Sophie's Story

I've been corresponding with my stepdaughter, Elin, the old fashioned way through letters. She's going through a difficult time in her life and I give her my thoughts being an older woman and a little comic relief as well as keeping her up to date on what is going on with her family here in Minnesota. She is married to Mark and their marriage has been troubled for the past half year or so. We've discussed marriage in several letters. One of the things that she wrote was that she wanted a close relationship with her mother-in-law but Dee had just divorced Mark's father and was too busy trying to find herself to develop one. Due to the troubles in their marriage Dee has made it clear that she does not like Elin. Elin understands why Dee feels the way that she does. Mark is her son and she wants her son to be happy. The chances of her having the relationship she wants with Dee is pretty small. I told her that sometimes when you can't form the sort of relationship...

I belong to a Toastmasters club in Small Town Wisconsin. Spring Speech contest is coming up and I'm contemplating competing. I have competed at speech contest before. The last time was about six years ago. I gave a speech in the Humorous Speech category. I won the area and division contests and competed at the district contest in Duluth. It was a disaster. The speech that had been so well received at the area and division levels didn't play well in the large venue of the district contest. I felt that I had let my club down by not even placing. I also found out the the first place winner was a professional speaker as in he writes and gives speeches as his job. While I understand that there is no rule barring him from competition it seemed unfair. That's like a person who swims laps at the Y once or twice a week competing against Michael Phelps. Both might be talented swimmers but Phelps is able to spend much more time at it as it is his job.Part of the third place spe...

If you look at my profile on Facebook you would see a picture of one or both of our cats. The reason for this is because I dislike all pictures of myself. Actually there are three good pictures of me in existence. One of them was taken when I stood up for a friend of mine at her wedding. I'm wearing a very flattering cherry red tea length dress. My hair is just above my shoulders and curly. I have a comb with a red and white flowers holding back my hair on the left side. The other was taken at Lambeau Field in Green Bay Wisconsin a few years back. It is a picture of C and I from the neck up wearing Packer ball caps. I'm wearing a yellow Lambeau Field sweatshirt. The last are any pictures of me from our wedding. (Only the ones that are from the waist up, I don't like any of the full length ones.) I don't think the wedding pictures should count though, I had a professional hair and make up job. Anyone would look good if a professional did their hair and make up. That'...

First I want to congratulate Drew Brees, the New Orleans Saints and their fans on winning the Super Bowl last weekend. On Monday I tried to introduce a new word into football vocabulary. It was inspired by Peyton Manning's intercepted throw during Sunday's game. On my status I wrote," A quarterback who throws an interception during a critical part of the game has "pulled a Favre". I was wondering if anyone would comment on that. Two people did. One of them accused me of Favre bashing and said that Duante Culpepper was actually more of an interception thrower than Favre. The other person said that Culpepper shouldn't be compared to the great Favre who will still be in the hall of fame no matter what. I don't think I'm bashing Favre, it is a fact that he tends to throw interceptions when pressured enough. He's been that way ever since I've started watching football although he did improve this year. I think it could catch on. As a noun i...

C and I finally had enough of a day off together that I decided we needed to start shopping for a dishwasher. I'm tired of having scales on my hands instead of skin and tired of spending so much time in the kitchen trying to keep up with the dishes. It's not like we have a ton of dishes to wash, but every day a few more get dirty and since there isn't that much counter space it looks like a lot. I knew where I wanted to go, there is a locally owned chain that I was interested in checking out. We'd already looked at Lowe's and Home Depot. We saw a lot of different ones, but wanted to check out some locally owned appliance stores. We walked up the the front desk where there were several men sitting and asked where the dishwashers were. One of them got up and went to show us. Along the way he asked us what features we wanted and what our price range was. I wasn't looking for anything fancy just something efficient,quiet that would wash the food off the dishe...

When I took up running last spring, I got myself outfitted. I bought T-shirts and pants and one pair of shorts just in case I felt daring. I also bought about 3 bags of socks. Nothing fancy just plain white ankle socks with a terry cloth lining. I wanted something that would cushion my feet when I ran. This week I spent tearing my sock drawer apart looking for a pair of socks to wear while working out. After about 5 minutes I finally found a mismatched pair. (I knew they were mismatched because the toes were different colours.) Since I was only going downstairs I took them and put them on. What bothered me is that a few short months ago I had half a drawerful of white socks. I thought I was set on socks for at least a year. I did a more thorough search of the drawer and found that half of the few socks left had holes in them. How the heck is that possible? It's not like they'd had holes worn into them. Now I need to go through the drawer and decide to either throw the one ...