Empty House Again

Family visit is over, so it’s time for a bullet-point catchup round!

• I complain about this country’s attitude to urban design (basically: “how do you want to die today, pedestrian?") a lot, but fair is fair: Americans really do know how to make a park. This summer, in addition to the smaller (but still very reasonable: have you ever seen a British council-provided playground that has covered seating and a barbeque?) parks, we’ve also been to Summit Park, West Chester Splash Park, and as of last weekend, Tower Park in Fort Thomas. The latter in particular is pretty impressive: multiple multi-storey adventure playgrounds, a zipwire¹, puzzles, swings (of different types covering all ages from toddlers to adults), a garden with musical instrument flowers, and a covered area where you could reasonably fit an entire street inside. I also see that the forest that is a few blocks from our house² is getting a bike park later in the year. For all their faults, Americans seem to put a lot more effort in than your typical British council…

• New iPhone has turned up after they decided to attempt delivery on a Friday night just as soon as I put Maeryn in the bath (and didn’t even try the doorbell). I am therefore undergoing the familiar journey of “oooh, shiny new iPhone! Look at the new camera!…and now it’s just the phone that has lost all my Kindle bookmarks” At least this time it’s a shiny new orange colour?³ (update after writing this - it did not copy over my iMessages, so I’m attempting to upload 1m messages into the cloud before I have to send the old phone back)

• I do wish my family could have a flight either from Heathrow to Cincinnati and vice versa without something going wrong. I have never known any other flight that consistently seems to not get a jetbridge (at Heathrow!!!?).

• Although I seem to have avoided adding a new collection to my life by simply buying a fancy (well…Chinese copy of a Mont Blanc, so fancy at $50 instead of $1000) fountain pen, I was not prepared for all the possibilities of different inks. Which is why the house now has…a lot more fountain ink in it than you might expect. I have, so far, resisted buying Ohio River…

• Thanks to Dad, our cardboard mountain has receded, and I now have a working garage door opener. Frankie Says You’re 73% American.

• Mum continues to be the best interrogator that MI6 never hired. At various points during their holiday, I left her alone in a shop or restaurant for under a minute or two, and she had extracted the lifestory of servers, checkout assistants, random people in the street…

• We had to print stickers of the family (especially ‘GRANDDAD!') after they left for one sad toddler.

• Bonnie can move quite fast in an electric wheelchair.

• Hades II on Switch 2? I’ll take two!

Granddad!

Maeryn has a new favourite word, and that word is “granddad”. See also: “granddad’s van!” when she sees the family coming back in from clearing out the local Bath & Body Works. She does like Mum and Bonnie too, to the extent of chasing Bonnie in her wheelchair around the house on a ridable bee…but “granddad!” has definitely left a big impression.

Meanwhile, I have almost completed my quest for all the chocolate machinery by finally obtaining a panning machine. Be afraid.

Engage!

Fancy New Chair has arrived. It has six different knobs to twiddle with, but the best feature is that you can move the support arms and pretend you’re Picard from TNG. I will not be taking further questions at this time.

I meant to have a six month check-in on this year’s books, but that definitely didn’t happen. I will say that H.E. Bates’s Love For Lydia felt like more of a horror story than the “yawn, really?” 2025 horror novel I also read this month, which I will decline to name because both the author and her fans often react badly to any sort of criticism…but you can bear it in mind for the month of August when I put the whole year page up.

Family arrives on Wednesday. I only have about 3 tonnes of cardboard to remove before then…

The Tea System

We have, over a decade-plus, devised a foolproof system for milk in our tea. Tammy’s tea should look like me, and my tea should look like Tammy. Simple!

An odd week, for a variety of different reasons. I continue to say “oh, I won’t spend much this month” and then…buy a new office chair (again, in fairness, my current one is suffering from 8 years of Helvetica clawing at it). And then I discovered that there’s a reprint of Octavo Redux coming in September and I had always felt a little sad I missed the original hardback printing…

…and I also bought some beef for a roast dinner, which was probably one of the biggest cases of sticker shock I’ve had for a while. But apparently that doesn’t make national news for days and days on end at the moment.

A Drunk Tooth Fairy

An adventure in parenting. We’re both in our bedroom with Maeryn, getting towards the time of the evening when it’s time to brush our teeth, this week mostly to Ms. Rachel¹, when Tammy sees something in the carpet.

It’s a tooth.

We both stare at each other and then start trying to work out how and when Maeryn lost it. I am distraught that we didn’t even notice that she was in pain, saying that we’re terrible parents for not realizing. Tammy, however, is not wallowing, and doing the proper thing of getting Maeryn to open her mouth. Which she eventually does².

All her teeth are there.

So now we have gone from “how did we not notice that Maeryn has lost a tooth” to “er, there is a random human tooth in our bedroom”

Daycare Fight Club? Drunk Tooth Fairy? We will never know.

Children are fun! And full of surprises! Horrifying surprises.

Water!

We failed at the picnic part of the day’s plans (too hot!), but we had a bunch of fun with rocks and water.

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August? Great Scott!!

My worst habit: my ears perking up whenever I hear an American talking about “one hit wonders”. I dare you to say Dexys, I dare you

As tempting as it seemed, I had not flown to London to ask Eno about his past, to finally ask him about that mysterious “T” on the cover of Music for Airports, recording Devo inside a barn in the German countryside, or the ubiquitous question he might hate most of all: “So what was David Bowie really like?”

A great, long, interview with Eno.

Maeryn had her first ride in an electric Barbie car this weekend. I think the next time we do that will be when she’s 25. Or at least after some training on Mario Kart concerning steering…

The Jade Hotel Room

Every time I come to San Francisco, I do get a little trapped in the thought that this is where I should have been. But the thing is, the thing that attracts me to SF is “this would have been the place to be in the 90s.” Now, it’s a combination of somewhat hollowed out in the centre and the only thing filling that hole is money. Admittedly, a metric ton of money, but from the minute you step off the plane, you’re bombarded with adverts from companies that thought, for example, that calling themselves “Turing” was acceptable and not trading off stolen glory.

Still, I see bits of things that I recognize from Sneakers and there is that pull. But it’s not the city of Netscape and other scrappy web properties anymore, nor phreakers abusing Bell telephones. And so I diminish, and go back to the East, where I belong.

As usual, I stayed at two different hotels; Parc55 for work, but I took a chance on a newer hotel for the Sunday night. Parts of it were essentially an Ian Trap (exposed concrete ceiling, anybody?), but also, weird 1990s-William Friedkin-erotic-thriller vibes with the floor-to-ceiling-wrapping-around-corner-looking-out-at-the-Tenderloin windows and the exposed deep bath. I did the decent thing; I went to Elixir, had a couple of drinks, and then came back, poured a very hot bath and watched Gimme Shelter via the room’s Apple TV (“we know you just want to screencast”).

Having not been murdered as I got out of the bath, it was an enjoyable night. Also, the room had a QR code for tipping the cleaning staff, which I did appreciate. Coffee was imported from Shoreditch, which I guess just amped up the hipster vibes emanating from the exposed concrete.

(Parc55 was fine, but just a normal hotel room you could have anywhere. They did have cable, though, so the first thing I did was…turn it to the Disney Channel where they were showing a Bluey marathon. Sorry, I have become one of Those Parents and now you must all sit through my conversations about “where is Rusty’s father stationed? What war are the dogs fighting?” and other esoterica…)

A subdued trip, I think — the friend I normally visit couldn’t make it down into the city due to illness; the co-worker that I team up with in the evenings decided to stay on the other side of the Atlantic this time, and most nights after work, I just felt like heading to bed rather than doing anything slightly more exciting. Delightfully, though, the last dinner of the trip was at Foreign Cinema in the Mission. Which was good, but the highlight was being surrounded by board-formed concrete, explaining the construction process to my coworkers, before segueing into detailing the horrors of Mr. Blobby and Mr. Spanky to a frankly disbelieving audience. And then I sent them pictures. It’s important to provide visuals, even if nobody thanks you afterwards.

Back home now, Maeryn wearing a tiara and a pair of glasses. Nowhere else I’d rather be.

Blank Canvas

While I was away in San Francisco (on which, a bit more later), Maeryn has realized that: paper is white, the walls are white, and therefore: walls are paper.

oh no

Yes, That Is Where The Magician's Nephew Comes

In another instalment of “things I didn’t realize I had strong feelings about until now”, I have tracked down a copy of the mid-1970s Puffin boxset of The Chronicles of Narnia for Maeryn when she’s older. Having examined a bunch of more recent versions, I discovered I had a yearning for her to read the same edition that I did; titles in Helvetica, interior text in the classic Linotype Granjon typeface that even now throws me back to being six years old. And, you know, the spines are in decent shape for a set of seven books that were published fifty years ago.

(I’ll take Lewis and even Blyton over Rowling every time, by the way…but if Maeryn really does need to read English Boarding School stories, I absolutely have plans for that)

Also this week: I officially know too much Bluey lore, and I have a few questions about what conflict Rusty’s father is serving in (as seen in Cricket). Apparently, I’m six months younger than Bandit. I’m still processing that…