Sophie's Story

   I was almost home from my Small Town Toastmaster meeting when I realized something. It made me very happy and if I hadn't been driving, I would have done a victory dance. Instead I took one hand off the wheel and did a few celebratory fist pumps.    What made me happy is that I had crossed the Lafayette Bridge and didn't even notice that I had done so.   A little background is in order here. When we moved to our current home, I had to find a new route to my Toastmaster's meetings. The route I used to take was going to take too long. There were several routes I could take and I tried them. One worked really well to get to my meeting, but did not work so well when I tried to get home.   The route that worked the best for getting home took me over the Lafayette bridge. The problem was that I was scared of that bridge. I've always been a little nervous about driving over bridges. My particular fear of the Lafayette came when the I35 bridge collapsed in 2007. At the

   I was dining out with some friends last night when the topic of missions came up. I turned to the woman sitting next to me and said that I thought she and I were the only two who had not served a mission. A word of explanation is in order here. In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, serving a mission means a two year commitment for young men or an 18 month commitment for young women. They are sent to serve in an area either in the United States or overseas to teach those investigating the church and many other tasks.   Maybe I was just imagining it, but she seemed a little sheepish when she said, "No, I got married instead." I felt like I had sort of put my foot in my mouth. (It happens often enough that I recognize it when it happens.) There are age requirements for mission work. The age requirements were higher at the time this woman could have served. Then she said that she never really wanted to serve a mission. At this point my toes were definitely ti

   One of my favourite books growing up was called Behold Your Queen by Gladys Malvern. It is sort of Biblical fiction as it is about Esther, but with a lot more detail. I have clear memories of reading this book sitting by the fireplace wrapped up in my mother's warmest robe shaking with chills during my yearly bout with the flu. I checked out this book once a year in the fall right around Thanksgiving for several years. At some point I stopped. I'm not sure why. Maybe I thought that it carried the flu virus.    Every so often I'd think about the book and sometimes would make a half hearted effort to get a copy. The book was originally published in 1951. It was out of print when I started checking it out from the library. The chances of ever being able to read it again, let alone own a copy seemed small. I eventually forgot about it leaving the memory of the book behind like so many other things from my younger years.    Several months ago I read something about a go

   Several things have happened lately. None of them are enough to fill a whole column. I decided that I would share a few of them.    A few weeks ago I was awarded by Advanced Communicator Bronze award from Toastmasters. To do this I needed to complete my Competent Toastmaster award (which I'd done already) and then complete two advanced manuals. Each manual has five speech projects in it. I went through several different manuals before deciding on Storytelling and Humorous speech. I'd been working on these for quite a while and decided that this was the year I needed to finish it. I was much closer than I thought. I finished my last two speeches and while I would like to have done them better, they were done.    I hadn't realized how long I had been working on this until brought my projects to the VP of Education to sign. The first speech I did out of the Storytelling manual was 10 years ago. It took me a decade to finish ten speeches. I'm going to work on the ne

   I've been surfing the internet for the past 30 minutes trying to find something else to write about. On the weekends I prefer to write about something light, something uplifting or something funny. Unfortunately what's been rolling around in my head for the past few days isn't any of those things.    I had various topics I was thinking about. I could write about Scamp's trip to the vet yesterday. I could write about our sump pump and how it started working for the first time last week. (We've never needed it before.) My latest rosemary plant bit the dust yesterday, I could write about how frustrating it is to keep one of those alive. I could write about the frilly scarf I knitted.   My mind still kept coming back to the same unfunny topic that hit me earlier in the week. It started when I saw an article about two preteen girls stabbing a third girl in Wisconsin. I read about it because I was curious. We had been to this town while on our last vacation. It is

   Last week the Table Topics master brought a "Chat Pack" with her. This is a set of cards with different questions on them that can be used for Table Topics at a Toastmasters meeting. There were a lot of good questions with a lot of good answers. One of them struck me as very interesting. The question was, "If you had to be known by a number, rather than a name, what number would you choose."    I think this is interesting because we are actually known by numbers as well as names. The one that comes to mind first is a phone number. It used to be that a phone number would be tied to a place, but now with cell phones so prevalent, more often a phone number is tied to a person.   There are some people who are known just by number. In Green Bay number 4 is Brett Favre and number 12 is Aaron Rodgers. There are  characters in movies or TV shows who are known only or mostly by number. 007 is always James Bond. Seven of Nine is a character in a Star Trek series. 99 i