"Fortune favours the bold?"

Friends and former colleagues Don Rathborne and Jean Kay Canwrite! 2010  Victoria

Under my new writing regime, I am trying to keep my desk top -- the real, not the virtual one -- tidy. I pick up a folded sheet of paper.

At the top of one side is written: "Fortune favours the bold. From the Romans?" Beneath this is the scribbled question, "Who burned the library of Alexandra?" Definitely my scrawl.

Then comes a name and phone number in my husband's hand. I flip the paper over and see, in my daughter's neat, vertical printing, three TV cable channels: BBC Canada, Biography, TSN2. After that, a couple of phrases in my husband's hand: Night Panicked America. Orson Welles.

Flipping the paper around 180 degrees, I see in the palest pencil the words "Sask Tel" with a phone number. So that's why I brought it upstairs from the TV room. Last night while I was watching John Alderton's P.G. Wodehouse videos from the 1970s, I got a call from a friend who is in Saskatchewan with her aging mother, and wrote down her new cell number.

Such small and interwoven threads form the web of our lives. From these we glean the connections that become stories.

What's the story about the picture? These two used to teach people on cruise ships how to take, improve, and use their photographs. Before the conference, I had a load of pictures on my computer. Now, after Don's wonderful workshop at Canwrite, I'm finally able to use them.