Judicial Snippets

Fiorella is judging entry level contestants in a romance writing contest, which has turned out to be quite encouraging. She has always thought her own synopses were bottom of the barrel, but compared to the ones she's reading now, Fio is Shakespeare.
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Fio has received critiques back recently from a couple of contests that she DIDN'T final in, but she tends to ignore them. One judge will say she didn't give enough detail and another will say she gave too much.
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What really irritates her is when some idiot judge doesn't give her full points on punctuation and grammar. If there's anything Fio knows, it's punctuation and grammar.
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Son in Retrospect

In high school, Older Son had a boom car, the kind with a bass that vibrates your fillings from three blocks away. We always knew when he was on his way home—so did all the rest of the world.

We pointed out the danger to his hearing, but he persisted in increasing his volume by adding even more speakers. Apparently he didn’t hear us.

A more immediate danger was burglars. His car was broken into several times, twice during the day in the school parking lot, once at night in the same lot, and a couple of times in our own driveway. On the last occasion, a passing patrol car decided there was something suspicious about two guys working on a car at 3 a.m. under an on-and-off security spotlight.

The cop nailed the thieves in the act, then rang our doorbell. The whole family got off to an early start that day.

Older Son finally got a car alarm, but the insurance company dropped him for excessive claims. I was threatening to do the same.

Needless to say, my son had a small fortune tied up in that car. It ate up all his Christmas and birthday money, whatever he could earn, plus whatever he was able to wheedle out of his father, a closet car stereo nut himself.

Then there was the fellow student who promised stereo heaven, but disappeared after Older Son forked over an eighty-dollar down payment. Checking the stereo shop where the friend supposedly worked, Son found out the guy had been fired. And his roommate had kicked him out for not paying rent—which made Son realize his friend did not, as he had said, live with a wealthy father and a garageful of show cars.

The whole experience seemed an unnecessary pain to me. Not until I visited high school one morning did I really understand about the booming bass stereo.

My pride and joy had parked out in front and was sitting behind the wheel with both doors open and the speakers blaring. A couple of guys and six giggling teen-age girls were gathered around.

“He uses it to lure women,” Younger Son explained. “He’s like a fisherman. The car is the hook and the bass is the bait and all he has to do is sit there and reel them in.”

No wonder he didn’t care about his hearing.

Follow the Light

Rays of light shine through the gloom. Husband wrote a sweet comment note last week after one of Fio's particularly depressing blogs. And, out of the blue, friend Joy raved about Fio's entry which made the finals in a local writing contest. And when Fio entered a Houston contest, the coordinator turned out to be the same nice person, Pat, whom she had dealt with last year--and Pat told her she was following Fiorella on line! What a surprise--Fio had talked herself into believing nobody read her blog, that she was writing only to herself.

And today is Oldest Son's birthday and thirty-eight candles will be lit. Thirty-eight rays of light.

Stiff Upper Lip

Fio's parents were from a tough generation. They didn't indulge themselves in useless emotional displays, such as mourning.

Fiorella is trying to follow their role modeling. No weeping, no brooding, no coddling of herself.

But she can't help but feel a little down--something her parents might have felt too, in similar circumstances. However, she can't help writing about it--something her parents would never have done, in any circumstances.

Cassandra Spoke, but Did Anyone Listen?

Ah, the financial geniuses have finally figured out that the reason people aren't upping the economy by buying stuff is that they don't have the money to buy stuff because they don't have the jobs to provide the money to buy stuff. Well, duh!

Fio has an idea. She reads a lot of British novels and she's noticed that everyone with an extra dollar (translation: about half a pound sterling) hires someone to tend the lawn, someone else to clean the house, someone else to cook the food, whatever, which spreads the meager wealth around as far as it will go. Not that the hirer is that wealthy either--but then clothes closets are smaller in Britain.

Anyway, Fio proposes that we stop enlarging our wardrobes and start enlarging our hearts by hiring people to do whatever they can do around our homes and business.

I have to say that Fio predicted all this years ago when she realized how the labor opportunities available were being diminished by labor-saving devices. At home, why send clothes out to be washed when you have a great washer-dryer in the utility room? On the job, why hire twenty people when five--plus computers--can handle the same workload? Maybe Ned Ludd had something when he led a revolt again that new-fangled mechanized loom way back when.

Down with machines! Up with people! (Says she who's using a computer to writing this blog and everything else she produces.)

Cut-off

When I was young and hinkty, I told my students that if they heard I had requested no extreme measures should be taken to keep me alive, they should shout murder because I wanted to cling on, no matter what. Where there was life, there was hope.

But now, I feel differently. Maybe it has something to do with the living death my father was involved in. Or maybe the example of my friend's father, who couldn't remember his wife's name, but wanted his gun because he was convinced someone was trying to kill him.

As far as I can tell, eighty-five is the cut-off time.

All in all, getting older is a whole lot less interesting than I thought it would be.

Deja Vu

Okay, Fio has just looked over her line-up and discovered she ran the same blog twice, the one about what Bob Wilson taught her. Sorry, but her brain has been a little overloaded lately. She owes you one, but you're not getting it today.

In addition, she notes the red message at the bottom of her screen saying Blogger.com could not be contacted and the posting may fail.

But such is life. We try, we fail, and we dissolve into nothingness.

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Ten minutes later:
But Fio can't help but keep on trying. She's replaced the original of "Bob Wilson" with a poem called "Nursing Home Visit." Check out Sept. 21.