Thanks to those of you who have asked how I'm doing - still sick as a dog, but it's an evolving beast, this illness. What first seemed like the flu turned into a sinus infection and now I have lost my voice. The upside is that I'm feeling a lot better than I felt a few days ago, but the downside is that I've been meeting up with 2 or 3 friends a day, leaving me with just a wisp of a voice.

But it's just a small blip on an otherwise fabulous trip - I've gotten to see so many friends already and I've been able to spend a lot more time with my extended family than I normally do. I've been in Minneapolis this past week and it's been so much fun - I really love the Twin Cities and on so many occasions, I've just had spontaneous bouts of joy run through me. It's just the simple things - meeting up with friends at old hangouts, eating at my favorite restaurants, sitting on campus and chatting (or in my case, listening) under the bright sunshine. Realizing that I can still find my way around here no problem even after six years away. I've been to the Mall of America three times now - though the funny thing is, I haven't actually set a foot in any of the stores there. Of course all of this combined with late nights is probably just prolonging my illness, but what's a girl to do? I've only got this week to see everyone and I can't help but profite of all that comes way.

I had to laugh though when I met with my financial adviser. She was going over my paperwork and asked if I still wanted my mother and Fabrice listed as beneficiaries on my accounts and in my will. I decided to change it - not that Fab would ever go looking for any of that stuff if something ever did happen to me, but I just wanted to make it less of a hassle for my mother. She handed me a pen to sign the paperwork and as she did, I did a double-take - the pen that I was about to use to take Fab's name off my accounts was a pen that he had frickin' made.

A lot of you probably don't know this (I didn't), but Bic is a French company and Fab worked for them for several years in V-town. (It's also where he met the *ahem* lovely Katell). Anyone who ever visited us there knows that we had pens up the wazoo - including about a thousand copies of the Bic velocity pen sitting at that moment on my financial advisor's desk. Each model is produced at a certain site, and I was pretty sure that particular model was only made in France, at the V-town factory, but I flipped it over just to be sure - and there it was - the little "Made in France" logo. I had to laugh at the irony of the whole situation - in many ways, it was like it was all coming full circle.

And then I spent the night with an old friend, drinking Champagne and Côtes du Rhône at a ritzy bar in downtown Minneapolis. So yeah - no complaints from my end.