Happy 2007!!

This is a cow that is quite literally in our back garden.

Let's keep our fingers crossed 2007 isn't as shitty as the cow is!

Resolutely Written

I'm starting this early because it's going to require some forethought.

What I'm not going to do is give up booze, or limit myself to one drink, or two or three. That would just start rumours of pregnancy, and besides these days I'm only ever relaxed and not talking about the @*&!ing mortgage when I'm drunk.

I am going to:

1- Drink more water. Okay, a safe one to start with here. It's boring, but it bloody well works. I always feel loads better when I drink lots of water. I hate drinking lots of water (why is it I can down glass after glass of gin but have to force down a mouthful of water?).

2- Write at least 100 pages of my book. Hopefully this won't be too hard. I'm already at 75 pages, which is just staggering to me, and I still have two, maybe three ideas left for the characters. OK, it's going to be bloody hard work, but if I'm not going to do it now I'm certainly not going to do it if we have even more sprogs.

3- Go running more. I finally splurged and bought the jogger of my dreams. Now I can't find a link to it, which makes me think hmmm, recall. It's bloody brilliant. I am absolutely in love with it, not least because it actually fits in my car so I can go jogging down at the beach without having to jog down there through the barrio first. Or as much of a barrio as SB allows. I used to love running, and my friend Chilly runs all the time and weighs less than a chia pet.

4- Stop being such an uptight bitch. 2006 has been the year of terror and worry for us in many many ways. Mostly financial, but whatever happens, even if we have to leave this country under cover of darkness and flee to the UK using assumed names, we will be OK. I have to remember this. We have our health (resolution number 6 - stop sounding like an old fart) and everything else can be dealt with. I am a chronic worrier and like to be in control. Don't I sound fun? If LK is reading this, he is already rolling his eyes. We've had a stressful, worrying, crappy year and we've dealt with this stress in different ways - me by bitching and moaning and nagging and nagging and nagging and nagging, and LK by running for the hills whenever he sees me so much as draw breath. This coupled with Anna sleeping in our bed has meant we've reached a bit of an all-time low. I love LK. Yes still, and he's being actively pursued by a gorgeous wealthy ex-supermodel who fortunately happens to be gay. If he wasn't I think LK would have trotted off to Montecito months ago, but if I carry on being such a harpy he might just change teams for an easier life, and I bet this bloke gives a better blow job too. I need to stop being such a wife/mother and start being more of a wife/girlfriend.

5- Don't try and achieve resolution number 4 through use of gin.

6- Keep up with this blog. My goal will be to actually have someone read this blog that hasn't first googled 'army circumcision'. True.

7- Eat more fruit and vegetables. I buy more fresh fruit and veg for Louis our guinea pig than I do for us. I make Anna eat all the good stuff before she even has a sniff at a cookie, maybe I should set a better example.

8- Actually put my face in the water when ocean swimming. I have done four sprint triathlons doing the breaststroke and one doing the crawl. Only once did I get the top of my head wet and that was when heavy surf knocked me repeatedly on my arse in 2002. I've progressed to doing the crawl, but I still only partially submerge my face. I need to get over my fear of seeing something swimming underneath me and swim like a swimmer not like an old lady who's afraid to get her perm wet. This is never going to happen.

Old Macdonald had a poor nights sleep

Anna at 3am this morning:
"Mumma Mumma"
Me blearily:
"Huh"
Anna VERY pleased with herself.
"E-I-E-I-O"

Bah Humbug 1 - Christmas Spirit 1

OK, so it wasn't all bad, and maybe I was a tad moany (and hungover) at 4am on Christmas morning.

Thanks to some good friends, excellent mimosas with eggs benedict, and yet another bike ride, Christmas wasn't a complete washout. It felt a little more special than a run-of-the-mill weekend, but it didn't feel like Christmas either.

Anna provided some excellent entertainment by really getting in to ripping open her presents. Her top picks were a Fisher Price Amazing Animals train and an old-fashioned jewelry box with a fairy that pirouetted when it opened. I had no idea they still made things like that. Our fave present for her had to be this wonderful book by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business which is absolutely hilarious. I want to buy it for all my friends.

LK got me an Ali G DVD and an Oasis boxed set, which together made me feel a little less like a prematurely middle-aged vanilla hausfrau. Well less of a prematurely middle-aged vanilla hausfrau than I actually am. He did after all also buy me some slippers. Fluffy slippers.

I have a sneaking suspicion that we will also be spending next Christmas in sunny old California, as we're flying to Blighty in May, but I'm going to do my upmost to persuade my family to come out here this time. And you know what? A bizarre sunny Christmas with dolphins and inflatable snowmen wilting on yellowed parched lawns - I'm sure they'll chuffing love it.

Bah Humbug 1 - Christmas Spirit 0

I keep imagining the above being recited a la Saturday afternoon Grandstand football scores reporter. Bah Humbug 1 (voice gently rises) Christmas Spirit 0 (voice gently falls). And in typing it out I realize I had Bah Humbug playing at home. Christmas Spirit were away, they never stood a chance.

I hate Christmas out here, it's just so wrong. To use a delightful Californian expression, it sucks. I don't get to see my family, and it's non-stop blue skies and sunshine (oh, poor me.....). Usually at some point in the run-up to Christmas I'll get that wave of Christmas spirit, however fleeting, that 'Joy to the World' feeling. Not this year.

I tried. We did a family bike ride down to the ocean (non-stop blue skies and sunshine again) and there were dolphins leaping and pirouetting like it was going out of fashion, or maybe as if they were being pursued by a great white. Who knows. It was good fun, but just not Christmas. Where's the pub and the sideways sleet? When we got back home I cracked open the Delia Smith and baked 24 mince pies and a meat and potato pie to try and get in the mood, but came to realize that spending hours baking cold-weather food for the edification of one person is just daft.

I then tried channeling Christmas Spirit with the use of copious amounts of red wine. Not a good idea, which is why I'm sitting here at 4am writing this post. Alcohol is a depressant Wrigs you moron.

Anyway, I realize Christmas Spirit is a deeper thing than Delia Smith (did I just write that?), and that it's still not officially Christmas morning so Christmas Spirit may eke out a late equalizer. But I felt like purging this Bah Humbug feeling. Particularly as I have 21 mince pies left to go.

How do you spell that?

You know the admitting staff at the hospital are a tad overworked when they register a patient's address of 'Lakeshore Drive' as 'Lakers Hore Drive'.

Then again, this is So Cal, and it just might be possible.....

All we hear is Radio Blah Blah...

I did not get stuck in the horrendous four hour delay north-bound traffic on the 101 this morning. Thank goodness. I got on at Carrillo, where the freeway resembled those 'welcome to LA in the 50s' idealized images of three lanes of pavement with a car or two in the distance. I sailed to work.

I did have chance to listen to the radio though, where the DJs were calling bosses on behalf of employees stuck in the traffic, to try and legitimize their lateness. Santa Barbara is a peculiar bubble in many ways, but geographically so because there's practically only one way in and one way out. If anything happens to either of these escape routes we're cut off from the world. This happened a couple of years ago when heavy rains and mudslides closed the freeways at either end of the town leaving us without fresh food and petrol for days. I called LK at the time from Trader Joes to say 'it's like Russia here, the shelves are completely empty and all I can find is organic milk' and he replied 'yeah Wrigs, it's like Russia when all you can buy is organic milk'. Good point.

Anyway I digress, nobody can afford to live in SB so everyone drives in from the south or the north, as a result, most of Santa Barbara's workforce was sitting in traffic this morning instead of keeping the town running. One of my staff was driving in from Ojai, and I knew she'd be listening to KTYD so as soon as I got to work I called her to see how stuck she was and to thank her for not calling in to the station to have them call me. To cut a very long story short, my phone rang ten minutes later and lo and behold I was on the air.

Everyone in SB listens to this radio station, not least because there is a dearth of radio stations in this town. I've never been live on air before and fortunately I didn't spack out completely. They dutifully told me that due to a big rig accident said employee wasn't going to be in til much much later, and I managed to squeak out that that was the second alleged big-rig-conflagration-closes-the-freeway excuse I'd heard that week and that she was fired. Not too funny in the re-telling but I thought I didn't sound like a complete muppet.

For about two hours after though, my heart was still hammering away like I'd had about fifteen cups of coffee, so apparently I am a muppet. A practically famous muppet.

Not ESPN

LK on turning on BBC America,

"Wrigs come quick, it's one of your shows, I hear the rustle of period costume and some guy trying to explain his despair".

Spinning

I went spinning today for the first time in ...ahem...and I swear I was not so much sweating as oozing a toxic sludge.

I used to exercise all the time. B.C. (before child) I would play tennis at least three times a week, and run triathlons, and .... stuff. Now, A.D. (Anna Dominates) I'm lucky if I can make it to the gym once a month, and my tennis game involves still receiving the A-team e-mails. That's it.

So, my $30.50 spinning class was brilliant (once a month....). And I really should do it more often. Blah blah blah. But I swear I was sweating neat Bombay Sapphire. It's been so long since I've done any sweating other than going in to a cold financial sweat that I was producing pure radioactive waste. I think kissing me would have been the same as licking as high-school chemistry bench. Lovely.

Must drink more gin and replenish.

Circumdecision

I've just read this article on the BBC website;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6176209.stm

and it's really got me thinking, because up until about ten minutes ago I was absolutely dead against the idea of circumcision. One of the reasons why I'm very glad Anna was a girl, was that the circumdecision as I call it, never came up.

This is another issue where it's odd living in a culture different to that which you grew up in. As far as I can tell, the only countries which routinely circumcise are the US and Israel. Growing up it wasn't an issue, and I distinctly remember discussions at University about one of the lads who was 'cut' and what did it look like etc. It's less endemic now in the US, and definitely treated like a decision rather than a requirement - unlike in the 70s when a tennis friend of ours managed to duck out of a tour of duty in 'Nam by volunteering to get circ'd - the Army was that keen for all their Johnsons to look the same apparently.

Prior to Anna's birth LK and I discussed what we would do if we had a boy (other than make LK's Dad very very happy), and in the end it was agreed we would leave the decision up to LK, as I deferred to the idea that our boy should look like his father, if that's what Lance decided. He would handle it all though; the idea of inflicting unnecessary pain on a newborn seems barbaric to me. And yes it is unnecessary as even the American Academy of Pediatricians now admits that circumcision is a purely cultural phenomenon without medical benefit. I've always heard pro-circumcision arguments along the lines of 'well young boys never clean them properly, so non-circumcision is more likely to lead to infection etc etc and circumcision is just cleaner' but to my mind, that's like arguing for removing all teeth because young boys never clean those either.

Anyway, that was my perspective, until I read this article which has completely thrown me for a loop. It basically states the rate of HIV infection is more than 50% lower in circumcised males, that the results were so stark that the "US National Institutes of Health decided it would be unethical to continue and stopped the trials early" so that they could encourage the 'control' group of uncircumcised males to get it done.

The reason is not, by the way, that uncircumcised penises are less easy to clean but that the skin protected under the foreskin is more sensitive, more likely to bleed and increase the risk of transmission.

So there you have it, I'm now starting to lean towards the idea of giving male baby K (should it ever happen) the snip - just in case he ever goes to sub-Saharan Africa of course. But now LK is worried that with circumcision we will be desensitizing the pecker of our little pecker and that's a far more unethical decision!

Dude, how embarrassing....

Here's just one example of why Anna should count herself lucky she has two so diverse parents. When I read out loud, I read slowly, and point at the pictures, and if I'm feeling truly adventurous I'll attempt a funny voice.

Lance on the other hand, overheard whilst reading Eric Carle's 'Mister Seahorse'

"Mrs. Kurtus laid her eggs and I have stuck them on my head. Now I am taking good care of them until they hatch"
"Woah, that's messed up. Imagine that Anna. Hi I'd like a cheeseburger and a large fries please"
"Dude you have a whole bunch of eggs on your head"
"Yeah it's kinda embarrassing".

No funny voices needed.

December, Briefly

A grey and overcast day here in SB, so I took Anna to the park for some fresh air and colour. A little botanist in the making I think.

Whereas living in England makes you appreciate the infrequent sunshine, living out here makes you covet the odd day of cloud or rain - so you can pretend that's it's winter for a while and actually use the fireplace, wear a fleece (a light fleece) and think about baked potatoes and chili for tea.

Oops. Spoke too soon, it's sunny again. What a surprise.

Death Warmed Up

The worst thing about having a cold (and yes I have a cold, because yes I have a germ-encrusted toddler) is that by the time you are sneezing with a streaming nose and eyes, and you can plausibly take time off work, you've already been feeling crap for days.

I feel awful. That horrid post-nasal-drip sore throat, fever, exhaustion pre-cursor of a cold thing. I would love to leave work right now and just curl up in bed, but you can't see a sore throat, you can only vaguely hear it, and although I look a bit flushed and feverish it's just not convincing enough. I would definitely look like I was skiving off to go Christmas shopping.

God I feel awful.

Phew

Today was a massive day in the K household. A crucial meeting to decide our future.

To cut a very long and involved story short, the City approved our planning proposals, our future, and unknowingly our second child. Now all I have to do is persuade LK that Doodle #2 is a good idea!!

I'm going to confess a completely daft superstition I have been giving too much credence to in the run-up to this huge meeting. And yes I do realise this is the second 'superstitious' post in less than a month, and that does make me a really sad cow, but these have been desperate times people.

I'm almost loathe to admit this, because if there is anyone out here reading this, I'd hate for them to get contaminated by this ridiculous superstition too.

If I see a digital clock that reads '9:11' it means bad luck is on its way (for obvious reasons) and 9:10 means good luck, as it's my birthday. Trust me, it's almost impossible to look at a clock without me seeing 9:11, this has been an incredibly pessimistic year.

When I changed Anna's nappy last night it was 9:11, when I finished putting out fires at work this morning it was 9:11. It's a digital ides of March for me. But when I sat down for the meeting thinking all was lost, (a 2pm meeting meant not a chance of seeing a clock say 9:10) our consultant said 'we need to pull the plans from September, the ones dated 9:10', I just about fell off my chair, and bingo, we got approval.

We're not home free yet, there's the possibility of public appeals, ridiculous months of construction and graft, more loans, and many many more 9:11's on the clock, but cheers everyone, I hope you all get the Christmas present that I just did! More wine please!

Now I just have to convince myself that I haven't tempted fate by confessing these 'signs' to a public forum.

Sad sad cow.

Outside the box...

LK "The reason we're such a team's because you're good at the details, and I'm good at the creative stuff"
Me "Yeah, like you can think outside the box, and I can't"
LK "I can even think outside your box"
Me "...."

Thankyou for calling..

Imagine installing a brand new phone system in a doctor's office, where it is absolutely imperative people get through in order to learn who the on-call doc is. Imagine looking after an 18-month old girl for six hours straight in a small cluttered office. Imagine doing both at the same time.

The voicemail message recording took about an hour of that time and went something like this...

'Thankyou for calling blah doctors office, if this is a true medical emergency...do you need to go potty?'
Please hang up and dial....no not in the mouth
and and ask that the on call...no Anna that Sharps container is not a toy.

I should have known that the 'we'll have it up and running for you in about an hour, no worries' approach was too good to be true.

Don't feel bad for me though, feel bad for anyone who had a genuine medical emergency between the hours of 10am and 4pm today that didn't involve the potty.