Hello Great Big Beautiful World!

In 37 days I finish my most important life's work: raising two beautiful, accomplished daughters.

My youngest daughter graduates from high school and soon joins her older sister in adventures of the collegiate kind (yes, you're allowed to ask me what daughter #1 got in calculus). Of course, one is never really finished being a parent but my role becomes more supportive and will be contributed from a lot longer distance.

Soooooo, what to do with myself?

It's time to follow through on an idea I've been attracted to ever since reading Ernest Hemingway in high school. Back then, I thought Ernest Hemingway was IT because of his machismo. I loved reading his simple declarative sentences exulting in manly activities like running with the bulls, shopping at Abercrombie and Fitch for his next safari, fishing by a good clean stream, and defending the free world from facism.

I could literally feel the sunshine on Ernest in the sidewalk cafes of Paris as he mused in his moleskin notebooks about Hadley and the baby and his next story. If I could have I would have zapped myself right there, ordered up an absinthe, and joined him in watching the parade of interesting humanity walk by.

I'm a bit wiser now and can see through the machismo for what it is: misogynistic alcoholism.

Yet the romantic idea of being an expat in Europe has not lost even one iota of it's romance. That idea has remained for thirty years. The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast - could two books be more wonderfully tragic and appealing to a young girl? It's time to find out for myself.

I hope to be an expat in Prague by August 1, 2008.

Wish me luck.