Blondi WHO?

Blondi Blathers, gussied up

Blondi Blathers is Kate’s Twitter handle. Blondi herself is a fictional character. Blondi Blathers is not Kate.

Blondi sees ghosts. Kate wishes she could.

Blondi’s single. Not Kate.

Blondi runs a village cafe. Kate’s doing well when she gets a sandwich made for supper.

They have a few similarities. They bake bread; Blondi uses the oven on weekday mornings; Kate makes six loaves every once in a while. Blondi jaunts to the lake before unlocking the cafe’s front door. Kate strolls on a gravel road surrounded by farmers’ fields. Blondi has a sister, Dawn, who’s a master baker and an artist; Kate has one of each — Karen and Joan.

Blondi and Kate read the same books. They both do hatha yoga, though Blondi is more dedicated to it and has renovated the attic floor of the little old elevator specifically for her daily practice. She lives on the second floor, above the cafe. Kate lives at Golden Grain Farm. She posts on this blog most days, right here front and centre.

Under SIDE ORDER you’ll find bits of conversation “Overheard” or little snippets about Blondi’s days in the cafe, but these are lost and gone forever (dreadful sorry, Clementine) when that section is updated. If you like that sort of thing be sure to click on over there.

Some of the images in the sidebar are clickable. Hover over them with your mouse to see where they’ll take you, if anywhere.

You can CONTACT Kate directly at stubblejumperscafe@gmail.com. Please do. She loves to hear from you.

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Where Kate Lives

Golden Grain Farm is about six miles from Wadena, Saskatchewan, Canada. The property was named by children’s author Thornton W Burgess (1874–1965). Apparently there once was a big three-storey farmhouse (long gone) with a wraparound veranda. It was his summer retreat back in the day, but it burned down. Now she and her farmbeau live in a smallish 1970s bungalow. This sign hung at the end of the driveway when they bought the place, and it is still there along with this old eyesore hunk of junk farm implement. More info about Thornton Burgess: click here.

More about Kate:

• born in 1959.
• where she gets the mail, buys groceries, goes to the library:  TOWN

• She wrote letters to penpals as a kid and at 12 got her first diary. At 15 an English teacher assigned a journal for the duration of the school semester and she’s kept one ever since. When email and online journals came to her attention around 1995, she jumped right in.

 • If she could do exactly what she wanted to do every day of her life, she’d be reading, writing, listening to music, playing music (though she can’t play her bass guitar, piano, harmonica or accordion worth shit, it’s still fun), singing (not in public), listening to her favourite radio programs, communing with the flowers and birds and fairies and elves, and sitting on the deck with a friend and a glass of wine on a summer evening, or by a crackling fire in the winter.

• What she actually does is try to keep on top of the dishes, read and write at every opportunity, forget to play her musical instruments (why?? it’s so much fun!),  spend as much time outside as she can when the weather is fair, and sit alone on the deck with her glass of wine on summer evenings, admiring her flowers and listening to the birds and hoping fairies and elves really do exist.

•For about 10 years she freelanced as a subject editor for the architecture, dance, theatre and film sections of The Canadian Encyclopedia. In 2016 she came off a three-year stint in the editor’s chair at the local newspaper. She was a freelance writer, copyeditor and proofreader for a publisher of student agenda books till the company was sold in the fall of 2019. In July that year she took a part-time position as administrator of the village office in her home town (yay!). She volunteers for the Wadena Food Bank as its communications person.

• It’s possible that you have landed on this page without knowing that Saskatchewan is in Canada, so here you go: Canada.

• Her home town is Margo; it’s just 20 minutes down the highway.

 The link will take you to three women singing a Christmas carol at the village hall.

Her sister Karen is in the centre.

Or here: take a little tour of Margo.

Or HERE; Margo as it was in 1914.

And look! Even MORE about Margo!

And yet more AGAIN.

• Some of the family: click here.

Kate’s lived with Scott since 2002. They have three sons (Gunnar, Emil, Everett), a daughter-in-law (Melissa) and two granddaughters (Little Eva and Little Rose).

Her Kateness

I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. ~ Michel de Montaigne

STUBBLEJUMPERS CAFÉ RECIPE COLLECTION: where she shares her tried ‘n’ trues

A Letter Out — Blog 2009-2016

Who Does She Think She Is, Anais Nin? — Blog 2002-2008

Indeed, that is just what a common and private life is: a life of the richest stuff imaginable. ~ Montaigne biographer Sarah Bakewell

Once in a while she sends out a newsletter, Kate’s 5 Things. If you’d like to receive it, email her and say so. It contains 5 brief items she may not have mentioned on the blog. More or less. Sometimes there’s a photo or a link or whatever strikes her fancy. You takes your chances and you pays the price: free.

Your name and address will not be shared with anyone, and a simple email with “unsubscribe” in the subject line will remove you from the list, no questions asked, no feelings hurt, no voodoo doll created in your image.

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Some of Kate’s stuff online:

Stuart McLean
Nell Shipman
Little Mosque on the Prairie

No Perfection Unless You’re a Sunset

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