I think I used to hope my life would be like this someday.

There's a party outside this door, but inside this quiet room there are three little blonde girls calming down with a book. The biggest one is reading aloud. The other two are pretty worn out (as you'd expect after 6 hours of party) but valiantly trying to stay awake. I'm hoping it will all go smoothly and soon I'll be triumphantly telling Sean of sleeping children.

I can hear my friends laughing out in the house, finding things to talk about with other friends of mine. Some people have a glowing disc and are flinging it about the lawn; they've already got a person saying he's willing to try it.

One of the lovable things about Die Hard is the attention paid to yin yang balance, deep holes and blood offset with guns.

Watched Commando. Matrix is the GM's favourite character, Bennett is his girlfriend's PC.

Hazel asks why we aren't borrowing her cousin for a year and giving her back as a present next Christmas.

Starting to think about sport.

I know very little about sport. Two years ago my New Year's resolution was to enjoy playing backyard sports for a healthy body and to avoid passing my sporting neuroses on to my kids. Today, in Sean's parents' backyard, I threw a Frisbee and played badminton and volleyball, Hazel played cricket. I didn't play cricket because I got anxious and I didn't feel I knew how to join in. I'm getting there; I enjoy backyard sports and my children do too but the neuroses aren't yet all gone. Besides, I wanted to play badminton; I'd suddenly remembered absolutely loving the shuttlecock floating over my cousins' backyard in 1983's English summer.

As I spend more of my scarce and precious time playing Ultimate Frisbee my analytical mind starts to try to understand sport; I know very little about sport so I'm doing research.

"What's sport for?" I asked the athletic-looking young man at Sean's work's Christmas do. He replied with a sharp smile, sparkling eyes, and declarative certainty "winning."
"But how can that be? What's good about winning?" I asked.
"Oh, winning's not good. Winning's a vice."
I think he's got something there, but it's not the only thing.

The next day Housemonkey said perhaps I should read this, and until I finished it I found it hard to do anything else, "this" is The Meaning of Sport by Simon Barnes. Among other things, Simon Barnes is the Chief Sportswriter for the Times. He, who happens to have spent most of his working life writing stories he finds in sport, thinks that sport manufactures the need for people to call upon extremes of character, all the better for making stories out of. I love stories and before I played Ultimate my favourite sport was cricket. Cricket is very heavy on the stories and a test takes long enough to tell quite a few.

Barnes also thinks sport is metaphorical and mammalian. Team sports are metaphorical battles, one-on-one sports are metaphorical duels, and races are metaphors about predators and prey. The thesis for which I was awarded my MA was called Mimesis and Make-believe: How We Use Art, and one of the things I wrote in it which I still think true is that other creatures play make-believe. Barnes's mammalian sports and my animal make-believe are the same phenomenon: pouncing on string and other kitten's tails, batting newspaper about, play-fighting. Other mammals' sports are about hunting and dominance whether they are make-believe, metaphorical or both.

At the moment, what I love best about Ultimate is that it can occupy my whole being; a lot of the time that I am on the field I am not multi-tasking at all, I am not even directing my thinking. My self is wholly present in the moment, senses and understandings united; intuiting and acting in a dynamic and embodied way. To be so concentrated is utterly luxurious, mystical and animal, it is how I am when I am pushing a baby out, when I orgasm, and the more of the game I can do it for the better I play.

Hazel's finished her first year at school. She reads, writes, and does arithmetic for pleasure still. Success.

Iris peeing in shower. Sean leaving work. Down to my last four arrows, I hear a distant thunder of hooves.

Iris doesn't know why the toilet girls aren't here yet. They have flags and sing sweetly 'you must pee in the toilet'.

In this game 'I like them' means 'they're yukky' and 'koro mi' means 'I like them.'

Iris wrote 'Sozon', which shows she loves me and understands how writing works!

That successful match-making high! I pushed two of the sweet pea blossoms together and now there's a pod!

This is tired: I just had a micro-nap on the loo at Karori rec ctr.

I just saw David Beckham, or some other athletic centre of attention with tattooed arms.

The vet's shelves are strangely bare. Sean supposes cat burglars.