Five Factoids

Yep, your Fio is a delicate flower. As she confessed to you yesterday, she does not fare well in hot weather. Neither, she wants you to know, does Sonia dog. Poor baby follows Fio out the door, then, five minutes later, barks to be let inside again. Mastiffs aren't designed for Texas summers.
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Three words that Fiorella wants newscasters to memorize the pronunciation of: realtor, nuclear, and athletic. They are NOT re-la-ter, nu-cyu-ler, and a-tha-letic.
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Every life hangs by a thread. Anything can happen any minute, no matter your age, your health, or how careful you are. Fate is fate.
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The way one says "Good morning" in the Nigerian dialect that Tosin at the Verizon store speaks is "e-k-a-a-r-o," which is pronounced like a rainbow. starting at a lower pitch, rising in the middle, and settling at the end. Fio would have loved to have studied a pitch language at some time in her life, but maybe there's still time after she learns Spanish, reviews her Russian, and picks up Telugu again. And then there's her Latin that she'd like to renew, and her German, Fio's study of which was cut short after ein semester. Oops, she didn't mention the French, which she passed a reading a exam on long ago, but which she never did learn how to speak.
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Surely the circus act in DC cannot continue much longer.

Weighing It All

Nothing beats laughter and random kindness to pull Fio out of a depression.  She had a great time at Mazda yesterday while she was picking up her baby car--Jason and Richard are lots of fun--and then, when she stopped by H-E-B to pick up a few things for supper, an employee who was outside gathering baskets noticed she was looking for a small one and ran across the roadway to fetch one for her.  And inside the store, she was able to snag a bigger package of hamburger (for Husband, Son, and Fio) than the butcher usually cuts, and a checker invited her to a new line she was opening up.

Fate balances out.

Sucker

Fiorella, who tends toward depression, feeds off the happiness of others.  Not in a vampiric way, but in a warming-her-hands-at-the fire sort of way.  When she was younger, she wept and raged at the unfairness of fate, but age has brought acceptance,

And Fio being Fio, she still hopes and prays and pushes on.

Control Issue

Fiorella grew up in an era which touted the power of positive thinking. She thought anything was possible if she totally believed in it, and being Lutheran--saved by faith alone--reinforced this viewpoint.

Of course she was a little discouraged when she leaped off of the porch step with a Mary Marvel cape tied around her neck and didn't fly, but she figured the fault was hers--she hadn't believed hard enough.

Other things didn't work out in her life either. In fact, she noticed that whatever she wanted to happen or thought would happen didn't happen so she revised her strategy, stating the negative to invoke the positive. Thus now she cheerily says things like "when I go senile . . ." as a charm against doing so.

It's a sort of magic to control her own private universe, but deep inside she remembers falling off the porch step and knows she has no control. What happens to her is both random and inevitable.