Sophie's Story

    C has had long hair for as long as we've been married. It was above his shoulders in our wedding pictures. When it grew longer he took to wearing it in a small ponytail. Think Founding Fathers type of ponytail. I kind of liked the long hair. You don't see many men his age with long hair and being a musician, I felt it was appropriate.   He's been thinking about cutting it for the last year or so. He vacillated. Sometimes he would get annoyed with his hair and mumble something about cutting it. Sometimes he would admire it and want to leave it as is.   Sometimes he would ask me what I thought. I would always tell him that it is his hair and he can do what he likes.  He's the one who has to live with it. In truth, I did not want him to cut it. Part of my reason is that I didn't want him to fit the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint stereotype. When you think of male LDS members, you generally tend to think short conservatively cut hair, white starched

   Recently C received an email from a man that he knows. At the end of the email, the man wrote, say hi to your wifey for me. As C read this to me I was instantly furious. You've got to be kidding. Wifey?  I have a name and he knows very well what it is.  I felt insulted, disrespected, dismissed and treated like an object. There were not enough polite words in my vocabulary to describe how I felt.   I should pause to explain why this set me off. I am not a fan of the word "wife". I use it because it is the common term for the female half of a married couple. However, I feel like it has a somewhat negative connotation to it. To me, there is an implication of inequality that makes me uncomfortable. I prefer spouse. The LDS will sometimes refer to their spouses as "companions" or "eternal companions". I can live with "sweetheart" or "other half" (never better half that's demeaning).   Another thing that irritated me about bein

      Everyone has preconceived ideas about things. Most of the time we don't admit it, but it's true.  It's a natural human instinct. We have to put things into categories so we know how to deal with them.      One thing I have a preconceived notion of are dollar stores. I've always believed that you get what you pay for. Cheap stuff doesn't last. It doesn't look good. It falls apart. You wind up having to replace it with something more expensive anyway.    I imagined dollar stores as small with shelves of plastic trinkets, tacky looking plastic flowers and old paper greeting cards with mismatched envelopes. There would be shelves of ancient looking spices with faded labels and bags of fossilized candy. Another aisle would have shelves of polyester clothing folded haphazardly. There would be an aisle of cheap plastic toys. The whole store would be dingy and smell a little musty.    Because I thought this is what dollar stores were like I never shopped in o

   January is the traditional month for making resolutions for the new year. Many of these resolutions center around diet and lifestyle changes.    I'm not a believer in the new year resolutions because I tend to forget about them after a few weeks. This past holiday season I noticed that I/we were eating a lot of junk food, mostly chips of various kinds. I know this stems from the kinds of food we eat during the holidays. There are cookies, dips, a cheese ball, chili and sandwiches.   I decided that enough was enough. Time to cut out this junk food. The last time we went grocery shopping we did not buy any chips. That's a good start.   I am coming to realise that getting off of junk food is not that easy. I made chili a few nights ago. Normally I eat corn chips with chili. I like to use the chili as a dip for the chips. It's not very healthy even if I'm eating chipotle bean chili. I resisted the urge to send C to the store to get a bag of corn chips. Instead, I ma

   Thomas S. Monson, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, passed away recently at the age of 90. Many news outlets published obituaries. One obituary, published by a newspaper in a large eastern city, upset many members of the LDS church. ( I'm not naming the paper because I don't want to give it more publicity than it already has.)   The obituary started out by mentioning that President Monson despite lowing the age at which women could serve as missionaries, did not allow women to be ordained as priests and mentioned his opposition to same-sex marriage. Many people were bothered by the fact that the newspaper wrote positive or neutral obituaries about other public figures who had recently passed away. Some viewed this as an attack on religion and religious people.    There have been several articles about the outrage and anger felt by many LDS church members who feel that the late President Monson was posthumously attacked. An online petition is b

   I am a very happy camper as I write today. It has been a good day and the day isn't even over yet.    The store is now open on Saturdays for four hours which means I worked this morning. We didn't have a lot of people coming in so it was a good time to catch up. The tech got the garbage, recycling and shred bin emptied. We got some prescriptions organized. There were several prescriptions we couldn't fill because the drugs were out of stock. We got them ordered in. The tech had time to order some over the counter things as well. The shelves were getting a little bare.    I stayed for an hour after we closed to get some paperwork done. I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped, but it was better than nothing. I worked in the office and enjoyed the peace and quiet in the empty pharmacy. There's a nice spirit in my store. I can't explain it. It's unlike anyplace I've ever worked at before. Everyone gets along and we are all working together to help

   Last week C and I went to a movie. This is a rare event. C loves to go to movies. When he was a kid he took a job cleaning a local theater so that he could watch movies for free. He passed this love of films to his children. He would take them to movies as often as he could.   I'm not so much of a movie buff. When I was a kid, I would go to movies but I would always feel sick and nauseated. Several times I had to leave a movie because I thought I was going to throw up. Sometimes I did.   I always thought it was the greasy popcorn smell that made me sick. I discovered the real reason while reading a medical journal article on motion sickness. It turns out that it is possible for people to get motion sick in movie theaters.  I tested this theory out by going to a movie after taking some meclizine. I was only slightly sick. It was a miracle.   Over the years I figured out how to dose the meclizine so that I can watch a movie without any problems. It seems that I have to start

    2017 is over. The last glass of champagne (or sparkling juice) has been drunk. The revellers are off of the streets. Here in Minnesota, it's -13 degrees.The sky is slowly turning from black to blue. The first morning of 2018 is here.    I am sitting at the computer writing this column, but I am not where I thought I'd be. Last year at this time I didn't see any big changes. I would go to work, attempt to stay caught up, try to take a day off once in awhile. I'd do all I could to take care of my customers. Maybe I'd get to spend a little time knitting, practising an instrument or spending time with C.    What I didn't know was that seven months later, I would abruptly resign from my job. My safe job with a stable corporation, the place that I had worked for 11 years. I discovered one thing about working for a big corporation. No matter how many unpaid hours you put in, no matter how loyal you are, no matter how hard you work, you are expendable. You can b