The Sisters had nothing but trouble out here in the world for the last couple of days, especially today. All the people are annoying, and stupid, and dumb.

And then, in one sparkling moment of clarity, we considered that it might actually be us.

To be clear, we are not annoying, stupid, or dumb. What we are is tired, cranky, and difficult.

We felt very hateful to the man at the Hobby Lobby because he had the audacity to work there.  So you understand, he was just working there. Like they pay him to do.  We didn’t like the cashier either.  Same crime.

The next trouble came in the form of the cashier at the Pei Wei.  Ava hated her eye lashes.  No reason for that.  She also didn’t like the way she asked to put the Sisters lunches in one bag.  What was she doing – trying to single-handedly save the world?

The girl in the Staples needed a beating because she didn’t know her inventory.  Or what a chalk marker was.  She works in an office supply store.  Even if they don’t carry chalk markers she should know what the hell chalk markers are.  Then, she can confidently say “No, ladies, we do not have chalk markers.  Take your bad attitudes somewhere else.”

We’re taking our attitudes everywhere, thank you very much, and you other people should just ignore us. There’s nothing you did wrong. Maybe.

Or maybe you’re parting your hair weird. Or we don’t like your shoes. Or we’re angry because a song we don’t like was on the radio and that’s your fault because it’s windy.

The Bandit does this thing that’s driving me crazy.

C.R.A.Z.Y.

Anything that he doesn’t want to do, he simply says, “No thank you.”

For example. “Bandit, take your shoes to your room.”

“No thank you.”

Or, “Bandit, go let the dogs in.”

“No thank you.”

Or, “Bandit, do your homework.”

“No thank you.”

It’s a quandary. You want to smack him but he’s so darn polite about it.

The worlds most polite pain in the ass.

I cannot tell you how disappointed I am that International Tiara Day fell on a Sunday. That’s not really the kind of holiday you can celebrate on

I really like this one with the fuzzy comfort band inside to help me avoid the headache the cheap tiaras give me.

your own. I don’t know about you, but my family doesn’t give one rat’s ass if I’m wearing a tiara or not, they don’t listen to anything I say.

However, you show up at Target wearing a tiara, people notice. Oh, yes. They notice. Especially if you give them an imperious look.

That’s a look you need to practice – imperiousness.

Still, the whole thing would have been a whole lot more fun if I’d had Ava with me wearing her tiara, too. Instead I had my family walking fifteen paces behind me and rolling their eyes. It really lessens the impact, ya know?

Thank you to all the service men and woman. We appreciate everything you’ve done and still do.

The handsome young man on the right is Amylynn’s Grandfather at about 18-years-old. Waiting for his orders during World War II

Here he is again in a better picture. Handsome, huh?

No wonder my grandma married him before he left.

The Sisters are working their fingers to the bone. The bone! We’re weary. It’s possible we might be a little insane and this is self-imposed stress. Here’s the deal. All three of the Sisters are going to be at the Arizona Dreamin’ event next weekend (There’s still tickets available to the weekend long event! Contact us!). There will be speed dating an author, a cocktail party with auction items (two of which we’re providing), we’re hosting a table at the banquet, and I will be holding four reader salons. That’s a LOT of stuff we have to come up with. Gift baskets and give aways galore. We might have insane, unreachable standards. It’s possible we’re a little bit crazy. It doesn’t matter. We’ll get it all done. There’s funny stuff that kept us going this week.

1. Stinky jeans. For years they’ve been telling us that we don’t need to wash denim. As in never. They want us to spot clean them with a toothbrush. Ewwwwwwww! Tommy Hilfiger says never to put them in a washing machine. Clearly, Tommy doesn’t have a husband that works construction. If we didn’t wash our husband’s jeans we’d have to move out of our houses, the stink would be so bad. And perhaps Anderson Cooper, who also never washes his jeans, doesn’t have a little boy in his life who attracts dirt like it’s oxygen. Whatever. We’re washing our jeans.  You should too.

2. Sadly this only gives us ideas. A 39-year-old Czech man was arrested in Sydney airport trying to smuggle 16 wild bird eggs out of the country in his underpants. We don’t know what kind of birds these eggs would have eventually become, but apparently they’re worth enough money to risk smuggling. This gives us pause. We only need to smuggle one panda at a time. If we get big pants… (ummmmm, actually, we might have that already covered). We’re going to start practicing walking with a waddle. We suspect that’s how that guy in Australia got caught. Bad waddle.

3. We’d get divorced for a hell of a lot less. A Russian couple are getting divorced in Switzerland. The judge has ordered the husband to pay the wife 4,020,555,987.80 in Swiss francs. That’s $4,509,375,194.80 American. 4.5 BILLION dollars. Plus property worth 146 million and a bunch of other stuff. When we divorce our husbands (probably over stupid comments like ‘It’s only cake’ or ‘Are you going to sit there all day and read?’) we’re hoping to get 3 nickels, custody of the cats, and the Keurig.

4. A hunting we will go. A large corporation has been trying to put a copper mine in our area for a long time but there is a LOT of opposition from environmental people and such. We bring this up because negotiations have come to a screeching halt again over an ocelot. Everyone should just stop worrying because the Sisters have figured out how to solve everything. We’re gonna hop right in the car with our kitty carrier and pick that little ocelot up and let him come live with us. We’ve named him Alfred. Now everyone can be happy. We’ll have a kitty. The environmental people can know he’s safe. And the copper people can copper on! We’re geniuses.

5. Oooooh! We found a new bauble. This one is from the new Cher Dior Collection. Of all the gorgeous pieces of breathlessness inducing jewelry, this is our favorite. We both wear a size 6. When we remarry for 4.5 billion dollars, we’ll expect these from our trophy husbands – who will be very old, very wealthy, and very deaf.

Sooooooooooo – Carly Cadillac decided to take a moment for herself right at one of the busiest intersections in our town. For no reason that I’ve found out yet, she turned on her dashboard warning lights and turned off the radio. This was alarming as I need the radio.

Is that a blue Cadillac in the front of that mess?

Since the traffic light was red, I put her in park and turned the engine off and turned it back on hoping that she would reset herself – she’s got all those computer modules you know. Nope. But she did refuse to shift out of park or allow anything but the engine to be on. This meant no windows and no door locks. I thought for a minute that I’d have to do that Dukes of Hazard move where I’d have to crawl out the window except I couldn’t open the windows either. There might have been panic until I remembered that little lock thingy on the door (the one that stubbornly refuses to allow a coat hanger to unlock it if a person MIGHT have accidentally left their keys in the trunk) and I pulled it up with my actual fingers.

I put the hazards on so I wouldn’t die–with no radio.

After I called emergency roadside assistance, a variety of folks offered to both help me and to kill me (it was rush hour). Finally, two police cars arrived. As they got out of the car I did too. The first car had a policewoman and the second car had a policeman. I clearly heard him say, “She ran out of gas.”

After establishing that I did not, in fact, run out of gas, the kind officer tried to get the car in neutral to at least move it out of the middle lane but to no avail. Carly can be very stubborn. Soon, my husband pulled up (I called him after the tow truck but before Amylynn) and also tried to get Carly out of neutral. Nope. The officer was pleased by this and told Ed he was glad he hadn’t been able to do it either because if he had the officer would have to give back his “Man” card.

The police lady and I just stood there deciding that no one had anything to be pleased about since we were all still in the middle of the road.

However, I did learn that she had miniature goats. She was super nice and if I had to stand in the desert heat waiting for a tow truck it would be with her. After all, she didn’t immediately assume I’d run out gas like an idiot.

Of all the people who were not happy to see me today, I will say the Cadillac people were the least happy. Imagine their faces when Carly came back (for the seventy-fifth time this year) and strapped to a tow truck.

In retaliation, they gave me the cheapest loaner car they had. Like I can’t break that Cadillac either.

Amylynn writes for Carina, who is a division of Harlequin. This “reading” from Bill is really very funny. Our one huge complaint is Bill massacring of the pronunciation of Harlequin.

NOTE – It’s pronounced “Har-le-quin” just like it’s freaking spelled. Not “Har-le-KIN”. Jesus. What the hell is wrong with you?

Otherwise this is hysterically funny.

Today is Timothy Olyphant’s birthday. We love him in Justified on FX. He is one of the few guys the Sisters would consider suspending our absolute rule of never dating/marrying a man with a smaller jean size than our own. No woman is every going to be happier with a smaller man. Fact.

Besides, who wants to feel fat next to all those skinny jeans in the laundry?

Anyway…

Happy Birthday, Tim! We hopes it’s wonderful! We’d really appreciate it if you’d open the box the MINUTE the UPS guy delivers it. We had to buy a smaller crate than we’d originally thought due to cost constraints. Do you have any idea how much it costs to ship two middle aged women? It’s not cheap.

We’re beginning to wonder if this is something specific to our neck of the woods or if this is happening everywhere.

The Sisters have long contended that Walgreens is trying to take over the world, but now we’re worried about sneaky mattress companies. Either

We don’t recommend picking one up on the side of the road to save money

they’re in cahoots with Walgreens or they’re in direct competition. Every single place in town where there is an empty twelve by twelve piece of land,  a building is going up. Before they always turned into a Walgreens, but now they’re all selling mattresses.

So now we need to know, just exactly how many people are buying mattresses? We don’t presume to speak for you but we hate the idea of buying  one. That’s a thousand dollars! We don’t care how badly we need a new mattress, there are better things to spend that money on. So if more people think like we do than not, how in the hell can these stores remain open. Who is supporting them? How can they afford to pay the surly people who work there? No one is ever in there buying anything.

Sassy turned eleven over the weekend. I have no idea how this happened. I blame her father.

The kid had a party with about a thousand of her little friends. She and her daddy planned most of the party – the swimming, the piñata, the lunch. I was in charge of the cake.

Of course I was.

I convinced Sassy to let me order the cake – sight unseen – from my favorite bakery. She’s had the cake before so it wasn’t like I was asking her to go forward on total faith. Although, honestly, if you can’t trust me of all people to buy a yummy cake, I don’t know what to tell you. You clearly have no faith in anything.

I ordered the cake from the wholesale bakery Ava and I tracked down when the purveyor of our favorite cake burned down. It turned out they weren’t the original baker of the cake and thus our greatest discovery was made. White cake, white frosting, white sprinkles. A square of heaven.

On Saturday, I got up early and got dressed. “I’m off to pick up the cake,” I told my husband. “It’s across town and they’re only open for a couple of hours on Saturdays.”

“Where the hell did you get this cake from?” Surely he was wondering why I wasn’t going to the grocery store around the corner.

I shrugged.

“Amy,” he said with the shake of his head, “it’s just a cake.”

I know my mouth hung open like my jaw was unhinged. Just cake? JUST CAKE? It’s like he’d never met me.

Just cake?

Why don’t men even bother to understand women? This stuff is so easy.

Just cake? Jesus.