Greetings and Salutations

Bon jour mes amis. Como tallez vous? Je suis tres bien.

OK enough of the French already. I don't remember very much. When I was in junior high and took French I was TRES bad at it. The teacher required that once the door was closed we could only speak in French. My French vocabulary is VERY limited (and my spelling is worse) and consists mostly of the following:

Ouvre le porte, sil vous plait. ("Open the door please!")
Bon chance. ("Good luck." Spoken by my teacher specifically to me in advance of every quiz -- does that tell you something?)
C'est tres domage. ("Too bad" -- spoken to me when handing back every quiz).

Anyway, I am doing OK today. Not spectacular (I hurt), but we got an encouraging e-mail, our ranking on all of the lists seems to be doing well, we're getting good feedback from readers and more good reviews. So I am concentrating on the happy stuff!

I wish I was multi-lingual. I am good at any number of things (and yes, I know, that sounds egotistical, but everybody's good at any number of things. It's human nature). One of those things is NOT languages. I try, I REALLY try. But I am just SOOOOOO bad at it. Sigh. I want our books to be around the world. I want to visit everywhere the books are. (OK, so maybe Iraq and Antarctica AREN'T on the preferred travel destinations right now, but you get the idea.) It would be so cool to go to Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Canada,... and see people every place I go that I've spoken to on line. Don't know that it's going to happen, but it would be seriously cool. People are people, wherever they're from. Love and heartache are both universal.

If the books do take off, I want to do good things with the money I earn. Granted, first things I would do are: (1) Pay everything off I owe, including buying my house outright; (2) set up a trust fund for my son; (3) set up a trust fund for other family members. Then I want to take a percentage of my money to travel, but a bigger percentage to go to various charities. There are so many things people can do to help if they just do it -- but it's so EASY to just keep spending on things you don't even need. I saw a special that was the equivalent of the old show "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" where this entertainer had 20 or 30 watches at thousands (even tens of thousands in some cases) of dollars each! What a flipping waste! You only have a watch on one wrist for crying out loud. If you're REALLY fashion conscious, one with a black band, one with a brown band, one gold, one silver. Poof. Four watches. Five max (what the heck, one diamond encrusted). The rest of the oh, $100,000.00 could go to say.... Habitat for Humanity, The International Red Cross. Now I'm not picking on this guy (which is why he is remaining nameless). I mean, he works HARD for that money. But a collection of cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, a dozen or so mansions? He's single, with no children, and travels constantly. I realize its his money but I can't help thinking, "what a waste!".

Yolanda, Jim, you are hereby authorized, if I ever do get that wealthy (don't hold your breath) to kick me right square in the ass if I get that extravagant and don't share!

Gotta run!

Cie