Thanks so much to all of you who read it and recommended it to friends and even random strangers!  Actually, I have 5 secret tips on how to win friends and influence people, and ONE of them is to give them a copy of Blame It on Paris.  I will tell you the other four later.

If you haven’t read it yet, don’t miss this comic and romantic true story about falling in love with a place, a culture, and a person.  

Pierrette Frickey is now retired but was a wonderful professor of French, and I can clearly remember sitting on the wall by the Humanities quad trying to figure out Madame Bovary after having been assigned it as extra reading.  (A little bit more than I could chew at the time–everyone else in the class was reading short stories.  I do love teachers who are good at spotting hungry minds and feeding them.)

On Wednesday, March 10, at 7 p.m., therefore, I will be giving a talk titled, “Blame It on French:  From UWG to Tahiti to Paris”, so that everyone can learn to blame things on other cities, countries, and languages.  And as I can all too well remember longing to spend a summer in Paris as a college student and not having the money, please help us make a few more study abroad dreams financially possible.

Blame It on Paris is donating itself to the cause:  The talk is free and open to all, of course!  But for everyone who contributes to the Pierrette Frickey Study Abroad Scholarship fund, I will offer a copy (signed on the spot!) of Blame It on Paris, the larger, trade paperback edition, not the smaller mass market coming out in May.  Suggested donation is $10.  ALL of that donation goes to the scholarship fund, none to defray costs.

The talk will be in TLC 1303, University of West Georgia.

I hope to see you there!   Wednesday, March 10, 7 p.m., TLC 1303, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia:  Blame It on French.

Sponsored by the University of West Georgia Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures,  the Office of Alumni Affairs, and the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Also, I wanted to say a big thanks to reader Barbara!  I would answer your email directly but the email address didn’t come through.  But in case you happen to check the blog, thank you so much for your kind words on Blame It on Paris.

Merci à tout le monde, en fait!  Thank you and enjoy your spring and summer!

It is now that I say in this imitation of the totally ghastly French dubbing of Terminator I once had the misfortune to be forced to watch:  J’y retournerai.  (You’d have to hear the thread-thin whisper voice used for that French Terminator dubbing to appreciate why I’m over hear laughing my head off, really.)

I am on a simplification kick. I am Decluttering. I am donating to Goodwill. I may even empty my attic of boxes of books I have been clinging to for 15 years. (I may. This is a very hard step, to give up books you once loved and don’t need anymore. It’s like giving up someone you once were and still like. I only did it once before–all my Trixie Belden books when I hit that “I’m an adult” teenage stage–and I always regretted it and wish like anything I had those Trixie Belden books back. So I tend to cling to books.)

But whether books stay in my attic or not, I would like to focus on a few things–writing, family, work, cooking, lazy fun times with friends–and so I am having to choose some things to stop.

Most tellingly, I did a journal exercise not too long ago using Kinder’s three questions, the second of which is: You go to the doctor, who discovers you have a rare illness. He says that you’re going to feel perfectly fine for the next five years, but then the illness will prove fatal. It will come suddenly, causing no suffering. The question is, Now that you know that your life will be over by then, how will you live it? What will you do?

And one of the things I wrote was: I would spend no time at my computer at all, except to write, and I might even start writing by hand. (Now this might not be realistic–how am I supposed to find out the WEATHER without a computer, for one thing? Watch TV? Look outside? That’s just crazy talking. Also, I wrote that I would grow a garden, so I decided to go start a garden right away, and OF COURSE where was I supposed to find out what to plant if I didn’t use the Internet?)

But…you know what I mean, I bet. There’s a line between resource and Computer=Life, and it’s not really a fine line, it’s just hard to stay on the right side of it. Internets are tempting creatures.

It may be that the hiatus doesn’t last very long and I get drawn back in very quickly, but right now my plan is to stick to it through August. This means I won’t be visiting your blogs much either! I will miss you, this is what I will miss the most.

But it is doing me a world of good to use that last little half hour of the evening to curl up in bed with (currently) Neruda’s Cien Sonetos de Amor (100 Love Sonnets–I highly, highly, highly recommend these, by the way, if you haven’t tried them. Tapscott’s translation is very good, too.) It’s hard to turn off the computer and make that shift, but I’m always glad I did. Simplifying experiences and deepening those, and maybe rediscovering a bit what it was like to live my life ten years ago when I didn’t have internet! That’s my track right now…we’ll see how it goes!

So this is au revoir (not adieu!)…THANK YOU for all your support the past year and a half, for giving me the chance to get to know you, and for humoring my obsessions. :)  And keep up the Chocolate War!!! Know that I will be fighting hard in the trenches, never surrendering, not even when faced with a dearth of Easter clearance candy.