At the end of high school forever ago, I thought I might want to write for a living. I was working in a drugstore after school, and used to flip through the magazines that I was supposed to be stocking on the shelves.

I did not care about the fashion and beauty magazines because I was raised in a home where money was tight, and so I did not value things that I thought were frivolous.

What I did love were words. I loved reading, and I had big thoughts and even bigger dreams, so I was drawn to the magazines and periodicals that had great articles.

I thought it would be such a great way to live, reading and writing and researching and getting my own words published.

Of course, that did not happen. I never believed I had enough talent to make my living with my thoughts. I was good at “doing”, had an affinity for looking after other people, and I feared poverty, or more accurately, I valued being able to look after myself.

So I became a nurse but continued to read everything. Eventually, I was even able to travel.

I started this blog around 2012 as a means to communicate my activities to family and friends while abroad. At the time, the internet was in its infancy, so wifi was not very common, and I certainly did not own a laptop. Smart phones were not in existence yet. David and I would locate internet cafés that offered computer and wifi connection for a fee, usually terribly expensive and for very short chunks of time. I had to go when the places were not very busy, because everyone else was also needing computer time so they were always crowded. And I had to think and type quickly because the time allotments were usually about 15-30 minutes.

I loved writing this blog, and would only do it while travelling. When social media came to be, I discovered instagram and all the evils of too much screen time. My long, thoughtful, once-a-week blog posts became a nuisance that I traded in for quick, manic instagram posts that allowed me to share multiple photos per day in rapid succession.

Suddenly, it is 2024; I have achieved absolutely nothing of note in my blue-collar job, I have four million regrets, and my attention span has evaporated, long ago destroyed by my addiction to my iPhone.

What I still possess is a love of travel (really only limited to Western Europe, though), a love of words, and an itch to document things for when my memories fail me down the road.

I would like to return my brain to its pre-iPhone state though, so I have told myself that this is the year I put the phone down and pick up books and The New Yorker again (the stack of unread New Yorkers in our house shames me, and also threatens to smother me to death should it ever fall on me, it is exactly that large).

I am also telling myself that I will write in this blog again, moving myself away from hours of staring at instagram, as part of my brain re-training.

Please wish me luck. And please do follow along if you are so inclined. It is going to be mostly nonsense writing because I am a nonsense person who has never formally studied writing, but on January 17, David and I are heading off to France again for our annual “let Minerva escape another Canadian winter and her problems by living in France for several weeks pretending to be French” project, so the words and photos might be interesting and fun. Or they may not, but it still will not cost you anything but the time you spent reading my jibber jabber 😄

Thanks for reading.