Yes, I am alive. Just on the road… one week down and three weeks to go. I’ve listened to Anthony Bourdain read “A Cook’s Tour” (twice) and driven over the Golden Gate Bridge (twice) listening to Spoon’s “A Mathematical Mind” (both times.) For the past few days I have been taking care of my 15 month old nephew Ryan. Kind of. Actually I have been helping my mom take care of my nephew. I have learned that it is virtually impossible to watch a fifteen month old by yourself. Not impossible, I guess, because people do it all the time. Maybe the right word is exhausting. I don’t know how people do it. As a single, childless person, I can do whatever I want. If I wake up with a hangover and decide to lay on the couch all day, I can do it. If you have a kid, that’s just not a possibility. I already had a lot of respect for the job of a parent. Now I have a sort of awe going on. How on earth do you do it with more than one? Also, if I was a parent I think I would be constantly worried that the kid was going to choke on something or fall off the slide at the park or somersault themselves into a head injury.

Tonight is our last night. I have a sort of empty feeling in there somewhere, along with the borderline exhaustion and emerging homesickness. I did learn a new skill – changing a diaper without puking. I have never changed a diaper before now, and I am forty-one years old.

It’s been a dream of mine to have no home, and to just travel around and blog about it. But I am not so sure I am really cut out for that anymore. Could be age, could be that I really love where I live and don’t want to leave for too long. Like being gone a month is… hard. Even with constant movement, with seeing all my old friends up here in the Bay Area.

So. Onward. I wish I had time to write what I wanted to write about the Golden Gate Bridge, I wish I had time to write about my now almost overpowering desire that I could not only meet Anthony Bourdain, but that I could BE Anthony Bourdain. About Top Chef: everyone knows what a mess this season is, and how it should be about the food (but not Kraft or Nestle) and not about these weird, petty squabbles. It’s just getting really old now.

I’m off to Sacramento tomorrow for the Unified Grape Symposium, one of the only trade shows I like working. I’ll try to write more after. Also, I had to turn off comments because I was getting spammed pretty bad, so go ahead, authenticate yourself. You know you want to.

I almost forgot.

Lest you think I have given up on Top Chef, you’d be mistaken. How could I with bizarre head ensembles such as this? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA….

Isn’t it weird when you meet people and it feels like you have known them forever?

This is Kasch and her daughter Antonia, my brother Tom’s new family from Berlin. I haven’t written too much about this because I wanted to make sure it was cool with them first. Basically, Tom met Kasch when he was on tour in Germany last summer, and now he is moving there!

Kasch and Antonia were here for a little over two weeks and now that they are gone there is a void. When my brother moves, there will be an even bigger void. Thankfully I myself am going to Berlin for two weeks in March, otherwise I would be hella bummed. I am sort of fantasizing about moving there myself, but of course I won’t. I don’t think. The problem is, I am an urban girl living in a beach town. I love my beach town, but I really get off on subways and outdoor cafes on big boulevards and bridges with statues on them and stuff. Though if I lived in a big city I would probably be fantasizing about sunsets and the smell of the sea and fried clams. Was it Hemingway that said, write about the summer in the winter, and the winter in the summer? That is the way I think, all the time. If you get my drift.

Anyway, I love Tom’s new family. They are both beautiful and, well, the epitome of cool. Kasch is already Cool Beyond Words and Antonia is The Coolest Chick In Town Waiting to Happen. For now though she is a Cool Little Girl. She loves, LOVES, my nephew Ryan. Here she is with Ryan and Ryan’s mama Carrie:

Speaking of Cool Little Girl Antonia last night was pretty funny. She hasn’t been speaking much to me since I can’t understand German, though I think she understands quite a bit of English. But last night, I went to Tom’s for dinner with Kasch and Antonia, Scottie Blinn (from the Mudsharks) and his wife Roxanne and kid Little Man Jackson. After dinner, the four other adults wanted to go down to Tony’s bar so I stayed with the kids. Little Man Jackson is basically a meteor trapped in a child’s body, and spent the first twenty minutes carreening off couches and walls like a pinball. It was some pretty intense energy expenditure, let me tell you. Antonia and I wanted to play Uno with the Hello Kitty Uno cards I got her for Christmas, so we kept asking Jackson but he was like, “no way, I ain’t playing with no Hello Kitty cards!” (Good boy, Scott would later say.) I finally talked him into it because you can’t play Uno with only two people so I was kind of desperate. Anyhow, I was like, “Jackson, you are CRAZY.”

Then, out of nowhere, Antonia says, completely deadpan, “Crazy Boy.” Then she proceeds to play Uno with us, SPEAKING ENGLISH THE WHOLE TIME. I was blown away, she just turned 10 but obviously has a mind like a steel trap.

Jackson continued cracking us both up, saying stuff like “I’m the weirdest!” and doing break-dancing moves on the floor when his energy got to be too much. Later, when his dad mentioned my blog Poptarticus, Jackson exclaimed “I’LL HAVE A BLOG TOO, AND I’M GONNA CALL IT FARTICUS!” Dude. I almost fell down laughing.

Antonia and Jackson got sick of Uno after three hands and started instant messaging each other on their little handheld Nintendos, drawing each other pictures and teaching each other words from their languages. It was really cool.

Kids. What a trip. FARTICUS. Too much. I wish I was that creative.