Yes, it is November 3!

And I have no idea if today has any historical significance...let's see, it's 4 days before November 7--I have at least 2 childhood friends whose birthdays are on the 7th...and one on the 14th. I never met the person who was born on the 21st (7,14,21,28--they would all line up nicely). (The 28th being mine.)

Ah, email and the 'Net. I have just spent a lovely (note the sarcasm) hour reading email, paying bills, and fussing with sites that wouldn't let me log on.

So, to make this post worth both our whiles, let me tell you who I'm going to see on Saturday: Peter Sis!! He is the writer of such books as The Three Golden Keys, (which is mostly about Prague and my main intro to Sis: I gave it to my dad for Christmas the year it came out. It is full of dream sequences and is very much magic realism...) Galileo, Komodo, Madlenka, Tibet through the Red Box, and others. Tibet won a Caldecott and is the only one I own. I may stand in line to get him to sign it on Saturday like I did with Kevin Henkes. He is originally from the Czech Republic but is now a New Yorker. A few years ago he won a MacArthur Genius Grant, which is some huge amount of money to keep doing whatever it is you are doing wonderfully. I missed seeing him in Chicago at the American Library Association, but the session was not a total loss because not only did I run into a friend from grad school, I also got a glimmer of a possible career switch, Special Libraries. (I think that's what they're called...these would be museum libraries, law libraries, not your public or academic libraries.) At lunch, my friend Marian (the librarian) (will she forgive me for the nickname?) said "Sarah Louise, you already are a special librarian." Aw, shucks.

I love Pete (hey, it's my blog, I can pretend we're on first name basis) because he is from Prague. Prague is a place that changed my life before I was born: when my father visited Prague as a college student in Hope College's Vienna Summer School, he was considering law schools. As he looked over the roofs of Prague, he mused, "I could be the ambassador of a place like this," and my life was never the same. My father never became an ambassador, but he did take the Foreign Service exam, pass, and become such things as Economic Attache, Consulate General, and Acting Charg d'Affairs. (Economic Attache = he worked with natives on economic stuff, was very instrumental during the changeover of Poland to the private sector from Communism; Consulate General = he was the head guy in charge of who got visas in their passports; Acting Charg d'Affairs = he was the acting ambassador when the ambassador was out on other business.) Basically, my dad had one of those jobs I never understood until I worked in the same embassy as a summer intern. Then I saw that he was one of the most respected men there, for his jokes and his amazing editing and writing skills. People always said to me, "Your dad tells the best jokes, writes the best cables (the major form of communication), is the greatest guy." It was neat to see him through the eyes of his co-workers, and I served a very important role: I could often decifer his handwriting when no one else could. I worked at the American Embassy, Warsaw, Poland for three summers, one in the Consulate (passports, visas, help to American citizens abroad) and two in USAID (US Agency for International Development).

So that was a trip down memory lane and not very much about Prague, but you can see I enjoyed being the daughter of a Foreign Service Officer and am grateful eternally (eternally!) that I am not the daughter of a lawyer. (What do you call 10 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!) (This was not the sort of joke my dad would tell...more on the jokes of good old dad in future posts.)

Amazing where writing takes you...I do love this blog. Thanks for reading...stay tuned for "Why I go to the Open Door."