Woman in Action

As those of you who follow Fio's alter ego on Facebook know, she doesn't hold back. Emotions boil up within her, and she spews out the words like a vocano blowing its top. But please note--those words are original. So is everything else Fio posts on Facebook and on this blog. It's always been that way. She writes her own accolades, poems, diatribes, and snide remarks. She writes her own books. She's even written a children's opera and composed songs. and in addtions, she paints and draws her own pictures, decorates her own house, and used to sew her own clothes (well, some of them). Yes, Fio is a driven woman, and sometimes it's hard for her to live with herself. But being who she is, it's even harder for her to NOT be herself.

So just pat her head, say "Good Doggie," and throw that woman a bone.

Explanation

If you looked at Fiorella first thing in the morning, you saw far more of what goes on behind the scenes than Fio ever wanted you to see--the jumbled notes, obscure references, and sheer gibberish that she shapes into her morning offering. Yes, as you probably guessed, the computers at la casa Fiorella went off-line last night, and it was an eye-opener. Not only was Fio blocked from writing a stunningly brilliant blog, but she couldn't check out her baby-steps attempts at Spanish sentences on Translater, contact friends on email, check out Google News or KEEP UP WITH FACEBOOK.

But now she's at Starbucks, every writer's home away from home, and has hooked onto their power, cleared her blog, and explained to you exactly what has happened. Except that she almost forgot to mention that she crashed a tall chair to the floor as she was trying to mount it, and the store was stunned into silence, then erupted into voices of concern. But that's your Fio--drama follows her wherever she goes.

Photo, Computer, Sonia, Easter, Spanish

As you probably figured out from yesterday's post, Fio tried to add a photo onto her blog, but ended up messing up the post instead. She promises not to try this maneuver again until some knowledgeable person is standing behind her and telling her exactly what to do. Apparenty a big part of the problem is that she has a Droid and her blog is on gmail.
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Speaking of computer problems, Fio is not thrilled to announce that she accidentally deleted about three hundred pages of text and notes as she was closing down from reviewing her current work-in-progress. Luckily, she has a Carbonite back-up and is on good terms with Click Computer Repair.
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In a complete change of topic, Husband is training Sonia Dog to close the back yard door after herself. It's going to take a while, but it will be worth it.
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Fiorella has plans for Easter. She'll buy enough chocolate tomorrow to take some around to the neighborhood people who have helped her with her murita de rocas (little wall of rocks), which should be finished off in a couple of months, maybe sooner. Spoiler alert: Fio will be wearing the bunny ears Husband picked up for her at Target yesterday.
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One more thing--Fio has decided to check out Target and Walmart for DVDs for people who are trying to learn Spanish. Duolingo was too repetitive, and telenovelas talk too fast.

United We Stand

Fiorella is heartened by the way the anti-Trump movement has come together with each person working in his own way. Fio uses FB and her blog, posting comments, responses, and poems. Others march or strike or continually contact their congressmen. Others sign petition after petition.  The intelligence community and news media keep insisting on telling the truth. And political cartoonists, comic strip writers, and TV satirists have reduced the situation to its basic absurdity.

Trump may be the first president laughed out of office.

Adieu to Fio's Sudden Popularity

Fiorella's stats, which had risen to 700+ pageviews per day for about a month there, have gone down to about 150 and will probably dip lower, back into the reality level for a blog that doesn't even advertise. The increase was caused by a sudden intense readership in France, which threw Fio for a loop. Was her blog being used as a school assignment to help students with colloquial English?  Was the French government looking at it to gauge American political opinion? Was it being used to encrypt secret messages, maybe from Russia to Trump? Qui sait?

(And yep, an earlier version of this blog was posted before it was supposed to be. Fio screws up from time to time.)

Pondering the Universe

Yes, Fio is the quintessential absent-minded professor, but how can she remember if she's already brushed her teeth when her mind is occupied pondering the universe, analyzing yesterday and planning today, and coming up with words of wit and wisdom for her blog?

Of course the answer to the question is--ta-da--by determining whether or not her mouth tastes like Colgate.

In the Know

Fiorella has a long-time habit of rechecking everything--Google news, Facebook, her blog, and her email--every time she opens up the computer, which is about five times a day and just before she goes to bed.  As she shut down last night, she heard herself say, "Nothing there.  I'm safe."

Yes, your Fio doesn't like surprises.

Can't Help It

As she lay in bed half awake this morning, Fio contemplated her literary career. It started with a four-line rhyme Mrs. Rider assigned the class to write in the third grade.  All Fio can remember of her offering is one line, "feathered Vs across the sky," which was her description of a bird migration. Then, of course, there was Baylor Children's Theater, which introduced her to scripts and drama.

In junior high, she wrote more poetry, mainly adolescent angst, and discovered comedy. That was also when, inspired by her mother's collection of Book-of-the-Month romances, she wrote the first chapter of a novel (which disappeared when Mother went through her desk drawer).

In high school, Fio penned playlets for presentation by the Latin club and the English literary club, wrote mounds of poetry, and ventured into short stories.   She also represented her school in ready-writing contests and edited the school Latin publication one year and the state publication the next.

Fiorella continued writing poetry, short stories, and essays through her undergraduate years, then added a romance novel and a dissertation to her repertoire when she was in graduate school.

And here she is now with two published books under her belt, a blog overflowing with mini-essays, about twenty short stories hanging around that she wants to re-edit, Lord knows how many poems scattered about, and more to come.

The girl can't help it.

OCD

Thank to TV, we now know all the jargon, and what we used to attribute to someone's personality, we now diagnose as a disorder. Thus, when Fio's friend dropped everything and moved out of state only to return four months later, Fio attributed her actions to ADD rather than impulsiveness.

But what about Fiorella, who plans every moment of her day?  Fio's friend may be impulsive, but she herself is compulsive.  Why else would anyone write a blog every day for more than seven years straight?

Better Late Than

Yes, Fio is late posting, but she's been through the mill.  Her blog icon disappeared last night when she was working after everyone else had gone to bed--God only know where her cursor wandered or what combination of keys she accidentally brushed her fingers over. Anyway, a quick trip to Click at nine o'clock this mroning, and Fiorella is back in business again.

But Click is having its own problems.  Georgetown's popular computer repair shop was bursting at the seams so it moved across I-35 to a bigger spot between Shipley's donuts and Cricket.  Click has a nice painted sign which would fit the space above its door, but the landlord is insisting on an expensive sign similar to Shipley's and Cricket's--a large plastic number with raised letters.

Fiorella is behind Click all the way, and she's given Travis, who mans the front desk, the email address of the features editor at the local newspaper.  Meanwhile, her ever-inventive mind is mulling over the idea of suspending the painted sign right above the shop, but not touching it.  Where's that drone armada when you need it?

Fiorella Fights the Computer, Husband Wins

Sorry to be running late, but Fiorella had an adventure this morning.  Let's call it, in line with all those cutely-titled elementary-school textbooks, "Fun with the Computer."

Some background here:  Fiorella is computer-challenged.  Her mind does not compute computerese. Nice, helpful people have often explained to Fio what they are doing as they move their fingers like Chopin across the keys, but Fio's eyes glaze over and her brain moves on to more graspable things--like gathering together all her short stories into a book, like refreshing her Russian, like rearranging furniture and landscaping the yard, like working out the family finances, like what the heck she'll write on Fiorella tomorrow.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, Fiorella tried to drag a desktop picture onto this blog for your edification and enjoyment, but she ended up pushing both you and the internet half off the page, then couldn't either back on again.

Finally she invoked Husband, the family computer guru, and he galloped over to the couch on his white horse and rescued her.

And we lived happily every after.

Promotion

Fiorella is overwhelmed again.  It isn't just the house or the yard or the writing.  It's the literary promotion.  Everywhere Fiorella looks, people are advocating self-promotion, which Fio does NOT want to do.  One reason she held out for an agent and a publisher was so that she would write, write, write her stories, and OTHER people could sell, sell, sell them.  Besides, she was blessed with many talents and skills, but NOT electronics!

Yes, your Fio has a blog, email, and Facebook, but that's it--no Pinterest, no Instagram, no Twitter, no WODDL, no Buffer, no Street Team, no give-aways,  Definitely a dinosaur.

Fiorella and Addictive Drugs

Interesting.  Fio came across an old blog that Husband wrote while Fio was recovering from heart surgery several years ago and learned that she'd had such a bad reaction to massive doses of Vicodin (=hydrocodone) that she'd refused to take it so the doctor moved her to massive doses of Tylenol.

What was that reaction, you ask.  The same as after her hip replacement--hallucinations whether she was asleep or awake.  Yes, your Fio is not destined for life as a drug addict.  She likes the world to make sense, to have cause and effect, perhaps the most outrageous hallucination of all.

Overnight Enlightenment

Husband knows it's going to be a busy day when Fiorella comes down the stairs in the morning with two pages of notes in her hand.  Yes, Fio keeps a pad of paper on the bathroom counter so that as soon as she wakes up, she can record whatever has boiled up out of her subconscious. The topics cover everything from her house to her book to her philosophical ruminations about the universe.

They also cover her blogs . . . like this one.

Reality Sets In

The euphoria of yesterday was somewhat tempered by the reality of the rest of the day.  when Fio tried to print out last year's blogs, the printer jammed.  After she spent a couple of hours jiggling it and pulling out scraps of paper with tweezers and a toothpick, Husband came home and figured out how to remove the faceplate and get the machine going again.  Meanwhile Fiorella had to pay bills, take care of a situation with her critique group, call the kids,  etcetera, and didn't get to those magic ten pages for WHERE THE HEART LEADS till evening.  But there's always tomorrow.

Christmas Cards

Fiorella has finished off her Christmas cards and is sending them on their way, fully realizing she is in a minority population--the cards she proudly displays on her dining room doors get fewer and fewer each year. If people want to communicate holiday greetings, they can text each other, or send emails, or sign up with Jacquie Lawson.

Fio remembers when Mother would spend days not only signing Christmas cards, but adding a little note inside each one.  It was called communication, and was particularly important before the invention of computers that engendered instant contact to anywhere in the world.  In fact, when Fio's family moved to far-away Texas, the voluminous letters written by her three sisters-in-law, Aunt Miriam, Aunt Hattie, and Aunt Julie, were what kept Fio's parents in touch with life and family at "home."

But Fio likes Christmas cards for more than communication.  She likes to design them.  She likes to create something interesting and pleasing to the eye.  She likes to add something new to the world, something that is uniquely Fiorella.

Like this blog.

Family and Friends

Fiorella is thankful.

She's thankful that Austin Son celebrated his first wedding anniversary earlier this week and that Minnesota son has twenty years racked up with his sweet bride.  She's thankful that Daughter has a new job and better prospects.  She's thankful for Brother Bill and the wonderful sister-in-law he brought into the family.  She's thankful for her relatives up east and for Cousin Mimi and her husband's recent visit.  She's thankful for Nephew Barney and his wife, Great-nephew Aaron and his fiancee, Great-nephew Barrett and his wife.

And she's thankful for friends.  Those who live in this country and those who live overseas, those she's known a long time and those she's just met, those who like her book and those who wish she'd stuck to poetry.

And she's especially thankful for those who read her blog.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Emily Wins

With a romance novel out, Fio considered closing up her blog shop, but decided she needs to keep it going. The blog is Fiorella's outlet for all the thoughts and theories her strange brain throws at her.  It is her letter to the world, that never wrote to her, which is a restatement of Emily Dickinson, which is ironic because  What the Heart Wants is from Emily also.

Friend Jeanell writes fiction, but Fiorella writes facts

Burning the Midnight Oil

The post Fiorella wrote totally disappeared.  Her baby car is in the shop.  The plumber was here for two hours ferreting out a 400 gallon per hour leak.  Husband and Fio are working on an LLC form for the family enterprise.  Her self-esteem hit rock bottom when she spent an hour filling out a form for her publisher.  Every time she's turned around, there has been something or someone demanding her immediate attention.  And she's also trying to work on WHERE THE HEART LEADS.

Oh well, there's always tonight, after everyone else has gone to bed.

Electronic Frustration

Hellooooooo! Long time, no see!

Fiorella has been through electronic hell lately.  The laptop finally works and she was able to email her revised manuscript to her editor this morning--just before she lost her internet again.  Husband was able to get the web working this evening, but, because he had to change Fio's password so she could use another computer over the weekend, she couldn't get onto the blog today, even with the new password.  Several hours of frustration later, she was finally allowed to get on board and write this blog.  It's almost 10:00, but your Fio will go to bed happy.

Now, about the TV that's out of whack. . . .