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Justice, Supreme Court of the United States
Through reading, I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. And, through books, I got to travel the world and the universe. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way — through the power of words — to change the world.
1961: Sonia Sotomayor and her younger brother, Juan Jr., with their parents, Juan and Celina, in the family's Bronxdale Homes apartment, a public housing project.
Sonia Maria Sotomayor was born in New York City in the borough of the Bronx, where she spent her formative years. Her parents, Juan and Celina, were both born in Puerto Rico. Juan was a factory worker, Celina a nurse. When Sonia was three, shortly after the birth of her brother, Juan, the family moved from a small apartment in the South Bronx to the Bronxdale Homes, a public housing project. From kindergarten through eighth grade, Sonia Sotomayor attended the Blessed Sacrament Parish School. Life at home was difficult, as strained finances and friction between her parents were aggravated by her father's worsening alcoholism. Little Sonia found refuge in books and in the home of a loving grandmother who lived nearby. At age seven, Sonia was diagnosed with diabetes. Living with this disease taught her self-reliance; she soon learned to sterilize her own needles and inject herself with insulin.
Sonia Sotomayor and her younger brother, Juan Jr., at Ellis Island; Sonia at home with her parents, Celina and Juan Sotomayor; Sonia in her Blessed Sacrament Parish elementary school uniform. Sotomayor's parents came to New York from Puerto Rico during World War II. Juan worked in a factory and Celina as a nurse at a methadone clinic. Sotomayor's alcoholic father died when she was 9, leaving her mother to raise her and Juan Jr. on her own.
Conditions in the housing project deteriorated in the 1960s. Crime and gang activity increased in the neighborhood, and drug users discarded their paraphernalia in the hallways and stairwells. When Sonia was nine, her father died of a heart attack, an end hastened by his excessive drinking. The benefit from her father's life insurance policy enabled Sonia, her mother, and her brother, Juan, to move from the projects to Co-op City, a massive cooperative apartment complex in the Northeast Bronx. After her father's death, Sonia threw herself into her studies and began to excel academically. Childhood reading of the Nancy Drew mysteries piqued her interest in crime and detection, but the Perry Mason television show, with its dramatic courtroom scenes, inspired her to become an attorney. By age ten, she says, her heart was set on going to college and becoming an attorney.
Sonia Sotomayor's graduation from middle school in the Bronx. When her father died in 1963, her mother, Celina, worked hard to raise her and her younger brother as a single parent. "She placed what Sotomayor would later call an 'almost fanatical emphasis' on a higher education, pushing the children to become fluent in English and making sacrifices to purchase a set of encyclopedias that would give them proper research materials for school."
Sonia was valedictorian of her class at Blessed Sacrament, and at Cardinal Spellman High School, where she was an enthusiastic member of the debate team. When a debate team friend who was a year older won a scholarship to Princeton University, he suggested that Sonia apply as well, and to her surprise she was accepted and awarded a full scholarship.
Sotomayor and friends at Princeton; Sotomayor graduates from Yale in 1979. In 1972, Sotomayor graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx where she was valedictorian of her class. She went on to graduate summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1976, where she was awarded the Pyne Prize, which is the highest academic award given to undergraduates. That same year, Sotomayor entered Yale Law School, where she was an editor for the Yale Law Journal. She received her J.D. in 1979, passed the bar in 1980, and immediately began work as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, serving as a trial lawyer under District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
An Ivy League university in an idyllic small-town setting was an abrupt change for a girl from the Bronx. The university had only recently begun to admit female students, and as a Latina she was doubly exceptional in the student body. The curriculum was challenging, and Sonia Sotomayor soon learned that she would need to improve her writing skills to succeed. She boned up on grammar, read widely over her vacations and worked closely with her thesis advisor. The extra work paid off; she graduated summa cum laude and won the University's Moses Taylor Pyne Prize, the highest honor Princeton awards its undergraduates. She was offered a scholarship to Yale Law School. In the summer between graduating from Princeton and entering Yale Law School, Sotomayor married her high school boyfriend, Kevin Noonan.
After passing the bar, Sotomayor joined the office of New York's District Attorney. As an assistant district attorney, she prosecuted dozens of cases involving robbery, assault, murder, police brutality and child pornography.
At Yale, Sotomayor was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and the managing editor of the law school's journal of international law. At both Princeton and Yale Law School she spoke out for the rights of Latino students, and urged the universities to hire more Latino faculty members. When she graduated from Yale in 1979, she joined the office of New York's District Attorney. As an assistant district attorney she spent nearly every work day of the next five years in the courtroom, prosecuting dozens of cases of murder, robbery, child abuse, drug trafficking, police misconduct and fraud.
May 26, 2009: President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden escort Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the East Room of the White House, where the president will introduce her as his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter. In her career, Sotomayor worked at nearly every level of the judicial system. Following a more than four-year stint as a prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney's office, and after that working as a private attorney for the firm Pavia & Harcourt, Sotomayor served on the boards of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency and the New York City Campaign Finance Board. In 1991, she was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to serve as U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York City. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton for the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2009, at the age of 54, Sotomayor would become the first Hispanic to serve on the high court. She would also be the third female named to the Supreme Court. (White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)
Although her boss, longtime District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, praised her as a "fearless and effective prosecutor," Sotomayor eventually found the endless procession of violence and crime demoralizing. The long hours in court and at the D.A.'s office had taken a toll on her marriage as well. In 1983, she and Kevin Noonan, also an attorney, ended their marriage on amicable terms. The following year, Sotomayor left the D.A.'s office to pursue private practice.
July 16, 2009: U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor takes her seat for her fourth and final day of testimony during her U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill. (Reuters/J. Reed)
In 1984, she joined the law firm of Pavia & Harcourt as an associate. Her extensive courtroom experience had prepared her well to litigate civil cases; in her years with the firm she acquired special expertise in trademark and international trade cases. Many of her clients were foreign companies seeking to protect their trademarks from domestic counterfeiters. Sotomayor often accompanied the police in their raids on sellers of counterfeit merchandise, on one occasion pursuing a suspect on a motorcycle.
Within four years, Sotomayor had become a partner of the firm. During these years she also served on the boards of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency and the New York City Campaign Finance Board.
August 8, 2009: Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. administers the Constitutional Oath to Judge Sonia Sotomayor in the Justices' Conference Room. Her mother, Mrs. Celina Sotomayor, holds the family Bible. (Steve Petteway)
One of her partners, David Botwinik, urged her to apply for an appointment as a federal judge. At 36, Sotomayor believed she was too young to be considered seriously for a judicial appointment. Botwinik kept pushing her and she finally applied. After an interview with New York's U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he recommended her to President George H. W. Bush, who appointed her to serve as judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Over the next six years, she presided over roughly 450 cases. Among other matters, she was asked to rule on the dispute between Major League Baseball and the players' union, a conflict that had caused the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. After a strike lasting 232 days, Sotomayor ruled in the players' favor, ending the strike an hour before the 1995 season was about to begin. Her decision brought her national attention as "the judge who saved baseball."
The Current Court. Seated left to right: Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia (deceased), Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Standing left to right: Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Justice Elena Kagan. (Credit: Steve Petteway)
In 1997, President Bill Clinton nominated Sotomayor for the U.S Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her nomination was sharply debated in the United States Senate, but in 1998, a bipartisan majority confirmed her appointment. In her 11 years as an appeals court judge, Sotomayor heard more than 3,000 cases, and wrote nearly 400 opinions. While serving as a federal judge, she lectured in law at Columbia Law School and was an adjunct professor at New York University Law School.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor welcomes Catherine B. Reynolds Fellows to the Supreme Court during the 2010 Summit.
Shortly after his inauguration, President Barack Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court of the United States, to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Justice David Souter. After a closely watched hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sotomayor's appointment was confirmed by the United States Senate by a vote of 68 to 31. She was the third woman, and the first person of Latin American descent to join the Court in its 220-year history.
Academy members Justices Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Ginsburg present the Gold Medal of the Academy of Achievement to Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the 2012 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C.
Journalists who cover the Court typically group her with the "liberal bloc" of Justices, voting to allow gay marriage and uphold the Affordable Care Act, but she has pursued an independent course, placing the principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights ahead of any partisan consideration. As she had on the Court of Appeals, she continued to earn a reputation for tough and detailed questioning of attorneys presenting oral argument to the Court.
2013: The book My Beloved World is a memoir written by Sonia Sotomayor about her childhood, education, and life through 1992. "In recounting her early life, Sotomayor describes growing up in a housing project in the Bronx to Puerto Rican emigrants. Her father was an alcoholic who died when she was nine, and she was subsequently cared for in large part by her grandmother. She tells of developing diabetes at the age of seven and learning to give herself her insulin injections due to the unreliability of her parents. Despite numerous odds, she relates her experiences in becoming valedictorian of her high school class, attending Princeton and then Yale Law School, working for the New York County District Attorney, and finally being appointed as a federal judge in New York."
In 2013, her autobiography, My Beloved World, received excellent reviews and became a bestseller in both English and Spanish-language editions. The Bronxdale Homes where she lived as a child have been renamed in her honor, as has a multi-building public school complex in Los Angeles. She remains an inspiration to all young Americans who feel marginalized or excluded in American society. She continues to speak out in favor of diversity in higher education, as in a 2017 speech at the University of Michigan, where she reaffirmed her belief that "until we get equality in education, we won't have an equal society."
When President Obama nominated federal judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, many Americans welcomed the appointment as a historic milestone; she is the first Hispanic American to serve on the high court. Her colleagues on the federal bench praised her as "a role model of aspiration, discipline… and integrity."
Born to Puerto Rican parents in New York City, Sonia Sotomayor grew up in a housing project in the Bronx. At age eight, she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, requiring daily insulin injections. Her father died the following year, leaving her mother to raise her and her brother alone. Young Sonia found solace in reading, and at age ten, decided that she would be an attorney. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and earned her law degree at Yale Law School.
As an assistant district attorney in New York City, she earned a reputation as a fearless prosecutor of violent crimes. She was still in her 30s when President George H. W. Bush appointed her to the federal bench for the Southern District of New York. Of the 450 cases she heard, one of her most famous rulings ended the major league baseball strike, just in time for opening day. Appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals by President Clinton, she heard more than 3,000 cases and wrote roughly 380 opinions. Today, she is the only sitting Justice with experience as a trial judge, and brought more federal judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any appointee in 100 years.
1959: Sotomayor and her mother, Celina, in the Bronx.
You grew up in the Bronx. What was the neighborhood like when you were a child?
Sonia Sotomayor: For those kids who don't know what it was, it was the worst neighborhood in the United States at the time and it was the South Bronx in New York City.
You've said you saw needles everywhere…
Sonia Sotomayor: Drug paraphernalia always in the staircase; in fact my mom wouldn't let us go up or down the staircase because she was afraid of things that could be lying around.
And when you were seven, you learned you had diabetes.
Sonia Sotomayor: It was something that my mother the nurse tried to avoid understanding. And I finally fainted in church one Sunday morning, and the nuns made my mother send me to a doctor, where they immediately diagnosed the diabetes.
Keys to success — Courage
Sonia Sotomayor: When I was first diagnosed, because I left the hospital taking insulin, one shot a day back then. Today it's many, many more shots than that, but back then it was one shot a day, and I would sterilize the needle in a pan. I had to get up on a chair to be able to reach the top of the stove and light it. It wasn't an automatic stove like today. I wasn't in the dinosaur ages, but this was the 1950s and things have changed a lot since then. At any rate, I had to light the stove, put the pot of water with the needles in it, wait until it boiled, it seemed to take forever. And then remove the water and let the works, the insulin works, the injection works cool down before I started to draw the insulin and give myself a shot. It was a process.
This was all in pursuit of having your parents not fight over who was going to give you your shot.
Sonia Sotomayor: Absolutely.
Sotomayor and her grandparents, Gallego and Abuelita. Abuelita, the family matriarch, provided her a safe haven from her parents' toxic relationship and their frequent fighting. In her memoir, Sotomayor reflects on the meaning of her grandmother's presence: "Since those years, I have come to believe that in order to thrive, a child must have at least one adult in her life who shows her unconditional love, respect, and confidence. For me it was Abuelita."
And getting to spend the weekend with your grandmother, your Abuelita, because she wouldn't give you a shot.
Sonia Sotomayor: My grandmother, she adored me. I willingly admit, and so does every other cousin I have, that I was her favorite granddaughter. I take that with a great deal of pride and absolutely no sense of humility about it. I was her favorite. But I also knew she didn't have the heart to give me a needle. It would have been emotionally too tough for her. And what would have ended up happening is I wouldn't have been able to stay over with her because I needed the shot every morning. And so it immediately became clear to me as soon I left the hospital that if I didn't learn how to do this right away I would miss out on that very precious time with my grandmother, and it was something I simply wouldn't give up.
Your mother was gone a lot, and you had a chilly relationship with your dad, who — you've said very candidly — was an alcoholic.
Sonia Sotomayor: The strange part when you talk about someone who you know loves you… my father adored my brother and I. And in fact in writing my book, the publisher asked me for photographs, and I went back to a childhood photograph that has hung in my mother's house since I was about three and my brother was one. And I took the photograph out of its frame for the first time, and in the back was a handwritten message by my father, explaining that the photograph had been taken at my brother's first birthday. And my brother was just… and my father was describing his tesoro, his treasure, his little boy. And then talking about me, and talking about how I lit up his life. And he also spoke about his love for my mother in this, it's about two, three paragraphs short. And I realized that my judgement that he adored us was true. But his love for us couldn't stop him from drinking himself to death. Addictions are an affliction on people who can't find what they need within themselves to put them aside and to seek help to put it aside. Most addictions require intervention, not just by you on your own strength of character, but the intervention of family and friends. Back then I don't know that my mother knew what she could do to save my father. Thankfully today, there are many, many more programs that people are familiar with.
1958: Juan and Celina Sotomayor, parents of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, at home in the South Bronx, New York City.
So you were nine when your father died. We gather you were unprepared for your mother's grief because when he was alive they were fighting all the time. In your book you describe this moment when you finally broke, because your mother was sort of disappearing on you.
Sonia Sotomayor: Mom was depressed, I learned later. She's very technical now; she says, "I wasn't depressed, I was sad. I was grieving." And she explains that she knew that his drinking was causing him physical harm. He had had one heart attack five years before he died. So a second was going to be very likely if he continued drinking, which is what the doctor told him.
In fact I'm not sure I relay in my book anymore that the doctor who took care of my father learned that my mother had stopped paying my father's life insurance. I don't know how he learned that but in some passing conversation with my mother. And insisted that she do so. Insisted so much that she finally felt compelled to pick up the policy again and continue paying it.
It was quite helpful, at least it permitted us to bury him. It wasn't a huge policy. It was a couple of thousand dollars but in those times it was a lot of money. It's what helped us move from the projects to Co-op City, which was out of the projects to a private apartment complex in upper, in the upper part of the Bronx.
But my mother says that she just… you can understand the inevitable, but coming to the reality was a different thing for her. Realizing that he was now dead and how special a time they had had in the beginning of their romance made her grieve deeply. And I called it depression in an unsophisticated way. I think she's right, she was probably just grieving. But we would come home from school in the afternoon, she would have dinner prepared for us and she would go back into her room and cry all night. And you're right, about a year later, I let it go on, I let it go on, I'm sounding like I'm some god or something. But my brother and I had been quietly sitting in the house watching television or reading books — books was my favorite pastime. And I'd just had enough one day. She locked herself back in the room, and I started to cry, and I went up to the door and started banging on it. And I was screaming at her, "You've got to stop this. You're dying on us and you're going to leave us alone. We don't deserve to be left alone. Please, please stop." And I finally just ran away from the door when she didn't open it. And I didn't know at that moment what my impact was. I actually fell asleep that night crying. But the next morning, my mother woke us up, and she said she doesn't remember this dress, but it was a black with white polka dot dress. And her hair was finally properly combed. She had for the first time in a year some makeup on, and I knew my mom was back. And that may have been one of the happiest moments of my life.
What about school? We hear you were sort of a middling student until the nuns started giving out gold stars. How did that come about?
Sonia Sotomayor: I wanted my gold stars. It wasn't actually a nun, it was a teacher in fifth grade who would reward students who had performed well on their assignments with gold stars. And I wanted gold stars. And I realized that to get them I had to figure out how to study. And I did something that has helped me my entire life, and it's something I still do, which is when I don't know how to do something now I start reading about it. Back then I would ask people for help. And I have found that if you go to people and ask them for help that it feels like a compliment to them. Because everybody likes feeling good and likes doing something for other people, especially when what they're going to do is easy for them.
And so I went to the smartest student in the class, and I looked at her, she's still a friend today. This is Donna. And I said, "Donna, please tell me how you study. I don't know how to study." And she said to me, "You don't know how to study?" She found the question odd but sat down and told me how she studied. How she would read the materials, she would underline the important parts of it. She would make sure at the end of every chapter that she understood what she had read before she moved on to the other chapter. How before a test she would read all of the underlined sections to remind her of what she had studied. And so I thought to myself, "Well that seems like something I can do." And that's what I started to do, and from a middling student I went to the top of my class, pretty quickly. Donna to this day says that was maybe the worst mistake in her life, because I started doing better than she did.
So you graduated at the top of your high school class, and then your boyfriend — I think it was your boyfriend — suggests that you should apply to the Ivies, and you had no idea what he was talking about.
Keys to success — The American Dream
Sonia Sotomayor: Ken had gotten into Princeton because his math teacher at our high school had suggested to him that he should apply to the Ivy Leagues. He also didn't know what they were but his teacher told him, he went, and he calls me up one day and says, "Sonia, you have to apply to an Ivy League college." And my next question was, "What's that?" He described it as the best colleges in the United States. That was his simple answer. My second question was, "How do I get in?" And he said, "You apply." Which sounds so simplistic, doesn't it? And almost unbelievable. But I think kids have to understand that we're talking about an age where there wasn't the Internet. Where really, television programs weren't as concentrated on education as they are today. A lot of that started to grow up with me but weren't a part of the life I was in at the time. At any rate, he says to me, "You apply. Our guidance counselors will give you the applications." I said, "How much will it cost me?" And he retorted by saying, "Nothing, because you're as poor as I am. You'll get a scholarship." I said, "Alright, how much are the applications, do I have to pay for that?" He said, "Same thing, they're going to waive them, don't worry. Just apply." So I asked him which ones to apply to. He told me, I applied to them, and lo and behold I got in. But it was not with an understanding of what I had accomplished. That came after I got in. As I was telling people about where I was going to college, and I could see both surprise in their faces and a sense of, I think the word is "admiration," in their eyes. And from there I began to understand that getting into a place like Princeton wasn't a norm. And it certainly wasn't expected of a child like me. But it was something that would be important to me.
When you were at Princeton you ended up graduating with honors, you won all kinds of awards. You won the Pyne Prize.
Sonia Sotomayor: I didn't know what that was either.
But the first two years were a real slog. Can you tell us what that was like?
Keys to success — Perseverance
Sonia Sotomayor: I've learned very early in my life that if you compete against other people you're going to find yourself wanting in some way. Especially because none of us are perfect, we're human beings. We do some things well, we do other things not so well. Other people do some things well, and other things not well. But if you put yourself in competition with others you're going to find yourself disappointed. And I figured out a sure-fire way to avoid that disappointment, which was to figure out what I needed to do, each day, to improve myself. To set my goals not against the accomplishments of other people but to set my goals against what I wanted to accomplish, how I wanted to improve.
So I spent my first two years at Princeton, again learning how to learn. How to write papers because I went in from a fairly decent high school but where writing wasn't its emphasis. Multiple choice was and I was great at multiple choice. Short answers, I can do fabulously. Longer essays, I had very little practice with when I went to high… when I went to college. And so I had to figure out how to start writing persuasive essays. I also had to figure out how to finally master writing English because I had taken on so many of the grammatical, or grammatically-induced errors of translating from Spanish to English. So what I did was I went out and bought grammar books from first to twelfth grade, I reread them. I worked with a professor at college, who, every paper I wrote, he would circle my errors and explain what I had done.
Was this after you got a C on your first paper?
Sonia Sotomayor: I got a C on my first paper, and I knew, this is when I knew I had to learn how to write. But my professor, Peter Winn, who is still teaching now, I remember the first words he circled, which were "dictatorship of authority." Oh no, so "authority of dictatorship," "authority of dictatorship." And Professor Winn looked at me, and he said, "There are a lot of nouns in Spanish where an adjective is added with the preposition 'of.'"
So you don't, we don't say in Spanish, "shirt, cotton." In Spanish we say, "shirt of cotton," not "cotton shirt." So he said, "This should be 'dictatorial authority.' It's an adjective, you put it before the noun." And I went, "Oh." He said, "Now go back and find all the places in the paper where you did that and fix it." And so that's what I do, and the next paper, with that lesson in mind, I would write out my essay.
I would go back and correct all of those errors. We did that paper after paper, error after error, and by the time I finished Princeton, after a lot of papers, I got an A from the reader on my senior thesis, who said that it was the best written thesis he had read that semester. That was a compliment that I thought I had earned.
But what I understood was that I had to work to get it. Nothing comes naturally. I had a roommate in college who is still a friend who would write her papers the night before they were due. I couldn't do that. Because I have to read everything I write and edit it. So I'm not a natural writer. She's more a natural writer than I am. But I can do what I need to do to give myself enough time to write papers, edit them, before I turn them in. And that's what I still do.
Is that the same roommate who said you were like Alice in Wonderland?
Sonia Sotomayor: I was talking to her one day about how alien a world Princeton was to me, having come from a very urban environment to a sort of, not rural, but suburban existence that Princeton was. Being with kids who had grown up in private schools, who spent vacations in places I had only read about, and that no one in my family ever imagined they could visit. I was trying to describe to her how alien I was in this world. And she looked at me and said, "You're like Alice in Wonderland," and I looked at her and said, "Who's Alice in Wonderland?" And she said, "You haven't read the book?" And I said, "No." So she looked at me and said, "Hmm. I have it at home. When I go back over the holidays I'll bring it back to you." Which she did. But I realized, I asked her when she had read it, and she said in grammar school. I then looked at her and said, "What other books did you read in grammar school?" because in my Spanish home, Alice in Wonderland wasn't a part of what we read. My mother bought the Reader's Digest so that we could have some understanding of popular literature, but she didn't know how to guide me in my classical reading. So Mary gave me a very long list of books to pick up and read, and one of my summers in college I read all those books. And I finally did get to read Alice in Wonderland, and I felt just like her.
So you went on to Yale Law School, and then you went to work in the Manhattan D.A.'s office for four-plus years. You ended up trying felonies, big, nasty felonies but you lost your first two jury trials, and then you went to see your boss, and what did your boss tell you?
Sonia Sotomayor: He asked me to go through the evidence of the cases, which I did. And at the end of it he said, "Well, you have one thing missing." I said "What, I thought I covered all of the bases. I made the best arguments that I think the evidence would support." And he looked at me, and he said, "That may all be true, but you're missing passion. You related this crime and your evidence in a very impersonal way. How did you make the jury want to convict?" I said "Well, the judge charges them, tells them they have to convict if I prove my case." And he said, "No, sentencing, not sentencing, finding someone guilty is a huge responsibility. You have to make people believe it's what they have to do. And you have to make them believe that the evidence that you've presented gives them basically no choice." And so I said, "How do you do that?" And he explained to me that it's in the manner that you present your case. It's in the manner that you show how passionately you believe in what you're doing. And in how much you believe that you've actually proven your case and that they must return a verdict of guilty. And his words have led me to believe that that passion is what guarantees success in life. Because that's what leaders almost always have, is passion about what they're doing. That passion excites not just them but you. And if you want people to follow, you have to really want where you're going. And so it was a lesson that let me not lose another case. I ended up with two hung juries after that in impossibly difficult cases to win, but I didn't lose them. And I think it's what's kept me successful through most of my life, is that sense of believing in what I'm doing to be the right thing to do.
So why did you leave?
Sonia Sotomayor: The D.A.'s office? Because working in criminal law, whether you're a police officer, a criminal defense attorney, a prosecutor, probation officer or corrections officer, anyone in that world is exposed often to the worst in people. Criminals have committed crimes, often horrific crimes. Those crimes have had negative impacts on victims and on entire families, whether they're the victim's family or the defendant's family. You begin in that world to see the world not as a good place but as a bad place. You spend your time worrying about the bad in people rather than looking for the good. And I realized that that's not how I wanted to spend my life. And that I needed to find other work that I would, would take me to more positive places.
So you went to work at a small, private law firm. You were very successful there. And then your partner gave you an application and said you should apply for a federal district judgeship. You were only 36. Did you think he was out of his mind?
Sonia Sotomayor: I did. I ignored him. I ignored him, and I told him no one would appoint a lawyer who was only 36 years old to the federal bench, it was a waste of my time. So for six months he periodically would look up and say, "Sonia, did you get the application?" And I'd say, "David, I told you it's useless." And he would continue, and every few weeks, or every, once every month or so he would come back to the subject. I ignored him. I went away for a holiday over Christmas of that 36th year of my life, and I came back, and my desk, which was always stockpiled with work, was empty. And I looked at my clean tabletop and looked at my assistant and said, "Where's my work?" And she looked at me, and she said, "Go talk to Mr. Botwinik. I had nothing to do with this." So I go marching into his office, and I say, "David, what are you doing?" He said, "Did you look on your seat?" And I said, "no." "Go back and look on your seat." So I went back, went to my seat, and on my seat was an application to Senator Moynihan's selection committee for federal judgeships.
I picked it up, I marched back to his office, I looked at him, and I said, "This is crazy. I'm wasting my time doing this. They're never going to select someone this young." He said, "Sonia, just do it." I said, "Do you see all of these questions? I can't do this alone." He said, "You have your assistant. You have my assistant if you need her, and I'll get you help from the paralegals." Which I ultimately did need, by the way. Those applications are so burdensome.
At any rate, moaning and groaning every single day that I sat at my desk filling that bloody thing out, I would stop by his office and say, "David, this is such a grand waste of our time. Do you know how many billable client hours I'm missing with these two weeks?" Suffice it to say, I put the application in. I finally finished it.
And only a few weeks later I did get a call from Senator Moynihan's committee. And I looked at him and said, "This is impossible." He said, "Just go." So I followed his advice, just went. He was the first person I called after the interview. And I said to him, "David, I still don't think they'll pick me, I'm only 36. But it's the best interview I've ever given in my life. They won't pick me, not because I wasn't prepared for the interview." And as it turns out, it probably was the best interview of my life, because I was called to see the senator a couple of weeks later.
So you were on the District Court for 12 years?
Sonia Sotomayor: The District Court for six, the Circuit Court for almost 12.
When you had been on the Court of Appeals for almost 12 years, you were asked to do another interview, but this one was with the President of the United States.
Sonia Sotomayor: That might have been my second best interview. In fact, when I was asked how that interview went by the staff that had been vetting me, the White House staff that had been vetting me, I looked at him, I looked at them and said, "Look, when you're being interviewed it's hard to tell how well you're impressing someone. But I will tell you that I know a characteristic that's probably led him to his current position. He actually asked the questions, the right questions to let me show my best to him. I will not regret anything that I did or didn't say." I told him, "I talked about me, and who I am in the best way that I could." And it's true. The president, in asking questions, was not judgmental. He simply let me explain.
Could you describe that day when he took you to the East Room to make the announcement?
Sonia Sotomayor: My mother, brother, and his family were in the back with the president and the vice president before my announcement. My brother is talking to the vice president about golf. My nephews are talking to the president about soccer. And I'm standing there anticipating this big announcement thinking this is just not real. This is really not happening. But finally some of the White House people come and escort everybody out of the room except for the president and vice president and I. And we start walking to the front of the East Conference Room where the announcement would be made. And they have very long legs, they're very tall men and I'm not that tall, certainly not in comparison to them. Their long legs pushed them further from me, or ahead of me. And at a certain point I realized they were going to get to the front way before me, and I whispered, "Please slow down." And they heard me, and they both turned around at exactly the same time, and both of them smiled at me.
And at that moment I had an out-of-body experience. It was as if I couldn't contain all the emotions I was feeling, and I had to let my consciousness leave my body and go somewhere up in the air. But from that moment on until about a year and a half later, I walked around doing things, looking from above down at myself doing things.
Including throwing out the first pitch.
Sonia Sotomayor: First pitch at Yankee Stadium. I can still tell you about, or tell you about looking at the crowd but really not hearing the roars because my head was, my consciousness was up there in the sky looking down.
So how did you practice for this, because I assume you're not a really great pitcher.
Sonia Sotomayor: Like everything I do in life, practice makes perfect. I had just come to the Court. I was inducted, my first induction occurred in early August. The induction that permitted me, the constitutional induction it's called, it's what permitted me to get all of the briefs that had been filed in court and all of the confidential memos and things of that nature.
So I had started my preparation for our October term. The Yankees called me somewhere in the middle of August to ask me whether I would throw out a first pitch at the first Red Sox/Yankee game at the end of the season. As you know there's quite a bit of rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox, and I love the Yankees so I was never going to say no.
But I had never thrown a baseball pitch in my life and I realized, "Gee, I don't know how to do this." So the first thing I did was find friends who knew how to throw baseballs, and they started teaching me how to throw a perfect pitch. A wonderful, wonderful friend on the Court, Kathy Arberg, Communications Director, had a friend who was a minor league pitcher. And she got him to come in and show me exactly how to hold the ball and throw it. And every afternoon for almost a month, I would go outside between the courthouse's building and temporary offices trailers that they had parked while the courthouse was being renovated. There was an empty space of grass. I would go into that empty space and practice for about 20 minutes to half an hour.
Who was your catcher?
Sonia Sotomayor: My catcher was police officers who knew how to play baseball. It was whoever I could find to help me catch and throw. The entire building, you have to understand I was the new justice, the new baby on the block. The entire building was looking out at the windows at every pitch I threw. But I threw a pitch down the middle within the strike zone on the upper right hand corner.
It goes to show.
Sonia Sotomayor: Practice makes perfect.
You've come to this court as an experienced judge with almost 18 years on the federal bench, yet you felt like you were drowning, and you kept saying to your colleagues, "Does it get better?"
Sonia Sotomayor: There is a different way at looking at cases than when you're on the lower court. On the lower court, you're reading what the court has decided, and try to divine what the rule of law is that the Supreme Court has announced in whatever case it's issued. And you're trying to take that rule of law and apply it to a set of facts.
Now you may or may not agree with a dissenter or with someone who has concurred on a different ground. But you don't pay as much attention to that because you have to resolve the case that's before you on the basis of the rules that the Supreme Court has already established. When you get on the Supreme Court, however, it's a very different enterprise, because every case that we're dealing with is an open question of law. There is rarely a direct precedent on point, and so what you're doing is you're reading all of the Supreme Court cases that inform that decision or help inform it. But you're reading not just the majority opinions but the dissenters and the concurrences, to determine how you think it's the right way to rule, because that ruling is going to affect all the existing cases that that case touches upon. But the development of the law in the future, so you have to know for yourself what the thinking in all of these areas of the law is, in a way that I didn't have to do as a judge on the lower courts.
That's a huge amount of work. Also remember that many of the cases that we're talking about in our decision-making have been written by one of my colleagues currently on the Court. They don't have to reread those cases. I do. Or did, or still do. And you want to know how your colleagues think in case you want to change their mind, or try to change their mind, so you have to understand what bothers them. So you're reading bearing that in mind with respect to your vote. How do I present what I'm thinking in a way that might be most appealing to the other members of the Court? That's a lot, a lot of work, and it felt absolutely and utterly overwhelming the first three years — not two — three years on the court.
I was working seven days a week and really had given up any personal life. But I also understand that that's not the right way to live one's life. If you don't live in the world, it's very hard for you to be a part of it. And certainly, at least for me, very hard to say that I'm making decisions that affect people unless I'm living part of their life too. And so, after those three years, when I felt a little bit more under control, and even to this day, I'm trying to maintain a piece of my personal life.
By now you increasingly have some very firm views on a lot of things that some of your colleagues do not agree with.
Sonia Sotomayor: I dissent a lot, don't I?
Your voice in dissent is sometimes more passionate than your voice when you're keeping a majority together.
Sonia Sotomayor: That's natural.
What's it like to lose? Does it drive you nuts?
Sonia Sotomayor: Does it drive me nuts? Another fascinating question. When I lose on things where I believe the Court has gone grievously wrong, I am sad, not nuts. I'm sad because I know the impact that a wrong decision has both on the people experiencing the situation, or on how the law is developing in a way that I don't think it was intended by either our precedents or the Constitution.
But nuts? No — I think, as I understand fundamentally that this is a collective process. We have nine voices, each engaging in trying to persuade another. I write my dissent in the hope that in some day in the future a majority of the Court will see I was right. I wouldn't write it unless I thought I was right. And so I have hope that someday what I said will influence other judges to look at a situation the way I did and to right the path that I got stopped in. So that's not to say that there aren't times I'm really upset. There are moments where I'm very, very upset. But I can only continue doing it because I really believe that there's a potential right down the road.
You do a lot of things that people don't know you do, and sometimes even the people you're doing it with don't know who you are. You serve in soup kitchens, you do other things like that. Does it change your views? Or does it affect how you think?
Sonia Sotomayor: That's impossible to answer. I tell people that I get asked all the time how does my being Latina affect my decision-making. And I look at people, and I say, "Probably no more or no less than every other life experience I've had." Sonia is Sonia as a sum total of every life experience that I have engaged in. I am no less or no more a Latina than I am a woman, a child of a single mother, a former prosecutor, a former business lawyer, a former whatever you want to say I've done. All of my experiences combine to make me the unique person I am, in the same way they combine to make every individual unique unto themselves and to how they view the world.
I happen to think that the more experiences I engage in, the richer a person I am. Just not only for myself but richer in terms of what I could ultimately give back to the world. And so, does it affect me? Not in any way where I can say to you in a particular case, "Because I served in a soup kitchen, I ruled this way." No, it's not only because I served in a soup kitchen that I ever rule in any particular way or because I'm a Latina that I do, that I make a decision in a particular way. It's because that conglomerate, that combination of all of that has led me to be a judge who approaches problems in a certain way.
Do you think your childhood experience with diabetes influenced you? How did your parents react to it?
Sonia Sotomayor: Well, I think any child who is diagnosed with a chronic disease the way I was with diabetes, something that would be with me for the rest of my life, parents' automatic reaction is to be fearful. And my mother, who was a trained professional at the time, understood what the added risk in my life would be and it did terrify her. In fact it was not until very late in my life, probably my 40s, where one day my brother called her up because I had called him upset about how agitated she was because I had a cold. A little bit of what I have today. And because colds can cause complications in diabetics, every time I had a cold she would get very anxiety-ridden.
She was driving me crazy. And my brother called her up and said, "You know you've got to stop this. You're really upsetting Sonia. She's going to end up not telling you anything is ever wrong because she'll be afraid of how you'll react, and please remember one thing: If she dies tomorrow, she'll die the happiest person that you'll ever know, because her diabetes has not stopped her from doing anything she's ever wanted. So don't you stop her." My mother actually listened, and since then I can't say that her worry has gone away. I'm sure it hasn't, but she tortures me less about it.
In your book you said diabetes turned out to be a kind of disciplinarian for you.
Sonia Sotomayor: Absolutely. I had a child, a six-year-old diabetic child at a conference once asked me if there was anything good that came out of being a diabetic. And obviously it's a condition I have to pay close attention to. I always have to monitor what I'm eating, and the insulin I'm taking, and what I'm doing, and the exercise, and whether I'm sick or not. There's constant variables that I have to balance in taking care of myself, but because of that, it showed me how to be disciplined about my own care, something that a lot of people don't ever really learn until they're sick. And it's a lesson that's highly important. Look at all the workaholics who work themselves literally, most of the time figuratively, to death. But they're doing it because they don't realize that the most important machine in your life is your body. And taking care of it is important for how well you function, and it gives you the opportunity to do everything else that you want to do if you're watching your own health. And so for me that's been a lifelong lesson. If I take care of myself I can do anything I want.
You mentioned learning to inject yourself so you could spend time with your grandmother. What did the two of you do together?
Sonia Sotomayor: What did I do with her? We would go to the market together every Saturday morning, and I loved that. She taught me how to pick the freshest vegetables there were. The sweetest fruit, she would point to the color, she would pick it up and smell it and let me smell it to tell me what smelled sweet and what didn't.
There are different types of smells to different types of fruit. Even today they'll watch me in a store, and only the grocers who know someone who really knows what they're doing permit this, but I pick up every piece of fruit to smell it before I put it in my basket. It's a strange thing to watch but that's what I do. And then we would go to the live poultry shop, and she would pick out a chicken for our meal that evening. And I would have to stand behind the glass that protected people from the feathers and guts that came out of the chicken, and watch that they were killing the chicken my grandmother had picked, and that we would get the same chicken at the end in a paper bag. And so that was my job with her.
She knew every storekeeper in the neighborhood. She knew every vendor on the street. She taught me how to like people. That's strange, but to enjoy people, to enjoy interacting with them, to get to know who they are, and to understand and appreciate the value of the work they were doing. That doesn't come naturally to people, I don't think. Not everyone possesses that ability, and my grandmother taught it to me, as I watched everyone calling out to Mercedes, which was my mother's, grandmother's name. I understood people cared about her. They actually liked her, and that was such a positive way, I thought, to interact in life.
In your book, you describe the parties at her house. Were these on weekends?
Sonia Sotomayor: Generally Friday and Saturday nights. A smaller party on Friday nights, a bigger party on Saturday nights.
And you crawled under the table?
Sonia Sotomayor: The house would be full. Now when I say house, it wasn't a house, it was an apartment in a tenement building in the South Bronx. And these apartments, now, I went back when I was writing my book to go visit the apartments, and they are tinier than I ever imagined as a child. I'm still not sure how dozens of people would fit into those apartments, I think we stood everywhere you could, and kids would hide everywhere they could, because otherwise you'd be kicked into the back into the bedrooms to get out of under people's feet. But that's my cousin, and I figured out that if we hid under the coffee table we would be left alone to watch. And so I got to hear the conversations, to listen to the music, to listen to my grandmother and my father somewhere in the middle of the night get up to recite poetry. And they would recite poems that were paragraph-long from memory, and it was always a sort of competition. Who was most dramatic, who could say it in a way that would engage people the most, and there would be a lot of clapping and stamping of feet when they finished, and I didn't understand all the words because at least at that age I was still grappling with learning English, and my Spanish was a child's Spanish.
And these were grown-up poems. But their rhythm, the depth of my grandmother and father's passion in reciting them. They gave me a lifelong love of two things, words and reading. Because words are so powerful, they're instruments that can take anyone to where they want to go. I tell kids all the time through reading I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. I would run to the library whenever I could and needed a place to hide. And through books I got to travel the world and the universe. I am still a lover of science fiction. And I'm the first one who went out and bought the most recent Harry Potter book. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way through the power of words to change the world. If you can move people through words to do things they might not otherwise be inclined to do, to deliver passion that they might not otherwise have, to get them to step up and want to do more — all of that I believe is motivated by the power of words.
So you weren't just escaping the South Bronx, you were escaping your homelife.
Sonia Sotomayor: Sure.
While we're on the subject of books, in one of your dissents you quoted The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin, and another book written by a young African-American…
Sonia Sotomayor: Ta-Nehisi Coates, yes.
Do your colleagues ever respond to that? Does anybody ever say to you, "I want to read that book."
Sonia Sotomayor: Oh, how interesting. No, but I don't think that a colleague ever would. I think they'd just pick it up and read it if they wanted to, because I'm thinking of books that some of my colleagues may have quoted that I haven't read. I will almost always get it from the library and read it at some point, because if they thought the book was important enough to influence their thinking then I would take the time to read it.
Are you a fast reader?
Sonia Sotomayor: I'm a very fast reader. David, the partner who encouraged me to apply for the Supreme Court once saw me reading an opinion as we were talking, and he looked at me, and he said, "Did you ever take a speed reading class?" And I said, "No." He said, "You're doing all the things they taught us to do in my speed reading class." So somehow I figured this out.
One of the rare times you didn't ask somebody else.
Sonia Sotomayor: It's interesting. It was one of the rare times I didn't, but I have figured out how to read quickly.
Could you pick two or three books that were really influential in your life, going back from your childhood to now?
Sonia Sotomayor: The Bible. I'm not an actively practicing Catholic on every occasion — I am a spiritual person — but I think the allegories, the stories, the parables of the Bible have influenced so much in the world. They've influenced art. You can't walk into a city in Europe without seeing religious pictures. Understanding what those pictures symbolize to people, what they have meant, I think has made me a better-educated person. Understanding — as my former colleague Nino Scalia used to talk about — moral law and its influence on law generally, but understanding the relationship between moral, Biblical law, and our secular law has a great importance, I think, in any jurist's existence. It is just the seminal book in terms of cultural understanding, whether it's Christianity, Catholic, Jewish, perhaps not for Muslims. And the Koran is something that I have read because I understood it was important in the same way to a very significant portion of our population. But I think everyone, whether you're religious or not, should read the Bible.
The second, probably, and I didn't talk about it in my book, which is always interesting to me, because it didn't come up within a lesson, okay, within the book teaching me a lesson, but the second was Don Quixote. And that ties in so much to the optimistic part of me, this idea of tilting at windmills, whether they're real or not. The imagination of them, what fueled that man, that love, that idyllic sort of quest. That can be life sometimes. We don't always achieve what we end up hoping for. We can work very, very hard at things and come up short. But I take comfort from having dreamt the dream. From having taken the steps, the quest, to undergo the quest of trying to reach them. If at the end you don't, you've had the journey, and I always think the journeys are valuable. They give you lessons, they give you memories. They help you meet people, they help you have an adventure in life. And so for me, that probably, when I've read that book, I understood that I was okay. Being optimistic wasn't a bad thing. It was actually a very good thing.
You've been talking about the power of words, which is great, but you haven't mentioned music. Do you listen to particular music when you write your opinions?
Sonia Sotomayor: No, and I have a couple of colleagues who do. I have a fabulous power of concentration by the way. People can talk outside my office and it doesn't distract me. But because I am slightly hearing impaired — not grossly but slightly — I have never really heard music well. To hear music I have to concentrate. I can't step away from it to hear it. So it's the one thing I don't turn on.
What first made you think you could be a lawyer? Why did you choose the law?
Sonia Sotomayor: Why law? Well, I am a media child, and the first lawyer I ever knew about was a TV character, Perry Mason. There were no lawyers in the housing projects I lived in. There were no lawyers in my family. We were blue-collar, working-class people, and so professionals like lawyers were not heard of in my circles as a child, but I met my first character as a lawyer by Perry Mason. And what he was doing helping people, by trying to prove that his clients in particular were innocent of the crimes that they committed, seemed like a pretty worthwhile endeavor to me, life endeavor. But what I liked about it was that he was playing detective. He was trying to figure out how the crime alleged was committed and who the person was that committed the crime. Now that's not really lawyering because it was fictionalized.
It's police work.
Sonia Sotomayor: It's police work. But more importantly, I've been a judge now for almost 25 years and never, ever have I ever heard of a lawyer on television, a lawyer in real life, breaking down a witness on the witness stand and getting the witness to admit he or she committed the crime. It just doesn't happen, okay? So you have to take with a grain of salt any portrayal of real life on TV.
First of all, they have to take out all the boring parts. Secondly, they have to condense what happens generally over a long period of time into a segment that's half an hour or an hour long, so they get to shoot the most interesting parts and none of the drudgery that surrounds it. But more importantly, they have to dramatize what's happening, and work is often not drama, whether it's lawyering or any other kind of work. But what I, the essence of what Perry Mason was doing of helping his client was something that over time I understood was the mission of lawyering. It's service to people's relationships. Every lawyer is trying to help either a person or an institution, whether it's a private or government institution, agency, or project, into addressing a difficulty that they're having with another entity. And when you're doing that, you're trying to either better those two entities' relationships… when two business partners go into business together they're trying to figure out, figure out how to operate together, how to take their competing interests and make them work together to abet a goal. If it's a criminal defendant in a case, the state is charging that person with a crime. Whether you're a prosecutor or a defense attorney, you're trying to serve the needs of society in ensuring that the prosecutor has proven his or her case beyond a reasonable doubt and that the defendant has received fairness in the process. These are roles of service and that's what I love about it.
But we know the law is not always just. It's rules.
Sonia Sotomayor: Yes. It's rules, and the rules are there for a reason, to have rules so that people know how to conduct their lives, their affairs, the trial, whatever, but it's not always just. The problem with justice is that it's relative to the two people involved. In every single court case, there's one side who wins and there's one side that loses. There's always that flip of a coin. The person who won thinks it's very fair, and very just. And the person who loses always think it's unjust. They rarely think that they've gotten their process in court the way they had hoped. And so how do I choose between the two? If I do it on personal preference, I'm certainly going to misgauge the situation because valuing the importance of an outcome to one person versus another is a very difficult thing to do. This isn't Solomon, where you say, "I'll slice the child up," and the mother, the real mother, says, "Give it to the other woman, because I don't want my child sliced up." That's not real life, okay. The rules help us in our relationships. Even though the outcomes may feel unjust to the one person, they are a way of managing our relationships with each other, according to preferences that are not personal to the judge-giver or to you and me, but to an objective standard that people can look at and say, "Okay, this is what this is about." How we deal with one another. Justice can happen in law, that's why we have so many settlements of cases. If that wasn't a possibility, people would feel the system was more unjust than it is.
On the old Perry Mason show there were no women in leadership roles, were there? There were no women lawyers.
Sonia Sotomayor: He had a woman judge. I do remember that. It was very unusual. But there were no women attorneys, you were right about that.
Times have changed. Thank you for everything.
Sonia Sotomayor Gallery
This page last revised on September 24, 2020
Retired Justice, Supreme Court of the United States
Executive Director, ACLU
Constitutional Court of South Africa


I was barely able to squeak this post out. I feel like I haven't written a post in a long time. And then just like that, it was Tuesday night and I knew I needed to get something up. My head is all over the place. I blame jet lag, but I am slowly coming out of it.
Thursday: Salads since Rory has an early softball game.
My trip to England, Scotland and Ireland. It was a lot of fun, but definitely a long time away. I have so many good memories and saw so many new things on this trip. I can't wait to write a few posts on it.
I was able to wear some long sleeve shirts and more Fall like attire in England and I loved it. Sure it was warmer during the day, but the evenings were perfect for a long sleeve. Before I left on my trip, we went to California and I bought several items from North Face which were amazing and cozy. I could only find the flannel and pull over online which are linked below. I still can't find the cozy gray sweater I bought.
I also got great use out of my Converse no-show socks. I wore my converse and my booties everywhere while traveling and I wore these socks with them every single time. Not only are they comfy (thicker for great padding), but they don't show while wearing either shoes.
Another item that saved me was my Michael Kors bag. I bought this bag especially for my travel. I wanted something big enough to carry my work portfolio, my iPad, my book, phone, wallet and other essentials. Everything fit in this bag and I still had room. I got so many compliments on it too. I can't say enough good things about it.
And finally, I LOVED my luggage. When you travel a lot, especially on foreign trips, you need great luggage. You also need luggage with the wheels that spin around as you have to go through small areas, move fast and drag your luggage around a lot.
We bought a new Samsonite bag before we went to Mexico and I used it for the first time on this trip and let me just say that I loved it. It has two compartments for your things and one side zips up. I stored all my clothes in that side and then my shoes and toiletries on the other side. I had a lot of room for gifts (I didn't have any room on the way home) and it held up so well on many flights (7 flights).
Well I was only in town for the first week and then I am back for the last week, so you could say I have been pretty MIA.
I am not really dreading anything right now.
I am still trying to sell some clothes for the girls and now I am taking pictures of our couch, so we can sell that as soon our as new one arrives. I am also working on catching up on reading blogs and answering comments. I am sooooo behind.
Fall and October. I love this time of year. I am also looking forward to some Fall like weather. We are still sitting in the high 80s, low 90s. Give me all the 70s.
I am reading The Woman in Cabin 10. I thought I would breeze through it while on my work trip, but I am only half way through. It is really good and I want to finish it, but since coming back from my trip, every time I read, I get soooo sleepy. Hopefully the jet lag will go away and I can finish my book.
As for TV, I am soooo far behind on that. I have a lot of things on my DVR. But I did get through a lot of fun stuff while I was away. Thank you Netflix and Amazon Prime. I have been watching Better Call Saul, Jack Ryan (so good. I watched it in two days), Younger (almost done with season 5), This is Us, The Sinner, Masterchef and anxiously awaiting all my other shows to start in the coming weeks.
I was in some new Fall clothes, but now I am back to shorts, tanks, short sleeve work tops and lighter slacks.
Food Truck Friday because the girls have been asking to go back for weeks and this is the final one for the season. Saturday, we don't have much planned and Sunday we are going to the beach!
Everything. I love October. We are going on our annual Apple Hill trip, have a couple home football games and Halloween.
I go in for a follow-up on my nose in a couple weeks and I am very excited for that. One of my nostrils is still "off", so that will be fixed soon enough and hopefully that is the end of my nose saga.
BONUS: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE WAY TO EAT OR DRINK PUMPKIN?
Wow this is a good one since I love pumpkin. But I think my favorite way to eat pumpkin is my mom's pumpkin cookies. She adds walnuts to the batter and they are soooo soft, chewy and amazing. I can't wait to make them again this year. Second place goes to pumpkin pie with homemade whipped cream. LOVE pumpkin, Fall and October!
Your menu sounds really yummy this week, as do those pumpkin cookies!! I'm so excited to embrace all-things-fall, too!
Me too. I love Fall!
Yep, pumpkin cookies are the best!! You and the girls are so cute in that picture. Dinner at your house sounding good!
I saw your recipe and definitely want to try it! Hahha. You can always come by if you are in town!
Their mommy signs are adorable! Girl I want all the cozy clothes right now. That plaid top is to die for.
I loved them and now they are up at work! The plaid top is sooo comfy. It will be on repeat often!
Loving all of your purchases and I'm with you - bring on ALL the 60s/70s and get out of here almost 90s temps! Ugh! Cheers to being back and getting back into a routine!
It is in the 90s for you too? It is way too hot. Love all the cooler temps.
I need to get some of those Converse socks. I tried a couple of other no-show socks with mine but you could see them every time!
Oh these are amazing. I have several pair and wore them daily on my trip. So worth it and not expensive at all.
I pay for Spotify too - I cant deal with the ads. & I use it ALL the time - so its worth it for me.
I still want that MK bag!!!!
Food Truck Friday sounds pretty awesome!! I love that luggage!!
Food Truck Friday, I love it! I don't love all things pumpkin...but I do love pumpkin cookies!!! We have pumpkin ravioli waiting in our refrigerator for this weekend too. MK has the best bags, I have a few designers in my collection...but my MK and Kate Spade bags are my favorites and most carried!
I just got the Woman in Cabin 10 from the library but I didn't start it yet!
That photo of you and the girls is absolutely adorable! I am sure they are so happy to have you home.


Hi crafty lovelies have you seen our design team news and checked out our design team favourites and winner.
You can find the post below this one.
Here are the details of our next challenge.
Here is some fabulous inspiration from our design team.
As from January our challenge blog will be going monthly on the first Monday of every month.
Our fabulous sponsors for 2018. I hope you will visit their stores.
I hope you will visit their fantastic stores.


Mounts permanently with adjustable rigid pole mounting clamps with 4" overall adjustment and overall sizes from 11½" to 72". The suggested mounting height is 14" to 16" above floor. Base and lens are available in 4' and 8' field-cuttable lengths.
Ideal for rail mounted aisle and step applications.


Theresa May, the British prime minister.
Politicians have uncovered evidence of a dark advertising campaign on Facebook, in which Brits were encouraged to lobby against Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit plan.
The Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee said £257,000 was spent on the adverts by an anonymous group called the Mainstream Network.
The committee wants Facebook to reveal who is behind the campaign after it released its new political ad transparency tools in the UK this week.
An influential group of politicians has uncovered evidence of a dark advertising campaign on Facebook, in which users were encouraged to lobby against Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit plan.
In findings published on Saturday, the Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee said an anonymous organisation called Mainstream Network spent £257,000 ($335,148) on ads that reached up to 11 million people over a 10-month period.
The "sophisticated" campaign included a direct call to action for users to email their MP asking them to "chuck Chequers," short-hand for May's controversial Brexit negotiating position agreed at her Chequers retreat in July.
Mainstream Network has no known named organisation, UK address, or individual associated with it, the Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee said.
"Here we have an example of a clearly sophisticated organisation spending lots of money on a political campaign, and we have absolutely no idea who is behind it. The only people who know who is paying for these adverts is Facebook," said the committee's chairman Damian Collins.
It's the kind of activity that could be made public with Facebook's new political ad transparency tools, which were launched in the UK this week. But they have come too late to capture the Mainstream Network campaign, and a committee chairman said Facebook should release details of who is behind the adverts independently.
In a statement, Facebook did not address whether it would voluntarily release details about who is behind Mainstream Network.
"On November 7, all advertisers will have new requirements before they can place political ads in the UK, including Mainstream Network. These advertisers will need to confirm their identity and location through an authorisations process and accurately represent the organization or person paying for the ad in a disclaimer," said Rob Leathern, director of product management.
"These steps must happen or the advertiser will be prevented from running ads related to politics on Facebook. We know we can't prevent election interference alone and offering more ad transparency allows journalists, researchers and other interested parties to raise important questions."
The Mainstream Network Facebook ad on the left, and the website on the right.
The Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee uncovered the Mainstream Network with help from communications agency 89up.
Users were targeted with localised ads which clicked through to the Mainstream Network website, 89up said, where they were encouraged to submit a pre-written email to their local MP. The email calls on the MP to "bin the Chequers Deal before it's too late."
Collins and Paul Farrelly, another lawmaker on the committee, were among many MPs whose constituents were targeted. Mainstream Network also carried a number of pro-Brexit news stories on its site, which have had more than 140,000 social media engagements, according to 89up.
The company also said Mainstream Network could be in breach of the EU's new GDPR privacy laws. This is because whenever a user emails their MP from the site, Mainstream's own address is copied, meaning that the user's email address could potentially be being stored by the organisation.
Collins said: "Facebook has recently announced a set of changes to increase transparency around political advertising on its platform. This example offers Facebook an opportunity to show it is committed to making that change happen — if you are targeted with a message or asked to do lobby your MP, you should know exactly who is behind the organisation asking you to do it."


I can't think of anything more beautiful than dedicating my life to bettering myself, learning to love all that I am, and sharing that mindset with others. A life full of self-discovering, sharing, community, and love.
I realize how I want to live every time I write, and the potential that words have to heal us. Strengthen us. Guide us to exactly where we need to be, even if we don't want to go there.
For me that place lately has been forgiveness.
Everything we have to endure has a purpose, I believe that whole heartedly. When we face our trials with the question, "what am I going to learn from this?" and "how is this going to make me grow?" we are better off.
I am learning each day about forgiveness. Learning about it and practicing it. Learning that because of forgiveness, I will get to be more of my truest self. Practicing forgiveness because I want to see that change.
Yesterday, I sat still in my sister's room, listening to music and taking a moment to be silent. Running through my affirmations, think of the person I am. Thinking about how forgiving those who have hurt me isn't for them, it's for me.
Forgiveness isn't about the other person. It's not about making them feel good and forgetting what happened. Forgiveness is about you, letting go of the power they have had over you. It's about taking back control over your life.
Forgiveness sets us free. It doesn't mean we forget. It doesn't mean we give our strength back to the person who made us feel weak. It means we finally decide that we love ourselves more than any hate or hurt that has been done to us.
Wishing you all a beautiful weekend. Love yourself more than those who have hurt you. Love yourself enough to forgive them, so you can be free.


PRESENT London releases a lookbook alongside their collection for summer 2011 to paint a fuller picture of their designs and offerings. A large range of textures was used for the line, including quilted outerwear, courdorys, wool, and embroidered patterns. Handmade shirting and a pastel color palatte round out the collection. Available now at the PRESENT online store.
This entry was posted in Collections, Footwear, Pants/Bottoms, Tops and tagged PRESENT. Bookmark the permalink.


2009) estimated that the crown group of Agaonidae could have originated any time between 54 and 216 Myr ago.
The term Agaoninae corresponds to the pollinating wasps, sensu Boucek (1988) or to Agaonidae sensu Rasplus, Kerdelhue, Le Clainche and Mondor (1998).
Fig wasps (Hymenoptera: Agaonidae and Torymidae) in New Zealand.
Order Hymenoptera, Chalcidoidea associated with figs (families Agaonidae & Pteromalidae).
2006) y de una especie particular de avispas de la familia Agaonidae para su polinizacion (Ramirez, 1970).
Entre los arboles del genero Ficus y las avispas de la familia Agaonidae existe una relacion mutualista de tipo obligado.
Agaonidae (Hymenoptera Chalcidoidea) and Ficus (Moraceae): fig wasps and their figs, xv (Meso-American Pegoscapus).
1983) observed vertical stratification in the tropical forests of Panama, Papua-New Guinea and Brunei with a marked preference for certain groups of insects including Agaonidae (Hymenoptera) in canopy areas.
Biological analogies between some fig-wasps (Hymenoptera: Agaonidae and Torymidae: Sycophaginae) and Varroa jacobsoni (Acari: Varroidae).
1999 Agaonidae Ramirez 1988, 1991, 1997, Ramirez and Montero 1988, Ramirez and Malavasi 1997 Eulophidae Gonzalez et al.
The eurytomids also occur as parasites in Cynipidae, Pteromalidae, Eurytomidae, Tanaostigmatidae, and Agaonidae (Grisell & Schauff 1990; DiGiulio 1997), and members of the family Perilampidae are hyperparasitoids of Ichneumonidae (Darling 1997).


text:
Flavia Kleiner (* 1990) ist eine Schweizer Politaktivistin.

Biografie
Flavia Kleiner ist das mittlere von drei Kindern einer FDP-Familie: Der Grossvater war Präsident, die Mutter Gemeinderätin der FDP Niederhasli. Kleiner besuchte das Gymnasium an der Kantonsschule Zürcher Unterland in Bülach und begann 2009 ein Studium der Zeitgeschichte und der Rechtswissenschaften an der Universität Freiburg. 2012/13 studierte sie ein Jahr in Jerusalem. 2016 war sie Masterstudentin und Unterassistentin bei Siegfried Weichlein am Lehrstuhl für Europäische Zeitgeschichte. Ihre Freizeit widmet sie klassischer Musik und dem Tanz.

Politik
Nachdem die SVP am 9. Februar 2014 ihre Volksinitiative «Gegen Masseneinwanderung» gegen bürgerliche und linke Parteien, Gewerkschaften und Wirtschaftsverbände gewann, gehörte Kleiner zu den Mitgründern der liberalen Gruppe Operation Libero. Nach den Parlamentswahlen 2015, aus denen die SVP als stärkste Partei hervorging, sahen die anderen Parteien sowie die Wirtschaftsverbände den Kampf gegen die SVP-Durchsetzungsinitiative als aussichtslos an, zumal Umfragen der Vorlage 66 Prozent Ja-Stimmen bescheinigten. Kleiner stellte sich mit ihrer Operation Libero an die Spitze eines Komitees aus Nichtregierungsorganisationen und wurde zu einem Gesicht der zivilen Bewegung, die sich gegen die Durchsetzungsinitiative formierte.

Die Ablehnung der Initiative wertete die Süddeutsche Zeitung als eine «kleine Sensation»: Ein heterogenes Bündnis aus der Zivilgesellschaft gewann gegen die SVP, die mehr finanzielle Ressourcen bereitstellte als das gegnerische Komitee.

Damit wurde Flavia Kleiner in der Öffentlichkeit bekannt. Mehrere Parteien bemühten sich um sie, ihr Porträt war auf dem Cover des Magazins abgebildet, und sie stritt in der Fernsehsendung Arena über die Europapolitik der Schweiz.

Einer Partei wollte Kleiner nicht beitreten und sich stattdessen auf die nächsten grossen Abstimmungsschlachten gegen die SVP konzentrieren. Mit Erfolg: 2016 wurde die Revision des Asylgesetzes angenommen. Im November 2018 verwarfen Volk und Stände die Selbstbestimmungsinitiative, die auf eine Kündigung der Europäischen Menschenrechtskonvention (EMRK) abgezielt hatte.

Am 17. Mai 2020, dem Tag, an dem die gegen die Personenfreizügigkeit gerichtete Begrenzungsinitiative hätte entschieden werden sollen, gab Kleiner bekannt, als Co-Präsidentin zurückzutreten. Sie wolle Operation Libero aber weiterhin unterstützen. Die NZZ am Sonntag schrieb über Kleiners Engagement mit der Operation Libero, sie habe «sechs Abstimmungskämpfe geführt und [sei] sechsmal im Lager der Sieger» gewesen.

Flavia Kleiner ist Mitglied im European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

Weblinks

 Flavia Kleiner auf der Website von Operation Libero (Archiv)
 Flavia Kleiner im Tagesgespräch auf Radio SRF, 17. Oktober 2014
 Flavia Kleiner in der Talksendung Schawinski von SRF am 11. April 2016

Einzelnachweise

Aktivist
Schweizer
Geboren 1990
Frau

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Search by Programs
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Home → A-Z Program Guide → Top Online Computer Education Schools
Top Online Computer Education Schools
Computer education covers a wide swath of courses and programs which split off into branching professions but are all integrated into the modern world. Professionals with varying computer educations create the circuit boards of cell phones and tablets, write the programming that allows WiFi to work and design the websites the internet shops on. As more of the modern world begins to run on computer circuitry, the more a computer education may be needed.
SchoolsGalore.com provides a list of online schools which offer a variety of degrees in computer education ranging from computer engineering to information security and including the interdisciplinary degrees of Web design and health informatics. While some degree programs may be available entirely online, there are some which may hands-on training and require on-site attendance. Check with your school to learn how much of the program is available entirely online.
Best Computer Engineering Schools
Each year, U.S. News & World Report publishes rankings of colleges and universities around the world and nationally. The following schools have been ranked as the best graduate schools for computer engineering by U.S. News & World Report in 2012:
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1. Stanford University
3. University of California Berkeley
4. Carnegie Mellon University
5. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
6. Georgia Institute of Technology
7. California Institute of Technology
7. University of Michigan
9. Cornell University
9. University of Texas
11. Purdue University
Below are some of the computer education focuses available from online schools and colleges through SchoolsGalore.com
Computer engineering bridges the gap between computer science and electrical engineering (in fact, graduate degrees in computer engineering are referred to as a Master's of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering) and focus on the relationship between computer software and the circuitry that powers it. Those with degrees in computer engineering design circuit boards and microchips for every aspect of the modern technological world.
Classes may include mathematics, electrical engineering, computer science and physics. Courses can also be paired with other disciplines for degree specialization in the bioengineering, communications, and nanotechnology, aerospace and automotive fields. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS.gov, 2012) notes that because the work performed by computer engineers attempts to overcome the limitations of current technological generation, computer engineers may work closely with computer programmers as they develop the next generation of computer technology.
The BLS (BLS.gov, 2012) also notes that as a result of automation and advancement in computer technology, more computer advancement comes from computer software rather than computer circuitry and hardware. The field is expected to see employment growth of up to only 9 percent from 2010 to 2020. However, while the number of jobs is not expected to grow as fast as other professions, the national median yearly salary for computer hardware engineers was $98,610 per year in May 2011 (BLS.gov, 2012).
More than just learning a programming language, computer scientists learn to develop new ways to program software and improve the efficiency of older programming languages. They can work with computer engineers to produce the software that runs wireless routers, automobile engines, databases and servers or personal computers. Computer scientists are employed in almost every single technological field in the modern world.
While the education of a computer scientist is grounded strongly in mathematics and electronics (a standard fair for a computer science degree includes analytic geometry, mathematic structures, physics and calculus) there are course specializations for students who intend to work on operating system software, commercial software, information security, website programming or artificial intelligence. The graduate level degrees in computer science may deal with programming theory and the role of computers in society.
Because computer science is a broad field, there is no data for computer science at large. However, because computer scientists often work with programming languages and software, occupational data for software developers can be a useful guideline. The BLS (BLS.gov, 2012) reports an expected job growth of up to 30 percent for software developers from 2010 to 2020 and that software developers of applications made a national median yearly salary of $89,280 per year in May 2011 (BLS.gov, 2012).
Web Design and Engineering
While websites can be constructed by students in elementary school, every graphical button on a website, every widget that streams a video, collapsing text and pop-out window are all created by students with degrees in web design and engineering. These students are the architects of website design and are important to the modern digital world.
Unlike the other computer education degrees, a bachelor's in web design and engineering requires a greater breadth of education. Degrees offered by Chico State and UC Berkeley in web design require courses in mass communications, graphic design and writing.
The BLS (BLS.gov, 2012) expect employment of web designers to grow as e-commerce grows (BLS.gov, 2012), especially as retailers move into the online world. Employment opportunities are projected to increase by up to 22 percent from 2010 to 2020. of the BLS also reported that, according to a survey by Robert Half Technology, (BLS.gov, 2012), the yearly salary for a web designer in 2012 was between $61,250 and $99,250.
Health informatics design and implement the network architecture of a clinic or hospital, establish information security protocols to protect private records and manage the client information database. Graduates with degrees in health informatics, or health information systems, can create programs that merge medical coding, a numerical identifier for conditions and procedures, with medical administration to track patient health or optimize the billing process.
Courses are interdisciplinary and merge health care with computer science and software programming. Students may learn about medical billing and health care processes in addition to programming theory. Classes may also include information security and database architecture to create secure servers for confidential medical records.
While the BLS (BLS.gov, 2012) does not provide hiring data for professionals creating health information systems, the BLS does provide occupational data for computer programmers, whose employment is expected to see up to a 12 percent job increase from 2010 to 2020 and earned a national median salary of $72,630 per year in May 2011 (BLS.gov, 2012).
Learn more about accredited computer education programs from online schools and colleges through SchoolsGalore.com
When researching online colleges and universities, make sure to verify that your choice of school is accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council or by another accrediting agency that approved by The U.S. Department of Education or The Council for Higher Education Accreditation, or both. DETC and CHEA both provide a searchable list of approved schools.
Programs in computer engineering can be accredited by ABET, formerly the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. ABET provides a searchable list of accredited programs in computer engineering and a detailed list of wholly online accredited programs. The Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology also provides a searchable list of accredited computer science programs
While accreditation is important, Red & Black reports that many employers are looking for skill and experience over accreditation and internships can provide soon-to-be graduates with the necessary experience. The Computing Community Consortium has a selection of computer science research opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students.
Sources and further reading:
The Council for Higher Education Accreditation
The U.S. Department of Education
The Distance Education and Training Council
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
O*NET Online
Robert Half Technology
Red & Black: Professionals say computer science accreditation not required for hire
US News, Best Engineering Schools
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


General Info: This cute little parrot is one of the most popular of all captive birds here in the United States because of it's small size and easy upkeep. It's a great bird for first time parrot owners. Although it is well known as a parakeet or budgie, the bird is actually called a budgerigar (budgie is just for short, and the name parakeet is really a name that includes a wide variety of small parrot species). This bird is native to central Australia, living in terrains that include wooded areas, dessert, and scrub. The wild variety are a lovely green and yellow color with a light tan beak. Captivity and a whole lot of selective breeding has produced a whole rainbow of colors in these birds, including light-blue, white, and yellow. There are also two distinct types of budgies: The American budgie and the English budgie. The English budgie differs from the American budgie in overall size. The English budgie is a few inches larger. In addition, the English variety has a very distinct "puffy" appearance to the feathers that surround the beak (almost as if the English budgie is sporting a beard!).
Size: They are small birds under 10 inches in length. The average length is about 8 inches.
Lifespan: These birds typically live about 8 years, but have been know to live up to 15-20 years. Of course, a happy bird on an nutritious diet will have a greater chance at a long life.
Dietary Needs: All too often, budgies suffer from malnutrition. This is in large part because first time owners will be told that a simple seed diet is adequate for their budgie and they will not deviate from this seed-only advice. Seeds, high in fat and low (or even lacking) in many essential nutrients cause many health problems. A budgie will thrive on a diet of a MIXTURE of seeds, pellet, fresh fruits and veggies, and sprouts. Although fresh fruits are great as a snack every once in a while, veggies, especially those that are dark green in color, are fantastic additions to your birds diet. An example would be fresh spinach leaves (be sure to take out any uneaten fresh veggies or fruit after a few hours as they can spoil quickly. Spoiled food may cause illness in your bird). Have fun with variety. Who knows? Perhaps you will start to experiment with different types of fresh fruits and vegetables right along with your bird. Be adventurous!
Cage Size: For a single parakeet: no smaller than 18 x 18 inch cage. However the larger the better. They need 1/2 inch bar spacing.
Train-ability: These intelligent parrots are among the top 3 "talking" species of birds (the other 2 are the African Grey and the Yellow-headed Amazon). Usually, it is the male budgie that learns to mimic human words (you can tell which bird is a male by the blue cere. The cere is the area on the birds beak that contains the nostrils. The cere in females is brown). Their tiny little voices sometimes make it hard to decipher what is being said, but they are capable of repeating words that are taught to them. Budgies are very friendly and make great pets. Sometimes you must tame your bird to make them friendly toward you. This can be done by simply spending a lot of time with your bird for the first two weeks of his or her life with you (for example: 4 or so hours a day of holding, talking to, or interacting with your bird in any way). If you want to minimize the need to tame your bird, you can get a bird that is very young and hand-raised. In my personal opinion, the hand-raised birds are the very best for use as pets.
Health concerns: Watch your bird closely for health problems. Illness in birds is very serious by the time a problem is noticeable to you. This is because birds developed in instinct, in the wild, to hide their illnesses because predators tend to target birds that show illness as they are the easiest to capture. Common diseases/illnesses that budgies suffer from are tumors, diabetes, malnutrition, gout, mite infestations, polyoma and liver disease. "Scaly face", caused by mites, seems to be the most common.


I like to change the ErrorLogSize of my v8 Qmgr by updating the qm.ini file.
I know qm.ini changes will need a Qmg restart to pick up. So that will be scheduled. This is a production Qmgr. I want to be sure that we do it right to avoid another restart.
1. Do I have to delete the existing AMQERRXX LOG files which is at default of 2M ?
The OP seems to be asking about the ERROR log files.
Opps Sorry. You are correct.
Yes, it is about the AMQERRXX.LOG and not the MQ logs for MQ restart and recovery. I am testing it now using a test Qmgr. But I have difficulties filling up the LOG in a short period of time.
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSFKSJ_7.5.0/com.ibm.mq.con.doc/q019020_.htm describes the default and maximum; but I suppose you've already read this.
I've not tried this, but I'd guess that you would need to stop the qmgr, delete the existing error log files, and then restart the qmgr.
Should be easy enough to test on a new qmgr.
I don't think you need to delete the existing error logs after changing the qm.ini file. We change this setting for every QM we build, and have never deleted the original error logs.
Use the amqscnxc command from a machine with MQ Client installed to connect using a bad channel name. Every time you attempt to connect, the QM will record the failed attempt against the non existent channel name in the QM error log. Put that command in a loop and run it a couple thousand times.
At first I was hoping that there is a quick way to confirm instead of having to wait for a day.
As peter suggested, you could cause MQ to generate thousands of error messages, until the log file rolls over.
You might also simply be able to echo "" >>AMQERR01.LOG (i.e. add a bunch of spaces to the end of the file), and run that a whole bunch of times.
And the file might not be writable by anyone else..


We carry beautiful butterfly candle wedding favors, butterfly bookmarks, butterfly key rings, butterfly place card holders and butterfly tins! We also carry butterfly decorated packets of coffe, cocoa, cappuccino and tea. These make wonderful favors for weddings, bridal showers, birthdays and quinceaneras.


You're able to have confidence in Backyard Pond Guys to deliver the best professional services for Backyard Ponds in Torch, OH. Our workforce of well trained contractors will provide the services that you require with the most advanced technologies in the industry. We use superior supplies and cash saving solutions to make sure you are given the highest quality products and services at the greatest value. Give us a call at 800-372-6460 to learn more.
At Backyard Pond Guys, we are aware that you must keep in budget and lower your expenses anywhere it is possible to. Though, being economical should never signify that you compromise superior quality with Backyard Ponds in Torch, OH. We provide you with the finest quality even while saving you money. We use the leading techniques and products to ensure that any work can tolerate the years, and we cost less money in ways that will not impact the excellent quality of any work. That is attainable since we know the way to save time and resources on products and labor. Save time and cash through getting in touch with Backyard Pond Guys today. We'll be waiting to accept your call at 800-372-6460.
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