NYC in a Nutshell

HELLO!  Fiorella is back from durance vile, aka New York City. It was a hard trip and a hard time, but now she's home, sleeping in her own bed, and unloading her suitcase--not at the same time.

In many ways, New York is not a nice place to live.  Besides, we all know it will be under water as soon as all the icebergs melt.  However, there's one big reason Fio would have wanted to grow up in the Big Apple--because she heard more non-English being spoken there than English. Her ears perked with pleasure and curiosity to every foreign sound. The only people who in New York who spoke English were behind the hotel registration desk.

Yes, Fiorella is a language nut.  LANGUAGE NUTS RULE!

Let.Me.Explain.Myself.

The. First. Time. That. Fiorella saw the words of an emphatic statement being separated by periods, she thought it was clever.  The second time, she was cool with it.  The third time, she thought, "Oh, this again," and the fourth time, it was old hat.  And tiresome.

Fio doesn't know who first used the stratagem, but it now seems to be de rigueur for romance writers.  Com'on folks, we can come up with ways of expressing emotional reactions other than clever punctuation.

Only Once

Fiorella was on a sailboat only once in her life, and she loved it.  The silence was total and complete. She was at peace.

Fiorella tried skiing only once in her life, but that was enough.  She had a horrible time trying to fit into the ski shoes, she nearly banged into the lodge when she was skiing down the bunny hill, and it took a couple of people to get the skis off of her because they were so tight.

Fiorella has had just one facelift, and that's the limit.  A perky young face on top of a decrepit old body would look sort of freakish.

Dexter Is Darling

Jeff Lindsay, who writes the Dexter series, is one of Fiorella's favorite authors,  It's not the blood and guts that attract her, but the smooth, almost poetic writing style.  Here's an excerpt from "Double Dexter:"

So are you, we say, and we push the tape into place over his mouth and go back to work, winding into well-earned bliss as the climax of our sharp symphony blares up out of the cheerful growing moonlight, and the music takes us higher and higher, until finally, slowly, carefully, joyfully, it comes to its triumphant chord and releases everything into the warm, wet night: everything.

That's Fit to Print

Television news bit into newspaper news, and internet news bit into television news.  What's next?

Time marches on.

Yellow Brick Road

Note to all job seekers:

Your talents and skills are nice, but all too many other people have the same talents and skills. What you need to do is give the impression that you'll be a pleasant person to be around for five days a week, twelve months a year.

Smile!

Here, There, Everywhere

Fiorella lives in a house of cords--the lamp cords, the computer cords, the printer cord, the thousand and one cords Husband uses which Fio fathoms not.  There are even cords in the garage--on hooks, in baskets, in drawers.

Oddly enough, Fio's great-grandmother, according to an old family picture, also lived in a house of cords.  Cords that were strung across the wall from (wonder of wonders!) electric light to electric light.

So maybe in the future, the electronic plug-ins will disappear like the the ones controlling the electric lights did.  Maybe charging will be done through the wifi.

Not that Fio knows what she's talking about, but you get the idea.