Of Fio's Baby Car, Fire in the Fireplace, and Mosquitoes

It's official.  Fio's thirteen-year-old  baby car, her beloved  navy blue Mazda Miata, is falling to pieces.  The window control broke inside the door panel and the dealership is repairing it for her, but advised against putting out the $$$ for replacing the front end panel. It's a quality of life decision, one might say.
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Fiorella is still running around in shorts, which means there's still no fire in the fireplace.  Let's hope all the firewood stacked across the driveway doesn't rot in place.
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Mosquitoes.  Fiorella is beloved by them.  Not a day goes by that she doesn't have a fresh bite.  The first freeze can't come early enough for her.

Communication Deprivation

It's official.  The land line is off till Thursday--THURSDAY WEEK--when the Verizon repairman appears.  Supposedly.  And it will be fixed.  Supposedly.

But Fio, you ask.  You and Husband surely have cellphones, don't you?  Well, yes, Fiorella answers.  But we live in a cellphone dead area and can only use our phones when we're leaning off the second floor balcony or are up at the mailbox beside the road.  Or, of course, when we are driving.

So--no incoming calls, no outgoing calls for a week and a half.

In a way, it's rather freeing.

Stressed, You Say?

This has been a hard week for Fiorella,  That engine light was still on so Fio had to take the car to the dealer for a $400 repair, she was diagnosed with GERD (good-bye, chocolate), attacked by a herd of mosquitoes, hit the concrete face-first again, is still recovering from having her false vocal chords shot up with botox, is agonizing over revisions of her new book, and is preparing not only for the NY writers' conference, but for her birthday,

The good thing is that she's lost two pounds.

Onward!

Fiorella learned something yesterday as she sat waiting hour after hour for her car to be fixed.  She learned her writing self-consciousness had been totally healed.  Yes, Fio hauled out her laptop and revised two chapters while she was in the dealership--and one of them included a love scene.

And when she spotted a young woman reading a paperback while waiting, Fio put a smile on her face, asked what she was reading (a romance), announced herself as a romance writer, and gave her a promotional bookmark.

To top it all off, one of the technicians sought Fio out and asked if she had written the book in her car that had her name on it.  Then he told her his wife writes romances and is trying to get published.  Fiorella recommended RWA, gave him her card, contact information, and a bookmark, and told him to have his wife get in touch.

What a day!

Fixin' Things

Fiorella's new laptop had been sequestered in the repair shop for a week to get stripped of its troublesome fellow-travelers, and now that it was home again, it refused to connect with her wireless printer.  Also, it wouldn't allow Kindle to be added to its complement of options.  To top it off, Fiorella was stuck in her current work-in-progress.  Stuck and scared.  Was she, for the first time in her life, experiencing the dreaded Writer's Block?

She prayed and agonized and considered, then realized the reason she was stuck was two-fold: she was totally frustrated by her computer, and she'd written herself into a corner.  The next day, Husband figured out how to make the computer communicate with the printer, and a little back-tracking lit a fire under Fio's recumbent muse.

Kindle, though, will have to wait for another day.