Sophie's Story

My grandmother had pots of African Violets in the living room windows. There would be two to three pots sitting on each sill. I liked looking at them. They were shades of purple, pink and white and very pretty. Grandma said I could pick one out and take it home with me. I thanked her and looked over each one before making my selection. When I got it home I took care of it as best I could. I kept it watered put it in a window. All the blossoms fell off and it was clear the plant was sick. I fertilized it, talked to it, kept it watered and did all I could to keep it alive. It died anyway. I felt really bad. Grandma had given me this wonderful plant and I killed it. I decided I had a black thumb. I tried growing other house plants with varying success. They would stay healthy but eventually all of them would die. I gave up. No plants for me, except for this vine thing I got that seemed to stay alive no matter what I did. Fast forward to 2008. After our cat,Ary, died a frien

The St Paul Minnesota Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints held their Stake Conference this past weekend. Stake Conference is when several Wards (congregations) gather together to listen to various speakers. These include people who live in the Stake,local church leadership and sometimes General Authorities (people with leadership positions over the church at large). One of the speakers at this fall's conference was Elder Gerrit Gong. Elder Gong was called to his position in the church this past April. He is 56 years old and married with four sons. He was educated at Brigham Young University and Oxford where he obtained his Ph.D. He was worked for the State Department and the United States Embassy in China. He was also a professor at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities. One would think that reading the above paragraph a dry talk was in store. College professors have a stereotype of being rather stuffy,delivering boring "I know it all" type

I was cleaning out my wallet the other day trying to find something. It was stuffed with receipts,business cards, odd slips of paper and blank pieces of paper that were probably receipts at one time, but the ink has faded off. Obviously I need to clean it out more often. One thing I have quite a few of is loyalty cards. It seems to be the trend in business today that if you give a business your phone number, address and email, they give you a card that is supposed to give you all kinds of discounts and stuff. Some of these make sense Aveda,Petsmart,Petco,Hallmark,Godiva and Dunn Brothers. These are places I go to on a regular basis. Well...maybe not Godiva. Godiva is a special treat. I like the truffles and they have really good dark chocolate. Some of them make no sense. I found MGM liquor warehouse, Famous Footwear, DSD Footwear,Breadsmith and PB Loco. I think I may have gone to MGM looking for some cooking wine once. I don't go there on any kind of regular basis so how d

C likes to tell people that I am literally an answer to a prayer. He says that he realised that Heavenly Father would know the type of woman he should have in his life and asked for help in recognising that woman when he met her. I'm certain he did have a few ideas about what he would like. She'd have to be good looking,educated, like music and some other things. Maybe he had a few daydreams now and again. Then I came into the picture. He's told me several times that I am more than he could have ever wanted. I tend to be a bit skeptical of that kind of talk. Then I realised there is one thing he probably wished for that he didn't think he'd get. I like football. I'm sure I'm not the only woman that likes football, in fact I know I'm not. The stereotype does remain that women prefer to do anything except sit in front of a TV on fall weekends and watch the game. I started watching football with my Dad when I got out of college. Sin

C had some dental work done and needed to take some ibuprofen to work. I remembered that he had a bottle next to his bed on the night table. "Take the bottle by the bed!", I called out to him from the other room. I heard sounds of shuffling as he rooted around his side of the bed to look for the pills. A few minutes later he came out. "I can't find them, " he said. "Did you look under the bed?" I asked. He answered yes. "Did you look really well under the bed?" "Yes," he said "They are not in the bedroom." I knew they were there. I saw them when I put something in the trash can a few days ago. I knew no one had touched them. They were there, he just didn't see them. I went back into the bedroom, pulled up the dust ruffle and saw the bottle. I picked it up and handed it to him. "Honey, Where did you find it?!" he exclaimed, in an exasperated tone of voice. "Under the bed." "But I looked th

C and I went to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival yesterday. We had a very good time. I had been watching the weather the past few weeks. If the weather was going to be cool enough I was going to wear the noblewoman's costume I bought about 12 years ago. At that time I was dating a guy who worked at the Festival and was very into it. He had found a dress that he thought I might like. I tried it on and it fit. In fact it looked very good on me. It was my favourite shade of blue with dark gold accents. The outfit consisted of a gauze shift, a taffeta/satin underskirt, a velvet overskirt and a long sleeved blue velvet bodice with dark gold accents and a decorated front. I wore a matching blue velvet hat with a small black feather and a small blue pouch. Sometimes I would carry a pewter wine cup decorated with a Celtic knot pattern. I wore it every time I went to the Festival. Sometimes it would be way too hot to put it on, but I did. I had even worked up a character to be

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is holding their General Conference this weekend. Church members from throughout the world will gather at the convention center in Salt Lake City to listen to talks by the General Authorities and other church leaders. More will be watching on satellite TV and Internet broadcasts as well as audio broadcasts. Presiding over this gathering and giving several talks will be President Thomas S. Monson. I encourage people to listen to President Monson speak either at LDS.org or on YouTube. He is an excellent speaker and a great storyteller. You don't have to be a church member or even know much about the LDS faith to appreciate a speech given by President Monson. At age 83 he's been married for nearly 62 years and has three children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He illustrates his points with events taken from his life as well as quotes, poems and lines from musicals. My favourite talk by President Monson is one he g

One of my readers had looked over the archived columns. He noticed that on average there are about seven to eight columns a month going back now almost a year. He remarked to me that he was amazed at the fact that I could find enough material to write that many. (I hope I paraphrased him correctly.) Actually there is another year and a half worth of material that I wrote before I went to Blogspot, so my archive is a bit more that what you see at the side of the page. It does look impressive even to me. To be fair though, I must admit there are a few "duplicates". The holiday columns, for instance, are on the same topic. I usually write one on my birthday and another on our anniversary. His comment reminded me of something I read in Ben Bradlee's book 'A Good Life'. He mentions an Style Section editor named Jim Triutt. Mr. Bradlee had casually asked once, "Where the hell are all the ideas?" In reply Mr. Truitt sat in front of a typewriter for 47