About Me

Welcome to my blog.  I go by J in the blogging world, my name is Julie, and I’ve been blogging since November 2005.  Some years I have posted every day, other years I have missed entire months.  I am inching toward 60, though when I started, it was just before my 40th birthday.  I haven’t really changed the pictures that pop up when I comment on your blogs.  One is when I was 27, on my honeymoon in Paris.  The other is from my 40th birthday party.  I look at those pictures and I look so young!  The picture above is more current.  I live in Northern California with my husband, Ted, and our adult daughter, Maya.

I write here because I have found a release, and because of the community that I have found while blogging.  Writing here has given me a voice that I didn’t have before.  I have never been a keeper of journals or diaries, and that is how I thought of blogging when I started.  But it’s not that.  I mean, it’s partly that, but it’s different in a lot of ways.  You have to censor yourself when you blog, especially if you’re not anonymous, which I’m not.  So I can’t and won’t write about work here.  And while I do write about my family, I will only write about things that they wouldn’t mind the world finding out.  Because let’s face it, this is the internet, and the world can find out most anything quite easily.  So no dirty laundry, no serious issues that are painful and private.  That’s a huge difference between a journal and a blog, because writing about painful and private things can be quite cathartic, and sharing them might possibly help someone else who is experiencing a similar journey.  But the privacy of my family is more important than sharing my troubles, so you won’t find a lot of that here.  Yes, it hampers the writing.  But that’s the way it is.

One time when I wrote of my troubles without reservation was when my mom was sick.  My mom started blogging about 6 months after I did, in 2006.  I am so grateful that she did, because reading each others blogs made up in some ways for the 1,000 miles of distance between our homes, and helped us to connect in a way that phone conversations don’t.  It wasn’t a replacement for our semi-weekly phone marathons, or for a real-live visit, but it was another layer to our relationship, and I loved it.  I especially loved discovering what a wonderful writer she was.   Because she had a lot of bloggy friends, when she got sick and couldn’t write anymore, she wanted me to update her blog and let her friends know what was going on.  That made me feel safe and free to open up and write about whatever I was going through, because she would not have felt her privacy was violated.  Because she read almost all of those posts, except for the last month or so, when she couldn’t get near a computer and didn’t have the strength or interest in reading anymore.  For anyone who knew her, not having the interest in reading was a sure sign that things were not going well.  Ugh.  She died in June of 2008, and I will probably never recover completely.  Realizing that and coming to terms with it is almost as difficult as coming to terms with my loss.  But writing about that here, and finding the support of my friends, and her friends, was a great help in a time of crisis.

You won’t find ads here, and I don’t write reviews for products that I receive for free.  I don’t have problems with others doing that on their blogs.  I just don’t think it’s interesting and the ads clutter up the blog.  If I thought I could make more than $1.50 a month at it I might be persuaded to change my mind, but at this point, the idea of writing about something that isn’t exactly what I want to write about is not appealing.  I tried writing for an online mom’s magazine for a very brief time (they folded when the founder discovered she had to spend her time fighting cancer rather than writing and editing an online magazine), and the experience left me uninterested in doing anything like that again.  I didn’t like writing on deadline, I didn’t like following someone else’s rules, and I didn’t like having to come up with ideas that followed someone else’s theme.  And this was a very laid back, easy going magazine.  So yeah, not interested.  I want to read what I want to read, and write what I want to write, and if it bores the crap out of you to read about the book I just read or the restaurant I just tried or the recipe I made for dinner two nights ago, then just skip that day’s post.  It’s OK with me.  We all do it.  I usually skip the product reviews on my friend’s blogs.  That doesn’t keep me from going back and reading about their lives.

Most of all, welcome.  I cannot really describe what blogging has meant to me.  It’s meant a lot.  I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it  up, but for awhile more at least, I think.