Daily Report

Husband really does love Fiorella.  He gave her several days worth of the old-style crossword puzzles he found when he was cleaning out a drawer, he stopped by Target on the way home and bought her seven boxes of Shredded Wheat, and he spent more than an hour battling his way through a strangely recalcitrant Amazon to get Fio the romance novel she wanted to read to put her mind on the right track for writing revisions.
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Sonia Dog will be a full-fledged adult mastiff on April 21 when she turns two-and-a-half-years old, and you can tell already that she's leaving her teenage years behind. But let a deer cross her path . . . .
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Husband is taking a day off so maybe he and Fio can clear out more of the garage.  Lots of interesting things are showing up, but they still haven't gotten to the boxes that haven't seen the light of day since they moved in nine years ago.
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Fio feels good this morning and hopes you do too.

Give and Take

It requires the knowledge of a lifetime to work the daily crossword puzzles. Fiorella calls upon her late father's golfing days for terms like tee, fore, putt, eagle, and birdie, names like Slammin' Sammy Snead. Dad's interest in baseball gives her homer, Mel Ott, Matty and Felipe Alou, Babe Ruth, Shea stadium. Her own history supplies her with such as (Yoko) Ono, Nehru jacket, and the Indian honorific, Sri.

On the other hand, Fio has also learned about things from crossword puzzles--things like the Ural and Altai mountains, several obscure European rivers, cold weather terms from the Northeast U.S. Today she discovered that the call of a moose is called a bugle.

So if you want to start your day off right,

/T
CROSSWORDS
/Y

Fio's Obsession

Okay, Fio will admit it--she's addicted to crossword puzzles. Which means that when she and Husband packed up for California last weekend, she bought a puzzle book and stuffed it in her carry-on so she wouldn't have to quit cold-turkey.

She worked crosswords in the airport, on the plane, when she couldn't sleep at night, and when plans got scrambled and there was nothing else to do. All in all, it was a forty-two puzzle trip. And when she got home, there were five newspapers awaiting her so she clipped all those puzzles out for a rainy day.

One-across is Fiorella. One-down is fanatic.