Cissa Fleming

Life

“Life lives, life dies. Life laughs, life cries. Life gives up and life tries.
But life looks different through everyone’s eyes.”

Cute! But one of my favorite quotes about life is from Henry Ford, that said:

“Life is a series of experiences, each of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this.“

And I would like to complement it with “every experience has a end”. Happily!
(Or unhappily, considering what we call “good experiences.”)

But all experiences end. The trick is: how can we get the time pass quickly during the ones we are not enjoying, and have the most fun possible for the ones we are?

It reminds me of that joke about Albert Einstein’s relativity theory. What does it seem to a guy if he has an old lady sitting in his lap for one minute,  compared with a beautiful girl sitting in his lap for an hour?  In the first case one minute seems like an hour, in the second case one hour seems like a minute…

I believe there is always at least one aspect in our lives that is doing well; I try to focus on it, and get some energy from enjoying it. If it is hard to find it, I ask a friend to point it to me. People not involved in the drama can see the whole picture much better! 

Of course I am writing this to myself, for those times that I am “down”. I use some texts like this to remind myself, as I also use some pictures. One of them is this one I am using on my website header for the subject Life. We all had several minutes of laughing and fun with that unexpected scenario: three toilets aligned in the driveway of a house.  When the owner of the house heard us (and joined us for the pictures and good times), she explained that the house was under remodeling, and the three toilets were waiting for the trash company.  

Were the ladies worried about “what people would say?”  No. They just enjoyed the moment. They forgot about the arthritis and bad vision and high blood pressure and their late husbands and just enjoyed themselves, enjoyed life.  

Life is beautiful!

Good Dietary Habits

At the US Department of Health & Human Services website I found the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, last edition 2005, next edition will be in 2010. 

It explains in a very simple way what (and how much) human beings are supposed to eat to be healthy, has all that tables with contents of each food, suggestions for regular diet, and the most amazing, explains the labels in the products we buy at the grocery store!!!

What am I going to do with that? 

Nothing! And I will keep eating dessert first! Life is short…

Smart woman!

This happened to my mother-in-law, nearly forty years ago. When she and her two kids came back to the car, she realized that she had locked the keys inside the car.

Well, she looked for a pay phone, called her husband at his office one hour away, and after he complained, he agreed to meet her with the spare keys.

Ten minutes after the phone call, she realized the passenger door was unlocked. But her husband was already on his way… there was no way to contact him (remember, that’s was a time where cell phones did not exist yet!).

She had no hesitation: she immediately locked the passenger door and threatened the kids to never talk about it to anybody, especially their father!

I am not sure how many years later she told him the truth… but I am sure both of them laughed a lot!

Sad because you lost something?

Every time I feel sad because I missed (or lost!) something, I remember what happened to a friend of mine.

They were driving from Atlanta to Orlando on vacation, in a big rental van: mother, husband, kids, nephews.

They stopped at a small gas station in “the middle of nowhere” for gas and bathroom break.
When she was helping her 2 years old daughter to xxxx, the car keys, that were in her shirt pocket, felt on the toilet. The toilet had automatic flushing system…

Yes, my friend lost the rental van keys in a toilet, 3 hours away from any other rental place office, with 4 kids, an old lady, and a hysterical husband screaming at her. And everything, including her purse, was locked inside the van.

When we put it in perspective, why were we sad?

Let’s pack!

Have you ever forget to pack underwear for a trip?
I did it.      Twice.

Now I have a list (of course, I have lists for everything!) of what to pack. 
It is on my Zenbe iPhone application, but I am transcribing it here, just in case next trip I forget the iPhone!

Here it is:

• Purse with id/passport, prescriptions, reservations confirmations, nails file, chocolate, safety pins, iphone charger
• Camera, extra batteries, extra memory cards
• CDs/ headphones
• Earplugs and masks
• Toothpaste
• Floss
• Toothbrush
• Mouthwash
• Shower cap (some hotels don’t have them anymore!)
• Hair spray
• Nails file/nails polish/nail clip
• Medicines & first aid kit
• Chocolate
• Makeup
• Hair conditioner
• Comb/brush
• More chocolate
• Underware
• Tops
• Tshirts
• Pants
• Dress
• Pijama
• Shorts
• Hat
• Sandals
• Socks
• Shoes
• Sueters/coat
• Bathing suit
• Sun glasses
• Beach towel
• Sun screen
• Insect repellant
• Beach chairs
• Sun umbrella
• Pillows, blanket

Dogs have masters, cats have staff!

Right now we are staffing five cats: Leo, 21; Woodstock,19; Amos, 16; Pepê, 14; and Princess, 12.  Too old? No, no!! Too fat!  These were pounds… 

Princess

 
Our cats have “large bones” … and we also are doing
an excellent job spoiling them!  

Woodstock, Pepê, Leo, and Amos

Books

Thanks to Delicious Library, an application for  the Mac to organize and catalog books, I could include more than 4000 of our books and 300 DVDs in an website.

 
It took 9 months to catalog them, but I still have boxes of paperback books in the garage (1500 cataloged already, around 2000 still to do it). And, of course, new books every week… 

We are part of a book club called Devonshire;  here is the list of some of the books that they have reading these 10 years.

My favorite books?  Illusions, by Richard Bach, and A Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marques.

What books I have read lately?

one of our bookshelves

• Divine Matrix, by Gregg Braden
• World Without End, by Ken Follet
• the 11 books of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series
• all Donald Westlake’s Dortmunter Novels (the last one, Get Real, is hilarious!)
• Don’t Look Down, by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayers
• Agnes and the Hitman, by Bob Mayers and Jennifer Crusie
• Ensaios sobre a Cegueira (Blindness), by Jose Saramago
• A Profecia Celestina (The Celestine Prophesy), by James Redfied
• O Monge e o Executivo (The Servant), by James C Hunter
• The Power of  Now, by Eckhart Tolle
• Three Cups of Tea:  One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time  - by Greg Mortenson and Dvid Olivere Relin
• Tesla: Man out of Time, by Margaret Cheney
• The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, by Candice Millard
• How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, by Michael J Gelb

Magazines

 
One of the innumerable great things that I learned with a friend of mine was how to get rid of old magazines without the feeling that you are missing good articles.

She told me “rip off the pages with the articles/information you consider important, and trash the rest of the magazine!”.,

Simple idea, as all great ideas! Brilliant!  

The issue now is to have pages and pages of old magazines that need to be organized…  

My idea is to keep in my blog these articles/information I enjoy reading on magazines. At least it will be easier to search/find them!!

Albert Einstein

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving”

– Albert Einstein

Why Cissa?

The question is about the spelling, or the reason why I go by this nickname?

Ciça is a common nickname in Brazil for Cecilia. But my friends started to call me Ciça just when I started as a intern at IBM. There they found out that Cissa, with double “s” instead “ç”, was my login at the university’s old IBM mainframe with punch cards as input, that just accepted 6 characters – and did not have “ç”.

By the way, can you imagine how would be to create this website using punch cards? 

We take some things for granted…