I'm glad you were born

from the writer's almanac:

It's the birthday of novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Ontario (1939). Her father was an entomologist who spent every year from April to November studying insects at a forestry research station in northern Quebec. Atwood said, "At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown." She had no access to television or movies, and few children to play with. So she spent all her time exploring the woods and reading.

She only began to attend full-time school in Toronto when she was 11 years old. She wrote, "I was now faced with real life, in the form of other little girls—their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip, and an inability to pick up earthworms without wriggling all over and making mewing noises like a kitten."

Atwood decided she wanted to be a writer at a time when there was almost no such thing as Canadian literature. There was actually a year in the early 1960s when a total of only five Canadian novels were published in the whole country. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, came out in 1969. The Handmaid's Tale became an international best-seller in 1985.

no wonder Cat's Eye rings so painfully true.

meanwhile, it's a good day. perfect weather and excellent yard saling: I got some big clunky brown clogs with buckles, 2 pair of zippered ankle boots, 2 pair of jeans that fit, assorted nice tops, an old point bar ballcap, 2 mini metal lunchboxes (1 boris & natasha, 1 monopoly), and the kids bought a 3rd rock from the sun video. I also bought a stack of books at the library sale.

right now the kids are howling with laughter at john lithgow.