Despite any evidence to the contrary I don’t have a whole lot going on from day to day. I just go about my life; doing laundry, eating my face off, writing and watching old episodes of Arrested Development and Mary Tyler Moore thanks to the miracle of Apple TV. A fairly mundane state of being by anyone’s standards.

The other day a lovely woman in Chicago sent me an email that said I was living her dream. But I suspect if she hung out with me for a day or two she’d be bored to sobs and race back to her thrilling big city life where women wear hooker shoes and go out for cocktails on Thursday nights. One woman’s dream is likely another woman’s cauchemar (nightmare), yet another stunning example of the useless French words I know.

But hum-drum days aside there is the odd dream being realized over here. Not long ago I put a year in France under my belt and so far that’s pretty high up on my ‘things I’ve always wanted to do’ list. And today I’m crossing off another one, ‘someday I’d like to write a book’. Now I’m not saying it’ll ever be anything other than a pile of kindling but who cares? The point is that I wrote it, all 65,000 words of it. It was a lot of work and it took a lot of time but I loved every minute of it. Okay not the minutes where I nearly tore all my hair out because I don’t really know how to use Word but all the rest were a pleasure.

For those thinking my book is something new I have some bad news for you, there’s nothing new under the sun. Instead of starting from scratch I re-read every single blog post I’ve ever written (who knew I used the word wacky so much?), weeded out anything not related to the Big French Adventure, tidied it all up again and again and finally chose about 160 photos to add in. Then I strung it all together into something that I hope truly captures the experience of what I’ve done over the last 18 months. So same story, different package.

What will become of it is a mystery to me. It’s now under the gaze of a couple of writerly types who have kindly agreed to give it a read and help me decide to either keep on with it or swiftly put it out of its misery. But here’s the best part, I don’t really give a merde. It could be the worst book ever written or Eat, Pray, Love Part Deux, either way it’s completely irrelevant.

I simply cannot lose on this one. I have a record of my mid-life mayhem and my year in France as well as hard proof of how much I love my monsieur which will come in handy the next time he’s driving me bananas. And when I’m old and gray, so that means today, I can say I once wrote a book.

So just like I did on the day of my Franceaversary, this morning I walked over the Pont Pinard and there it was again, that joy thing. But this time I was ready for it. I stopped to settle into it and I thought of something the probably great and now definitely late Steve Jobs once said, “Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Words to live by.