The First.

And voila, I'm making a third entrance into the blogging world. 

Though I've considered starting up a blog in which to note down my thoughts for many years now, the impetus just was never there. But lately I've been bugging my family with long, drawn out emails about traditional Moroccan holidays full of pictures, sending my mom things for her blog, and wishing my Flickr had a space for thought-sharing, so I guess now is the time. The more I see my friends be able to express themselves in their own little corner of the web, the more I realized how I've really ached to do the same. 

I enjoy writing, but don't write hardly as often as I should. This quote that once I found in some long-forgotten place in the web and have saved for many years, sums it up nicely:

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.      --David Hare

That being said, I process as I write, so while I'll do me best to remain comprehensible, forgive me if I'm ever not.

For those of you who have lost touch with what's up in my life right now, or who don't know me, here's a little intro, past to present.

I guess I was always a bit spicy!

With my three beautiful sisters. I reserve every right to brag 
about them as often as possible, and trust me, they deserve it.

More siblings, two of the three brothers. 
Yes, I'm the shorty in the family.

And the missing one, donning a gift from Morocco. 
Somehow we've managed to not take a picture of all 
seven of us for quite a while now. Oops.

I lived in Texas, Kansas, Brazil, New Jersey, Nebraska, and South Dakota as a child, growing up with three brothers and three sisters and a Brazilian mom, and homeschooling on and off. After spending much of my senior year of highschool homeschooling while living with relatives in Brazil, I made my way to study comparative world history at the University of Notre Dame. 

Thanks to ND's Center for Social Concerns, I spent 2 summers doing service projects, one in Albuquerque working at the Boys and Girls Club, and one in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I was beseeched upon to write a blog for the latter, so you can waste some time reading my past ramblings of that very interesting summer here if you wish. (Teaser: a large part of my work was with drug mules, all women, mostly Africans, who got caught at the airport and were thrown into the Brazilian prison system for on average 4 years. I visited them, wrote a guide to prison life for the new inmates after many interviews, helped them correspond with their families, and lived in a halfway house with many on parole. But I promise you nothing about the quality of writing.)

After that I spent my junior year of college wandering around France, writing a sparsely updated and somewhat boring blog (have you got the feeling yet that my previous attempts left me less than inspired? Well third time's the charm, right?), exploring a bit of Europe on a tiny budget, taking pictures of beautiful places, trying to learn French, and meeting my now husband! 

Long story short, I finished up one last semester at ND, graduated in January 2011 a semester early and promptly moved to Casablanca, Morocco with Othman, who was then in the States meeting my family. 

We've been living here almost 3 years now, and got married this past August! We live in a nice little apartment in Casablanca with our two turtles, Chomper and Sparkle. I'm an English teacher at British Council where Americans are sorely outnumbered, and thus have picked up many British-isms (at first I wrote "flat" instead of apartment, oops), and he's a quality control engineer at a big Moroccan mineral water company. Our life is simple, but happy.

Turtles!! Sparkle is the little one, and Chomper is about 
the size of my palm. I guess technically they're tortoises. 
Othman's caption: "He chomps, she sparkles!"

For all wedding photos, credit goes to the lovely Emily Ann Photographer.

My interests: taking pictures of the little things, gluten-free/paleo/GAPS baking, becoming a more effective teacher, reading voraciously (especially historical fiction and nonfiction), writing poems that I think are mediocre but am told are good.

His interests: cars and driving them, computers, enjoying bad TV shows ("for the right reasons" he says) and some good ones too, discovering international reggae bands (and exposing my brothers to reggae covers), having luscious, beautiful, curly hair.