You may well ask. I've been VERY busy, trying to finish a book so I can start the prep on another one. I have a penultimate draft, I think. All it takes is time. Actually, it takes more than that but time is what is negotiable and disappears. So here I am, sticking my head above the - - it's not ground, it's a bog - above the bog, taking a sighting, figuring out where to go from here. Not that I haven't seen or thought a few things. By the end of the day, no, by late afternoon, my head is foggy and my brain is mushy but I can't go to sleep and I can't go out because I'm a prisoner of my project and because I'm too physically tired. So I read and think, in a loopy way. One night I read Jane Gardam's new book "Last Friends". Delicious. Must re-read the other two in the trilogy ("Old Filth" and "The Man in the Wooden Hat"). One night I re-read the book I'm working on and put it into reasonable pagination, set up for fair copy. (Still messed up in one section of different drafts, have to check for repetition - always a danger with computers, less so with physical cut-and-paste.) Watched a couple of old movies and welcomed the commercials because I read stuff, like Candace Savage's "The Geography of Blood", related to the place where I'm going to hibernate in October: Eastend, Saskatchewan. And a book about happiness, very Keynesian. As for the old movies, they are time machines, both disappointments and revelations.When I look in the mirror and try to remember who this old person is, I think I'm the only one who has changed. Not so. Actors in old movies are the best reminders we have about aging. Where does the time go? Right now, it's gone for the nonce and I'm going swimming.

I've been hunting for a fountain for a couple of years now, not the Trevi, nothing like that. I would like a small fountain to mount on the wall of my balcony. The idea is to muffle the sound of the traffic below with the gentle trickle of circulating water. So far I haven't found anything small enough to work. I was surfing the net the other day, finding nothing but big two thousand dollar fountains for large gardens, when I bethought me of The Boy with the Boot., a little fountain in Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg that I researched way back in my other life. So I looked it up and there - lo and whatever - was an article by me about the Boy. Published by Manitoba Pageant, an historical magazine, in 1957, the piece still has my byline on it. I guess that's about the closest to immortality that I'm ever going to get. Quite thrilling, actually. Suddenly I had total recall of my hunt for information, one of my first big research assignments (self-assigned). I remember I was in New York with my husband and I went to an ironworks rumoured to have been the source of the boy - boyS, for there were similar fountains all over North America, each with its own story, I'm sure . I remember sitting in the library of the Winnipeg Free Press reading micro-fiche reels of past issues of the paper, searching for dates relevant to the Boy's history How different research is now when all you have to do is go online for it. (Caution: check your sources.) The lesson is still the same. Be patient. Seek and ye shall find. And one of these days I'm going to find a fountain for my balcony,