How do you do

• I wrote a lot of letters when I was a kid and a young woman, and at 12 I got my first diary. I remember it had a blue cover and was a day-dated one-year diary, but that's about all, and I don't have it anymore. At 15 my English teacher assigned a journal for the duration of the semester and I've been keeping one ever since, and still have them all. When I discovered email and online journals, my letter-writing habit changed. I use my webpage now. The only drawback is not receiving a response in the mail anymore.

• If I could do exactly what I wanted to do every day of my life, I'd be reading, writing, listening to music, playing music (though I can't play my guitar, piano, harmonica or accordion worth shit, it's still fun to try), singing (but not in public), listening to my favourite CBC Radio programs, watching comedies, dramas and documentaries (not horror movies or violent films, ever), communing with the flowers and birds and fairies, and sitting on the deck with a friend and a glass of wine on a summer evening.

• What I actually do is go to work three days a week as editor for the local weekly, tidy up the house on Saturdays, bake bread on Mondays (when I can keep up the routine; even the best ones never last long), try to manage the dishes regularly (and fail), read and write at every opportunity, plan to purchase a proper machine to enjoy my CDs with and never get around to it, listen to CBC radio quite often, forget to play my piano and guitar most of the time, watch Doc Martin and Coronation Street and the odd movie when it's on a channel without commercial interruptions, spend as much time outside as I can when the weather is fair, and sit alone on the deck with my glass of wine on summer evenings, listening to the birds and hoping fairies really do exist.

• Here's the standard list of stuff new readers seem to want to know:
— born in 1959
— mother of two adult sons; stepmother of one
— spousal equivalent to a farmboy since the year 2000
— live about six miles from Wadena, Saskatchewan

• It's possible that you may have landed on this page without knowing that Saskatchewan is in Canada, so here you go: Canada.
• My home town is Margo; it's just a few minutes down the highway.
 The link will take you to three women singing a Christmas carol at the village hall.
My sister Karen is in the centre.
Or here: take a little tour of Margo.
Or HERE; Margo as it was in 1914.
And look! Even MORE about Margo!
And yet more AGAIN.
• Some of the family: click here.