Sophie's Story

I'm not sure what we were discussing at work when I said, "Things were done much better in my day." I caught the quick look that my tech gave me. I knew that look, it was the same look he gave me the day the store manager brought in an old jukebox full of 45s. I had to explain the concept of vinyl records to him. He had no idea. I explained to him that what I had just said was a quote from Alice Keppel mistress to King Edward VII of England during the Abdication Crisis of King Edward VIII. I didn't expect him to know what that was so I gave him a very condensed version. For those of you who don't know about King Edward VIII, I'll explain. In January 1936 King George V of England died and was succeeded by the popular Prince of Wales, who took the name King Edward VIII. The new king was unmarried and was seeing Wallis Simpson,wife of a British shipping executive. Later that year Mrs. Simpson filed for divorce. The King informed his Prime Minister that he planned...

Football playoffs are going on right now. I'm not a huge fan, but I have a few teams that I cheer on. My favourite team as many of you know is the Green Bay Packers. They were defeated by the Arizona Cardinalsa few weeks ago. The other team I like is the Indianapolis Colts. I started following them when Tony Dungy was the coach as Dungy is a class act. Like most Green Bay fans I do not like the Minnesota Vikings. I would rejoice every January as they would start to lose and not make it to the playoffs. I would shake my head over the dumb stuff that the players would do and the embarrassing situations that they would find themselves in. Green Bay players would never act that way. Now the Vikings are playing this weekend and the winner, I think, will be playing in the Super Bowl. Everywhere I look I'm seeing purple and gold. Everyone is excited about the Vikings who play New Orleans later today. I'm sure a lot of fans are checking into the possibility of going to the Super B...

A friend of mine said she was "gobsmacked" by some poetry she had read. She has this massive vocabulary and every time I have coffee with her it is a treat as I always learn something new. Gobsmacked has so many great images that go along with it. It got me thinking about some of my favourite phrases,words and quotes. I'd like to share them with you. High octane pain in the ass. I read this in a book once. It is one of the worst insults I use. Not just an ordinary every day, mildly annoying person. This is someone who drives me up a tree on a regular basis. It coveys how I feel with a minimum of bad language. "We do not know what is normal, we only know what is customary." I have no idea where this quote came from or who said it. This one was a lot of comfort to me when I was younger. I didn't fit in to any groups or cliques in school. It was difficult not being like everyone else. They were "normal" I was not. Now that I'm older I've f...

It only took us two years and three months, but we finally have pictures on the walls. When we moved here there were a few assorted nails and screws where the previous owners had things hanging. I put a few pictures up to cover those spots. I just put up what I thought would work thinking that later we would plan it better. I didn't realise it would take so long. The rest of the pictures went downstairs to store. Last fall I decided I wanted them up. I convinced C to help me and we brought all the pictures upstairs. We decided the best way to do this was to put them on the floor near where we wanted them and to hang them if we decided that we liked the spot. We distributed them throughout the house. The smaller cat pictures went in the hall along with my print of 'North Dakota in 87 Exits'. 'Life in the Vast Lane', another North Dakota print, found a home in the living room by the coat closet. A picture of cats in red hats fit just right on a wall between the l...

Hello everyone, Colby here. Scamp says he has to have a nap so I'm writing this all by myself. I have been living here for nearly a year now. I lived with a human before, she was my foster human, but hid most of the time or stayed around other animals. Humans are strange. I will give you an example. Yesterday I heard Sophie say she was under the weather. I know that the weather is in the sky and that we are below the sky. That means we are all under the weather all the time. There is a tree in the house. Scamp says that last year around this time the humans got a tree and put in in the house. There are all kinds of toys hanging from the branches. The humans yell at me when I try to play with them. If they don't want me to play with them, they should not put them out. There are also lights on the tree on a green string. The string is fun to chew on, but Sophie doesn't want me to chew on the string. I chewed on one string and the lights went out. I hope they can be fi...

I gave into temptation on New Years Day. After watching Carrie and C surfing Facebook I finally started a page of my own. I was a bit reluctant as Facebook seems like something for younger people. I didn't want to be the person trying to act young and be "cool" (or whatever the equivalent term is these days.) I filled out the form completely as I do for all forms. I didn't even hesitate when it asked for my high school and the year that I graduated. After I filled it out a list popped up. There were names and pictures of many people that were in my high school class. This was something of a dilemma for me. I did not like high school and have very few good memories of those four years. I was very shy and didn't fit in anywhere. I had two close friends but aside from them had nothing in common with anyone else. My goal was to get out. I knew there was something better for me somewhere else and the only way to find it was to go to college. I picked a college fa...