An Artist's LIfe--Loss, Labor, and Triumph

Fiorella is very unhappy. In fact, she is devastated. She has lost an art collages she had promised to give her doctor. It's a simple, three circle construction, one of the few abstracts she's ever done, and she loved it, and now it is gone. She'd put it in a plastic zip-bag and taken it with her while she was shopping today so she could find an appropriate frame for it, and she thinks she got home with it--a plastic bag is pretty obvious--but when she finished putting away all her purchases and prepared to get to framing, the zip bag and its contents were nowhere around. She's search everywhere twice over, but the nutcracker doll is still broken. Fearing loss, Fio had had two copies of  the collagemade at Fed-Ex Kinko a couple of days ago, which means that it can be reconstructed, but Fio will always know it was a second edition.
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That outdoor sign that Fio is adding to her Christmas decorations this year is turning out to be a little harder to put together than she thought. Fiberboard, of course, is not an ideal medium to try to attach sticky alphabet letters to, but Fio figured that if push came to shove, she could overcome that problem with Scotch tape. What she didn't expect was difficulty coloring the stencil letters she'd picked up at Michael's. She tried red crayon, but guess what--they don't make crayons like they used to and the newbies don't cover well. Nothing to do but trot over to H-E-B and pick up the cheapest red finger-nail polish she could find.  Yep, for just three bucks, she now has the reddest, shiniest, weather-proofest CHRISTMAS GREETINGS around.
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The outside tree is taking a little longer to finish off because the two previous paragraphs, but it is going surprisingly well. All those metallicly decorated chocolate medallions, which Fio is using for decorations, are proving to be worth their weight in gold. (They've also contributed to Fiorella's weight, but don't tell anyone.)