A new year is a-knockin'

I've wracked my brains to find some witty, snappy opening line that will grab your attention and have you hooked on my blog the way coffee addicts are hooked on Starbucks. Unfortunately, it is far too early in the morning for me to be uber-creative. So a simple 'hello and welcome' will have to do.

I cannot believe that another year is over. So, so much has happened in the last three hundred and sixty-one days that it makes my head spin. I have definitely come a far way since December 27, 2009. Wow, even writing that year feels weird.

So...my very first blog. Well, to be perfectly honest, I actually do write another blog for my school's website. You can check it out here. That blog is primarily school related and I mainly discuss the crazy rantics I go through as a DL student. That's Distance Learning student since I mainly take most of my courses online.

By the way. Rantics is my little made-up word. It's a combination of rants and antics. It seemed to fit for this blog and has officially stuck in my vocabulary. Who knows? Maybe it will catch on like "bling" and "EVOO" did. We'll see.

I guess I'll start by giving the basic, first-date kind of information.

I'm MJ. I live in south Orange County with my boyfriend, his seven-year-old son, and two cats (Usher "Gus" and Syd). Just for the record, Usher a) came with the name and b) is not named after the Usher you're thinking of. He was named after Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. Or maybe his former owner really did name him after the pop artist and was just trying to sound sophisticated when she met me in the parking lot of a diner in New Jersey to give him to me. Sophisticated indeed.

I have a few slight obsessions: Languages (I speak four and have a list of languages I still want to learn), books (huge fan of James Patterson, Dan Brown, Kate Moss--not the model--and Emily Giffin), Man vs. Wild, Hell's Kitchen, MMA/UFC, traveling, writing, wine, chocolate and fuzzy socks. In fact, my fuzzy sock obsession is so well-known that I got five new pairs of them as Christmas gifts. I am thrilled!

My future posts will, of course, have more pointed themes and topics but I just wanted you to get to know me a little better. :)