About me

James and I in our garden back home in KY. 

My name is Maria-Joelle and this is my first blog so please bear with me while I get the hang of this! I've always written things down in notebooks but I have decided to try keeping a blog for a while. I live with my husband James, Bismarck the dog and 2 crazy cats (Mia & Mau) in sunny, southern Spain. James is from Atlanta, Georgia and I was born in Belgium, but I grew up in Ireland from the age of 3. Hmmm....I have a hard time defining where I feel I'm mostly from - the best way I can describe it is as a sort of triangulation of my 3 favorite places in the whole world - My childhood home in Ireland, my godfather's house in Belgium and our beautiful home in Kentucky.  I have an Irish accent but I'm the only one in my family who does! 

My reasons for having a blog (As a child of the 80s I still think it's a little narcissistic but the way social media is going these days plus the fact that we move around a lot and have family and friends strewn around the 4 corners of the earth - means that I'm actually really happy and thankful to have different means available to stay in touch with loved ones, stay connected with friends and meet new people. Otherwise I would be a little 'hermity' and this keeps me out of my comfort zone ha haha!) 
Other reasons are: 

• As a soon-to-be new Mommy I have an overwhelming desire to document everything! I really want my family and friends to be part of my baby's life and be able to check on her development and how she's doing. 
• Photography is a big part of my life and I don't always have time to get my photos printed. Now when I say it's a big part of my life, I don't mean that I consider myself a photographer, I mean that I photograph things randomly and rather badly most of the time; it's like a knee-jerk reaction. I don't have instagram, I just have a hundred million photos of the same thing saved to anything that comes with a chip. Needless to say this flummoxes my husband, especially when he finds a hundred photos in a row of the dog's nose. Hopefully this blog will poke that part of my brain that wants to find the 'best one', that one photo that sums up the rest, that will allow me to delete and free up some gigabits on my poor long-suffering devices.
•  I love making lists and writing things down..in fact I would like to write more and practice the skill of writing. This will hopefully help me to do that! The internet is such a huge overwhelming resource, I thought this might be a good way to collect together the things that I have not had the time to transfer into a paper notebook. I like looking at other people's Pinterest boards but I'm too lazy or something to start my own, Ha haha! 
• Of course a fear of mine (amongst many!) is some sort of digital apocalypse where everything important to me that happens to be in a digital format vanishes <POOF> but this is also a good exercise - to lose any fears and just write! And write with the thought that, like those buddhist mandala sand sculptures, it doesn't matter what is written only that you write, and in the end it is okay to make mistakes and write what people will think is nonsense or that I will think is nonsensical or mundane later. It will all help me to embrace my love of writing. Plus it helps that I can type at lightening speed so this is essentially a faster way for me to document things. Making it a public blog is just about getting used to writing for a different audience.
• Of course not everything will end up here but with a good cup of coffee and a free morning who knows what things I will end up rambling on about!

Speaking of audience, who do I expect readers of this blog to be? Well aside from family and friends, anyone who likes the same things I do:

• Music, Fishing, Eating coffeemate with a spoon, talking to cat, animals, wishing I was a vet. dancing with eyes closed, not making sense, laughing at my own jokes, flying dreams, when the random light bulb fits, life imitating art, doing pretentious lists, having the flu, coffee and cigarettes, fat little notebooks, old leather wallets, human anatomy, buying books like A practical guide to molecular cloning, little signs, giraffes, airports, finding my keys, googling everything, perpendicular tidying, the other side of the pillow, cars running on vegetable oil, the little flower shop on the way to Sally's, bonzai trees, world maps, big magnets. People who get me, people that I get. Stuff. Book shops. Orion's belt. Travelling. Mythology. Horses. Owning a ranch. Thinking about thinking. Worrying about random stuff. Getting massages. Atoms, Molecules, Learning about how stuff is made. Movies, concerts. microscopes. telescopes. Life. 

By the way I wrote this list 10 years ago and had it saved on another profile but - happy to report - it's still as relevant and irreverent today!

Most entries will probably be about thoughts I've had that day. Some topics will probably be about food, arts and crafts, photography, where we live! Being a military family we move around a lot and this year we have been blessed and assigned to sunny Spain! So no doubt I will find some anecdotes that I would like to remember. The other big news is that we are expected a baby so I'm sure that there will be a lot of baby posts, or else there might be none - no posts at all - as I slowly realize my life is being consumed by diaper-changes and lack of sleep. We will see! 

So thank you for checking out my blog, 

Keep Smiling! 

True love 

Our little strawberry shortcake!!! Coming soon! 

James and Mia 

Mau

Bismarck or 'Bizy'