San Diego Zoo

Throwback to when I went to the zoo in San Diego and saw those two beautiful birds 🙂 I was amazed by the toucan’s beak and red eyes of the starling.

© Photography by Madison Kennedy

It’s Christmas day 😀

Time to open up your presents if you haven’t on Christmas Eve, and time for me to reflect on people who are less fortunate and deserve all the help they can get.

This is something that is very important to me, I support a couple charities with occasional small gestures, or donations if I’m able. I don’t usually share online when I do so, but I think it should be spread because you never know, someone reading might be encouraged to help however it’s possible for them to.

For Christmas this year, since mostly this holiday is about kids, I chose two charities that work hard to help children in need. I am a frequent flyer member of two airlines that make it available to donate the miles you acquire after your trips, and even though I didn’t have too many, I always think that even the smallest action could end up being meaningful to someone, somewhere.

Air France allowed me to donate all of the miles I had acquired, to UNICEF – 7,634 Miles-Prime to 0 for me ! Unfortunately Lufthansa has a stricter miles donation program, and it has to be either 5,000 / 10,000 or 20,000. Thankfully I had a little over 10k miles so I was able to donate 10,000 to SOS Children’s Village. Those miles will now sponsor 18 children in the town of Nhlangano, Swaziland with medical care.

Donating your miles doesn’t cost anything. If it happens that you have some and don’t know what good you could do with them, this is a nice gesture especially in time for Christmas, season of giving back. In the past, I used to keep my miles to upgrade for a better seat on long-haul flights, I know some people who keep theirs to order material things from the airlines’ online stores;

When I found out about the miles donation programs, it didn’t matter  to me anymore, what type of seat I could upgrade for on an intercontinental flight… and I am not really like Madonna, a “Material Girl” 🙂 so the choice was easily made. I hope this post will inspire you to help someone in need, it doesn’t have to be a donation, anything helpful is usually welcome and being selfless brings positiveness.

I am really glad there is something like this I could use my miles for, and I will for sure in the future always donate all the miles I possibly can. I wish a beautiful Christmas to all of you, enjoy this holiday !

The official sites for UNICEF and SOS Children’s Villages

It’s Christmas Eve !

I love celebrating this holiday for so many reasons… okay, mainly three that can be summarized very briefly; 1) spending time with my family, 2) gifts overload ! and 3) FOOD of course 😀

I drool in advance thinking about what my mom will cook. I like eating well, but I’m a terrible cook, so homemade plates by mom are like the Graal for me. We had quite a paleo dinner tonight with smoked salmon, foie gras and snails as first course. Then an amazing french Raclette ! We sat around a grill placed on the table, and had the choice between beef / veal and duck served with warm potatoes and melted cheese.

So good ! Highly caloric but it’s seasonal appropriate 🙂
Finished with macarons from one of my favorite restaurant, (I recommend to anyone who visits Paris to eat there at least once) Café Pouchkine – all right, I have to admit I stole a couple macarons before we even started dinner because they were looking so delicious in their pretty little box in the fridge, I couldn’t resist 😛

That little infraction was totally worth it by the way : I love giving up to my guilty pleasures, especially when I really shouldn’t, makes it just more fun and enjoyable. Anyway, I wasn’t planning on writing a blog entry tonight because I’m feeling super tired and full of that awesome food; a good night sleep is all I can wish for right now, but I missed blogging so much during my three-weeks break (that I needed for personal reasons), I couldn’t help myself from sharing a quick update.

Have a Merry Christmas, xoxox !

Crazy shopping days !

My third round already (since last Sunday) at the Galeries Lafayette in Paris, in search for the perfect gifts for my family : I found cool goodies for everyone and I’m finally done… thank God, because walking for hours was a killer.

I actually loathe shopping because I’m a really lazy person, constantly wish I had someone like a personal shopper to do that kind of thing for me… anyway, it wasn’t so bad this year, I actually had fun 😀 They’ve opened an awesome Disney store on the 4th floor !

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, my family’s tradition is to open the gifts after midnight – can’t wait for it, I’m super impatient BUT there’s going to be good food served, which will keep me occupied no problem until then because I’m an ogre in real life.

I’ll probably share with you what I got for Christmas the next day, so yay !

Christmas tree and festive decorations

First, I want to apologize for taking three weeks break from blogging, I hope you didn’t miss my updates too much, but I really did need time off for personal reasons. I did not take that time off to work on my blog, find a new design, or anything like it… it was just for me, so I could rest and focus on private matters.

Secondly, forget everything that I said before about this blog… a couple of times I tried to change my way of blogging, and I had these new ideas I wanted not experiment, but actually make happen right away; after a while, and every time, I dropped each of those so-called “ideas”. I came to the conclusion I should start clean. For that reason, I changed my blog’s url, which used to be http://iconamerica.me and is no longer mine / active.

From now on, this blog is http://madisonkennedyblog.com which sounds a lot better to me for two reasons : 1) there’s my name in it, and 2) everyone can definitively tell it’s a blog, duh ! It’s a lot simpler, and I’m happy I made that change happen.

Lastly, since this is a new start, expect my blogging to be (just a bit) different from what it used to. I have evolved over the years, and of course it’s going to reflect. Also, in the following weeks especially, I do plan on another design for this blog, to make available more informations about myself and easier to follow me on social media / other websites with updated links.

When I’m done with all that, which probably won’t take as long as the break I just took 🙂 I will write a post about it, and explain what I’ve done, and why… how things are with me, and the projects i would like to try out ! But definitively, when it comes to this blog, it will be clear what it is (spoiler alert : blogging in the most basic form probably), and stay that way whatever experiments I do on my own. I’ll include tangible things on the blog only.

That’s it 😛 I’m glad I’m back from my break, I can’t wait to share things with you, xoxox