from the land of rice-a-roni

dude. we're in san francisco.

we thought we got everything, everything, done before we left this morning, but on the plane justin remembered we forgot to file our taxes. doh!

it has just occurred to me that we will not be able to claim johannes as a dependent on this year's tax return.

it's not really the deduction - i'm sure we would have spent more on him than we would have saved in taxes. but a tax return is an historical document; some future descendant (if there are any - god, i hope there are) trying to trace his family tree might search tax documents looking for us and totally miss johannes's existence.

i feel a compulsion to document my existence for future generations, which is ironic since thus far our next generation consists of some disturbingly-large bone chips in a small laminate box.

justin cannot understand why i need to keep six boxes labeled "childhood memorabilia"(among other boxes) in our root cellar. when he recently opened one up (presumably on a mission to prove there was nothing worth keeping there) and found my second grade report on the virtues of chairman mao, i thought i was never going to hear the end of it, to which i say, it was a different time, okay? nixon had just been to china, it was like a bold new frontier to us, and we didn't know then, at least in society at large, what we know now. we were just fascinated with this exotic place that was being opened up to us (admittedly only opened a tiny bit) and there was a ton of goodwill toward china and mao. justin wasn't even born yet when i wrote that report (which i do not even remember, by the way, so it's not as though it was some horrible indoctrination experience for me), so he cannot relate; he has never known a time when we didn't know about the less virtuous practices of mao - tiannamen square is probably the beginning of his political awareness of china. but back to my original point - the fact that i wrote the thing at age 7 is, to me, an interesting reflection of society in general at that time - which hopefully that mythical future descendant would find interesting and not an indictment.

this is my first time to visit san francisco, which seems odd, but it's true. randy was waiting for us at the airport and whisked us off to herbivore for mushrooms, bean tacos and marinated tofu (i think it was the garlic aioli that made the tofu so fantastic). he and justin have spent the afternoon trying to get their laptops to talk to each other and noodling on randy's guitars, which seems to have been good for justin, but i find it exhausting to not talk about johannes at all. maybe when jenny gets home from work it will be different, or maybe this will just be a tragedy-free zone for us, which may not be all bad. r& j sent us this insanely huge, incredibly beautiful basket of flowers last week, which i broke down on saturday to use the flowers in the arrangements i made for the memorial service/party (still not sure what to call it - i'm experimenting with terms - bear with me).