation on my entire half of the floor stopped during this admittedly ill-advised monologue. It was a little hard to hear over the subsequent gales of mirth. (For the record, it took almost two days for the I/T department to stop laughing about this. Every so often when I pass by their cubes, I still get the occasional glance and giggle.)

“What the hell?” I asked the clerk.

I stand by my version of what happened with that clerk from 7 years ago. The one I was speaking to now didn’t question my story, which I have to say was nice of her. I don’t know how often she’s had to break the news of unexpected single statehood to wives in the past, but I’m willing to bet that the usual reaction doesn’t involve laughter. Or, okay, cackling.

So this, apparently, is what that clerk 7 years ago should have told us.

1. We could not submit a marriage license with errors.
   
2. We had up to a year to fix it.
   
3. If we didn’t fix it in time, they wouldn’t record it as a legal marriage.
   
4. The end.

“Well, that sort of sucks,” I said. “We’ve been filing taxes and getting mortgages and stuff. What do we do now? Lose our house and get audited?”

No, apparently not.

“We’ll have to get married again,” I told the Guy that night.

He said nothing.

“So you’ll get to live up to that thing you always say when I ask you if you would do it all again if you had the chance,” I said brightly. “You know, not many guys get to put their money where their mouth is.”

He said nothing.

“Do you want to get married again?” I said, after giving him ample opportunity to step up and be a man.

“I’m thinking,” he said.

Jackass.

If any of you should ever get into this kind of situation in the future, rest easy. Apparently, this is something that happens often enough that the state of California has something called a “Declaration of Marriage.” This is a document that you and the (reluctant) spouse must go into the county clerk’s office to attest to together. They make you fill in your personal details, backdate to the day you were married, sign, then raise your hand and take an oath swearing the facts are as stated. Then you take the form away and have one or two witnesses who were present at your wedding sign as well.

“Of course, it’s not like we’d know the difference,” the clerk at Santa Clara County’s offices told us. “You could just go and grab any random stranger off the street.”

I’m pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to tell us that.

“And when do we have to turn this back into you by?” I asked.

The clerk, a nice and obviously intelligent young man who’d listened to our story with every appearance of enjoyment, regarded me thoughtfully. “Let’s say … ASAP,” he said.

It was a learning opportunity, I told the clerk. “And now we know for next time,” I said cheerfully.

“Hm,” he said.

We got the form done at the clerk’s on Thursday morning. Hobbes enjoyed it tremendously; this time around, we got to have our son with us. He didn’t entirely approve of the kiss we exchanged — in jest — to commemorate the occasion. Thursday evening, the Guy dropped the paperwork off at our friends’ house. That night, she and her husband signed off on it. This morning, I dropped it off in the post office box.

So congratulate me. I’m married. Again.

Meanwhile, I’ve started an email to my son.

“Dear heart, let me tell you about the three days you were a bastard.

First of all, it wasn’t my fault….”

Needless to say, news of my marital difficulties made the rounds at work. My boss kindly gave me some time off to go get married again.

She called me later that night to ask me to file a feature request we’d been talking about earlier that day. I was on my way home, so I took the call in my car. “No problem,” I said. “I’ll do it as soon as I get home.”

Well, ‘as soon as I get home’ inevitably turned into, ‘as soon as I pick up some groceries, make dinner, feed my family, wrestle him into bed, clean up the kitchen, clean up the living room–’

She emailed me to ask me if I’d done the feature request yet. “I’m just about to,” I wrote back. “Hold on–”

And it occurred to me that technically, this was my wedding night.

And technically, my boss had knowingly called me on my wedding night to ask me to do some work. “Someone needs to talk to HR about our work/life balance here,” I wrote on the feature request, because I am very professional. “Making someone work on their wedding night is just cruel.”

“Yes, but why should I listen to you?” my boss said, when I pointed this out to her in the morning. “You were living in sin for 7 years and lying about it.”

Well, there is that.

“No,” I said.

“We were at Trader Joe’s, and he wanted to buy some snacks. I told him no snacks, because I was fat enough already. And he said, ‘Yeah, you’re too fat.’”

I laughed. (Well, who wouldn’t?) Hobbes was busily pushing trains around the living room floor, and didn’t look up.

“Hobbes,” I said. “Is Mommy too fat?” Dangerous territory, but I had to ask.

“No,” he said.

So now I know: my kid is smarter than average. Go figure.

“Honey, Daddy is downstairs.”

“I want daddy.”

“Well, he’s busy. You’ll have to wait. Can you be satisfied with just Mommy for a little while?”

Silence.

“Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaddy! Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaddy! Come here, Daddy! Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaddy!”

Having a 2 year old is a lot like living with a small, deranged air raid siren.

I’ve been rereading Anne Lamott’s wonderful book, Operating Instructions for the last week or so. I’d forgotten how beautifully it’s written, not to mention how much it makes me laugh. When I initially read it, Hobbes wasn’t even a glimmer in the eye; nowadays I read it with an eye angled backwards, to the same first year experiences I had with a new baby at the age of 35. The laughter has an extra edge of rue to it, a kind of, “I hear ya, sister,” that it didn’t have when I first read it.

I wish I’d reread it sooner.

Hence the quasi-regular journaling. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I have the staying power of your average squirrel. I blog by fits and starts, depending on how introspective (never) I’m feeling. The Guy continues to believe that I have an active brain, in which things are always firing off. The reality behind my occasional lapses of silence, as I’ve frequently told him, is that things have gone fzzzzut. There are entire days when nothing ever happens between synapses: my brain leads its life without sin, largely wrapped in saran wrap. When I’m dead, they will be able to transplant it into someone as an almost new, barely used product.

Lately I’ve taken to wandering through the lavender and blue fields of depression. This is only noteworthy in that it’s pretty rare that I get depressed. Generally speaking, depression implies self-analysis, at least to me. Thinking, creative people get depressed — people like Poe or Shelley or Van Gogh or Beethoven — whereas I’m a suburban product manager with the attention span of navel lint. Of course, theirs was the clinical kind that these days require meds, and in those days ended in knives and earlobes and symphonies and syphilis.¹ Mine is the kind that would be resolved with small life changes, which I’m too stupid to make.

Lacking the dramatic flair or the talent to do anything meaningful with my mopes, I generally just tromp around like a Billy Goat Gruff, announcing to everyone I encounter that I’m in a Bad Mood. It is all very gratifying and vaguely soothing to my wounded spirit when my coworkers (accustomed to a more sunny-tempered me) fuss over me and offer sympathy. It is less so when one of the more pragmatic among them points out that her 3 year old does much the same thing, except higher-pitched.

The next phase in all this will probably be for me to stop being cranky and instead shift into martyrdom. Never having been a martyr before — it is, I’m told, a position with limited career growth opportunity — it should be a novel experience, at least.

Hobbes raised his little fist in the air. “Chicken!” he shouted.

It was an opportunity too precious to be missed. “Honey,” I said. “Say, ‘Black Power!’”

“Yellow power,” the Guy objected.

Hobbes stared at us.

“Ignore your daddy, sweetheart,” I said kindly. “Black power, Hobbes! Say black power!”

“Black poop!” he shouted, and raised a valedictory palm.

We’ll have to work on that.

We were halfway to the daycare when I realized that the disc had moved onto tracks that Hobbes doesn’t particularly favor. “Do you want more monkeys?” I asked him.

“More monkeys!” he shouted.

I skipped the CD back; after a few seconds of unnerving silence — the disc is close to wearing out from abuse and reuse — the 5 Little Monkeys song started again.

Hobbes cheered. “Monkey love again!”

I sniggered the rest of the way in.

He loves ABBA and Katy Perry. He really dislikes Maroon 5.

“Monkeys!” he shouted at me this morning, on the way to the post office. “Monkeys! Monkeys! Monkeys! Monkeys!”

I took this to mean that he wanted me to put on one of his Putomayo Kids CDs, which contains a song about monkeys jumping on a bed. I obligingly slipped it in at a red light, and forwarded to the right track. He bobbed his head through the spoken prologue, then demanded, “Sing, Mommy! Sing!”

Obligingly, I started singing along to the music. After a few seconds, Hobbes started to flail. “No, Mommy!” he said desperately. “Stop singing! Stop singing!”

Unfortunately, along with my mother’s love of music, he seems to have gotten her musician’s ear. And my Asian Tact Deficiency Disorder.

“Mommy sings bad,” he said sadly, when I gave up. He had more social sense than I had at that age though, since he then added in a consoling manner, “It’s okay, Mommy. It’s okay.”

Personally, I think it shows native good taste on his part. While I was at Eastman, professional opera singers used to ask me to stop singing, with much the same urgency. He did the same thing, except without the intervening years of dedicated schooling. What can I say. My son’s a musical prodigy.

Then it patted my cheek. “You’re very clever,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said.

Last week was long, long, loooooooong in the way that temporal anomalies are long, or dental appointments where you haven’t flossed in a while are long, or self-prepared taxes on the night of April 13th because you forgot to do it earlier are long. Each day passed with incredible speed, but somehow each work week contained 10 or 11 days.

It’s the third week in a line of weeks that have had that elastic feel. Not that the days that have bookended the month have been notable for their ease of use, say, but we’ve been diving into an especially noxious period just recently. The tipping point¹ came partway through the last week, when a coworker and my new boss both offered me some very good advice. Coincidentally enough, someone reminded me of the definition of insanity — and here I am, on the other side of it, feeling remarkably refreshed for someone who’s just found half a dead moth in her hair.

Hobbes crossed the halfway point a couple of months ago. He is closer to three than he is to two, which he informs me means that he is a “big boy,” though he says it without any obvious signs of comprehension. In the purely physical sense, he isn’t — at Fry’s yesterday, he spent an exciting half-hour running up and down an elevated deck display with a boy that I later learned was only 21 months old. He was taller than Hobbes was by a good inch.²

“He’s so articulate,” the little boy’s grandmother marveled. Hobbes jabbered something about his toy car, and then went pinging off the deck’s rails, a free electron without portfolio.

“It’s because he’s small,” I told her. “You’re thinking he’s advanced for his age, but his age is older than he looks. It’s not that he’s smart. It’s that he’s in miniature.”

Which I suppose sounds a bit like I’m calling him an idiot, but he isn’t, really. Just average.

And small.

“You keep saying that,” the Guy said, “but he’s not really that average. I think he’s pretty smart.”

“He seems pretty normal to me,” I said. “I mean, for a boy.” Realizing that sounded a bit more disparaging than I meant it to be, I added, “He seems about the same as his classmates. Maybe a little shorter.” I might be a bit obsessed about height.

“But you have to remember where we are,” the Guy said. “And his teachers say he talks a lot. If he’s average here, he’s above average everywhere else.”

“Mm,” I said, not exactly agreeing, but not really disagreeing either.

I have a pathological fear of being too proud of Hobbes’s achievements. Weighed against the scope of greatness prodigies subscribe to, it seems unfair and vaguely ridiculous to over-enthuse about normal development milestones. And in the annals of his personal history, it might embarrass him to discover that his mother was so soft-minded as to gibber with excitement for a solid ten minutes, just because he announced, “No shoes in da house,” one day as he climbed up the stairs from the garage, and painstakingly removed his little velcro-fastened sneakers.

Oh, and the fact that he has figured out how to take pictures of himself. With my iPhone.

Which is passcode-locked.

That’s totally normal for a 2-year old, right?

1. I use the phrase advisedly. These days, I feel more like Sisyphus’s boulder than I do Sisyphus. I’ve never felt much sympathy for the Greek heroes and villains, mostly because even the good guys were jackasses, but I’ll admit I’ve always wondered about Sisyphus’s boulder. Do you suppose it’s more frustrating to be the person who’s pushing the boulder up the hill, or being the boulder who’s never left alone? I can imagine the inner monologue getting pretty damn tedious. “Almost there, almost there, al– most— FUCK.” [Back]

2. I blame those Asian genes. Damn Asian genes. [Back]

Reading Thomas the train is serious work.

Bobblehead.

I dreamt last night that I had conjunctivitis of the left eye (pink eye, for those of you not plugged into my daily dose of medspeak) and spent a cranky dream-day trying to get out of one engagement or another so I could get treatment. “Oh, that looks bad,” all my dream people said sympathetically, peering at my eye. In my dream, I would pry my eyelid open with my fingers so they could see that my iris had a second iris riding shotgun behind it, a slippery, brown-and-black striped disc that kept sliding around the surface of my eye and occasionally popping out to flash people, for all the world like creepy Uncle Mark the Drunk who shows up to family events wearing a brown overcoat and no socks.

I woke up stressed and vaguely itchy in the morning, to find that Hobbes had inched over to me during the night and fastened his mouth over my left eye socket. Hence the fevered dreaming. I have no idea how long he spent sucking all the moisture out of my eye, but I spent the entire day wading through a world made blurry by incomplete vision, self-conscious with the conviction that one of my eyes had grown visibly larger than the other.

Oddly, nobody commented on it.

I should note that this is not one of those things that I was warned about as a future parent. On this particular point, I consider my friends remiss.

Right.

Hakone Gardens, Apr 2 2011

“What you doing?” Hobbes demanded.

“I’m spanking Daddy, son.”

“Haha,” said the 2-year old. “I’m too old for that.”

2011 has been an interesting combination of mixed blessings and catastrophes so far. Given that it’s only three weeks old, it’s a little early to say whether this is going to be par for the course. The latest problem was my car’s unseemly inability to take me back home from work last night. This resulted in some haphazard and last-minute shenanigans. I coaxed it along at 30 miles an hour as far as our mechanic’s, some 15 miles south of my office. Fortunately, they have an after-hours drop-off, which allowed me to leave the keys and avoid a morning visit sans car the next day. The Guy and Hobbes, in process with a hand-made pizza at home, dropped everything and trundled north to pick me up, a rescue mission somewhat hampered by major accidents on the road.

Not theirs, fortunately. We abandoned the pizza as a lost cause and had Chipotle for dinner instead, a change of plan that Hobbes took in good part, though his first words to me this morning were, “Daddy make pizza?” followed by, “What he waiting for?”

The failure of my car’s work ethic, hitherto remarkable for its spotless record, is a mixed blessing for a multitude of reasons, not least being the fact that I had seriously — but seriously — considered giving it to my sister last Sunday. Sako is now up in Washington State, spending a few days with my mother before heading to Eastern Washington to take up a long-desired job as a hospital nurse.

Her resources are even slimmer than they were 5 years ago, when she was a professional bum (“professional” being the only applicable word when she had no other sources of income beyond assorted bum-enabling activities like dumpster-diving and yes, occasionally, Yosemite Search and Rescue. We won’t even mention the period she spent as a carny) so to be saddled with a non-functional car mid road-trip would have been adding insult to injury. Particularly when said road-trip was undertaken to take up said new job.

Less notable, but still in the plus side of the tally, is the fact that despite the fact it was shuddering like a rheumatic on a cross-country ski trip, the car was actually able to make it from the office parking lot (where it did a convincing portrayal of a grand mal seizure) all the way to the mechanic’s. While I don’t expect the verdict to be good or cheap, at least it spared me the additional indignity of a tow truck bill, something that could not have been anything but expensive given the distance between the parking lot and the closest credible mechanic. It remains to be seen if the repairs will be even worth the cost. At its venerable age, my car is worth only $1k by Kelly Blue Book standards. Good maintenance and regular check-ups can only go so far when a car’s driver has smashed into a concrete pillar and then been rear-ended by speeding cars twice in under 6 months.

I should point out that none of those occasions were in any way my fault. One rear-ending was done on the freeway, when a tailgater in stop-and-go traffic performed the ‘go,’ but mistook his pedals and thus failed to perform the ‘stop.’ Another time, I was parked at a red light, which an oncoming car failed to notice.

The concrete pillar was a clear-cut case of malicious malingering. It had no business being where it was. If there were witnesses, I’m certain I would’ve had a valid case.

We’ll see. The mechanic has promised to call me in a couple of hours with his assessment of the damage. In the meantime, the entire episode, combined with the occasion when I ran out of gas while taking Hobbes home from daycare, has had its predictable effect on my son’s mind. He now has the worst possible opinion of his mother’s driving abilities. It is bad enough that he never passes a gas station without asking if, “Mommy need gas?” Nor that he fails to request at least once while I’m driving him anywhere, “No crash? No crash?” I’m fairly certain that the next manifestation of his increasing anxiety will not paint me in a favorable light. To be fair, I can’t deny the justice of his worries. The evidence against my automotive skills is mounting at a dismaying rate.

He fell asleep on the way home.

At this point during our long week of no childcare, I consider it a victory when I manage to go half a day without wanting to strangle him.

2010 has dealt fairly well with my family, the roof and flooding and all that notwithstanding (more on that some other time.) I certainly have no complaints, or at least none that wouldn’t embarrass me. Considering all the horrible things that have happened to other people we know, I’ve gotten off astoundingly easy, and so has the Guy, though he might not see it that way. On the home front, our loved ones are healthy and alive; we are employed and possessed of shelter, however spotty said shelter may be in this season of rainstorms; and we possess the three basic ingredients of happiness: health, harmony, and prosperity. 健, 和, 富, as the Japanese put it. Or in other words, ken, wa, fu.

We have been lucky in a lot of ways, for which I am exceedingly grateful, believe you me. 2011 will hopefully be more of the same. With the economy picking up, or so they say in the news, it will be a better prospect ahead for more people than just ourselves.

Insofar as New Year’s resolutions are concerned, I’m going to save myself a lot of time, and preemptively give up. I consider this efficiency rather than lack of ambition. In 37 years, I’ve never successfully completed any New Year’s resolutions to such a degree that I could consider a list a success, and I’m damned if I’m going to set myself up for failure yet again. In fact, putting something on my New Year’s list is almost a guarantee that I will not be doing whatever-it-is I’ve set as a goal. I’d much rather set more manageable goals on a daily or weekly level, and treat each one of them as a minor triumph rather than a major hurdle.

(As a sneak peek, my current goal list for 2011 consists of the following: put away laundry, clean up Christmas tree, and go to ATM. I have already knocked down one of the three. So far, 2011′s full of the warm glow of achievement.)

On a completely unrelated, totally irrelevant to New Year resolutions or anything front, Cooking Light is presenting a 12 Healthy Habits program which seems about as attainable as anything else I’ve set myself. More attainable in fact, because my sister has been harping on me to do these things, and with the added incentive of dodging her badgering (really, she’s as bad as my mother, except American, which makes it worse) I probably have a half-decent chance of accomplishing some of these.

January’s goal is to eat more fruits and vegetables: add 3 more servings of each to my diet each day. This is not something I expect to be all that hard, if only because I’ve already started getting obsessive about said fruits and vegetables. The farmer’s market is a weekly visit now, whereas before it used to be a monthly one. Is my diet seeing a noticeable improvement? It might be, if I remembered to cook the vegetables before their ‘grow limp and dank in the crisper and decay into black fuzzy gloop’ date.

I am not the world’s best housewife.

Also, vegetables have no stamina.

The fellow who wrote about the pitter patter of little feet was either deaf, or didn’t have kids.

Mine came thud-thud-thudding around the corner and came to stand next to my chair. I looked down at him. His face was pensive.

“Mommy, I’m sad,” he said.

I’m a terrible parent. I choked down the automatic urge to respond, “In so many ways, my child,” — Pavlovian responses, what can I do — and patted his head. “Aww,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

He sighed heavily. “I want to hewp Daddy. I can’t hewp Daddy.” He raised his hands up in the air, arms straight, then let them thump down to his sides.

I patted his head again. This time, I didn’t fight it. “Some things just can’t be done, sweetheart,” I said.

Oh, c’mon. Like you were more productive.

“OH! Needs HEWP. Too BAD.”

Which is true enough, but sounds unnecessarily sarcastic from a 2-year old.

At some point not during Nano. Probably.

Maybe.

(I hope.)

(Mommy helped with the bits that involved sharp cutting implements.)