Here is everything you ever wanted to know about me. If you did. And I'm not saying you do. (I wrote it at the request of my new editor. Fortunately, he found it amusing and I'm still employed.)

Betsy Sundquist is a new reporter for the Capitol Report/St. Paul Legal Ledger. She has held every conceivable job in journalism in the upper Midwest over the last 20 years, most recently as a Web and copy editor for the unbearably exciting Industrial Fabrics Association International in Roseville, Minnesota. She did such a sterling job there that the company eliminated the position in April.

Betsy is a fifth-generation Kansan whose geologist father dragged his family to the ends of the earth, or at least the ends of the country. She grew up (more or less) in Kansas, Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado and North Dakota, where she graduated from high school in Bismarck and began working for the daily Bismarck Tribune at 16. She attended Moorhead (Minn.) State University and worked during college at The Forum in Fargo, then later as entertainment editor at the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader.

She took a journalism hiatus to work as an aide in Washington to U.S. Sen. Jim Abdnor of South Dakota, then returned to The Forum when Abdnor wasn’t re-elected, vowing never again to allow her job to depend on the whims of voters. Since moving to the Twin Cities, she’s worked as a process server, an online pop-culture columnist, a desktop publisher, a communications aide for the House Republican caucus (so much for that “whim of the voters” vow) and a test proctor. She is married to Kip Sundquist, an Oracle systems analyst for Mortenson Construction, and they have a brilliant 7-year-old son, Andrew, and a charming 10-year-old Akita, Otis. They live in Burnsville.

Betsy reads voraciously and sells used books online (which is the reason for the 7,500-plus books on shelves in her garage). She loves rummage sales, concerts, the Renaissance Festival and the Minnesota State Fair, and couldn’t live without satellite radio, Starbucks iced tea and her personally autographed photo of Bobby Sherman. And she wins a lot of radio station contests, mostly for ridiculously large barbecue grills.