Where I'm Coming From

Here is a little bit about me.

This is the driveway of our cabin in winter.
The front of the cabin looks out over a beautiful lake.

I was born and raised in Northern Ontario, Canada. My home town has only 600 people. We don't even have a stop light. It's a lovely little place right on Lake Huron, but not much going on.
I am the middle of three daughters. Yup, I'm trouble. :)
Both my parents were elementary teachers, now retired.
Both my sisters each have a set of twins! My older sister has a boy and a girl; my younger has a daughter, and then two girl twins. I have no kids, but I tell everyone that's okay because my sisters have extras. :)

When I was a wee lass, my Dad built a log cabin in the woods. Like, even MORE in the woods than where we were already living! We dubbed it The Great Escape Inn. It is my "Happy Place". I will probably miss Camp more than anywhere else in Canada.  (I've had some confused comments about me using the word "camp" to describe our cabin. Some people call them "cottages". In the North, it's a camp because they were usually hunting camps, not places to vacation. Here's a website of some neat Canadian slang.)

I attended the University of Guelph and received my Bachelor's of Science degree in Biology in 1994.
Soon after I graduated, I spent six weeks touring Europe. Best time of my life!

I wandered about Ontario living in various cities and changing jobs frequently for many years. I hated working and hated offices and hated bosses and hated schedules and hated getting paid by the hour.
In 2008, I quit my office job and started working from home as a transcriptionist. The pay is crap but I absolutely LOVE it. I love working from home in my PJs with Willow to entertain me.

At the time of this blog post, I am living in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, which is about an hour north of Toronto. (That's another Canadian thing apparently: describing distances using travel time instead of kilometers. Huh. Never noticed until someone pointed it out.)
I have a very small one bedroom apartment. It's like 33 square meters (355 square feet). It's nice. I don't really need more space. It's just me and Willow, and Bert sleeps over sometimes.

I have a beat-up 1995 Toyota Corolla that I have named Daisy. She's falling apart, the poor thing. We're trying to cobble her together with duct tape and epoxy until we can leave to Guatemala. Then we'll sell her to some punk kid who will be soooo excited to have a car, even an old jalopy like her. :)

On the wall of my apartment is a map of the world that I took out of a National Geographic magazine when I was a kid. I've kept it all these years. It used to have pins in all the places I wanted to go. You can still see the holes. I had such an adventurous spirit as a child. I hope I can recover at least some of that now in my middle age. Guatemala is a start!