I wrote the below rambling letter while making a gross of cookies for my daughter swim team sponsored swim-meet this weekend. I suppose that I will not be on line all weekend or not much at any case.
This is a letter for a pen-pal swap on swap-bot.

Dear J,
I’m sitting down to write you this letter trying to think of what to tell you.
It’s funny I can talk for hours these days when once I was too shy to talk. But when I was much younger I could write eleven page letters to friends far away.
I’m not sure what happened but that stopped sometime when I was in college. I suppose the pressure of paper writing over took the need or ability to write letters. I think since then I have been spoiled by the internet. Email became the main written communication tool for me in the early 1990s. It was the telephone that kept me in contact with friends but as we spread out the expense got too much.
I have decided that 41 is not too old to have a Pen-pal and I have never had one that wasn’t a friend first.
So I am a 41 year old mother of an 11 year old girl and a 5 year old boy. I’ve been married for almost 14 years to a good man I met in college.
That 14 years has been the most geographically settled in my life. This is neither a good nor bad thing. I just traveled with my family most of my childhood.
My father is an English Professor at UCLA and he took the job in 1969 in hopes of moving to a small college like he and my mother went to (and I did) after a few years. Seeing that he has been there for 41 years that never happened. That Did however afford him the opportunity to teach and study/research abroad.
This started in 1972 or 3 when he was took a postion with the University of Leiden in Holland to teach there on exchange for two six month session with six months in between.
So off my family went. I attended a Dutch kindergarten and had my tonsild out in Holland.
After that he tried to find a way to go over seas as often as possible. We had many trips to live in live in England as short as nine months and as long as 2 ½ years.
A result of this is that I don’t have a High School diploma. I have ‘O’ levels and ‘A’ levels which are the exams that are nationally taken in England or at leat were in 1985-1987. I think they have changed since.
I think this letter is probably rambling. But one has to note that I keep getting up to bake cookies. I am tasked with making 10 dozen for my daughter’s swim meet this weekend.
I do love to bake and it is often more adventurous than planned. Well as my finished batch of cookies  cools and the next batch chills and some butter bowls soak in warm soapy water. I want to comment on some of your profile (although if you are anything like me you are now wondering what you wrote.)
I am fascinated by the fact that you have both an art gallery and a small farm. The part that fascinates me the most is that the most creative family I know have chickens rabbits and goats (as well as dogs and cats) as well as pursuing artisitic careers Dad is a retired very successful interior designer, Mom is a painter and a potter daughter is a modern artist who does wall sculpture with beach plastic and son is a poet. Daughter sells her art as well as working for an art board and a program called Art From Scrap. It is  really cool they focus on doing art from discards and trash.
I was thinking about how you like short stories and old movies. I am reading a fun book that is a series of letters between and author her agent or publisher and a few other friends that is set in the 1940s around the end of World War Two in England. I find it a good In Between book to read bits of it goes quickly and is not too hard to put down and pick back up later. It is called “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.
Well I am off to eat something fast before I pick up my son it is hard to do much when he is around he is a very active and busy boy.
I may just write a letter about my Kids some time.

Yours,
Me
PS I have enclosed some scraps of paper that I think could go well in collages.