NEW RELEASES
I’m not sitting on Vadar’s lap
Since the retirement of The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes, Chuck and Beans has become my favorite cartoon.
This is why….
If you go to the Shoebox website all this week, they’re giving away calendars – two a day.
If you win one, you have to promise to give it to me. It’s only fair.
But, baby, it’s cold outside
I’m pretty sure that the person who writes this cartoon read our minds. The part of the kitty will be played by alternating Amylynn and Ava. 
Sprint is giving me an ulcer
I really hate my cell phone. Ava hates her cell phone, too. My Honey and I have the exact same wretched phone so you can be assured he hates his as much as I do. We all have Samsung phones through Sprint. I believe that Ed, Ava’s husband hates his Samsung Sprint phone as well.
When I say we hate our cell phones, I’m not using that word lightly. In fact, hate may not be a strong enough word. I’ll have to get out my thesaurus and get creative.
My Honey and I each have the Samsung Intercept. They should have called it the Samsung 
Pieceofcrapthatdoesn’tactuallyworkasaphone. It’s an android phone in which you can play games and use the internet with and all that happy crap. You know what I mean – one of those phones that is desperately trying to be an iPhone but doesn’t have a shot in hell. I can play Angry Birds – when it doesn’t freeze up. I can also catch the hockey scores live – when it doesn’t freeze up. I can Tweet – when it doesn’t freeze up. I get my email veeeeeery sloooooowly and sometimes the email I send actually arrives in the mailboxes where I sent it. I’ve long since given up trying to use Facebook because that is guaranteed to cause the stupid thing to freeze up. The only way to un-freeze it is to pull the battery off the back and reboot. That only takes about fifteen minutes to accomplish. For whatever reason, it decides which texts it intends to send and which are so banal and unimportant that it won’t bother. We have no way of knowing if they went or not. Did it go or does Ava just not think I am as funny (Ava would never think that) as I thought I was?
Arrrrrrggggggggg!
The biggest, most annoying, inconvenience with the stupid thing is that the damn touch screen often times won’t let you answer a call. No matter how many times, or how gently, or roughly, or how loudly you yell at the effing thing, you can’t answer the phone. You must helplessly watch your incoming call be hijacked by voice mail because you are impotent to answer it. Anytime I call My Honey or Ava and they don’t answer I just wait for a couple of minutes. They’ll call me right
back and hopefully I’ll be able to answer their call.
Speaking of calls – I only hope I never have an emergency and need to call for help. I’d have better luck chucking the phone at a potential rapist than getting the phone to cooperate in making a call for help in any kind of timely fashion. You’d think Sprint would be concerned about that!
Amazingly enough, Sprint already replaced my phone once due to it’s horribly bad construction.
I bring all of this up because I went on Sprint.com and then to a human at the 800 number to see about trading up. They won’t let me. And the customer service people are completely unable/unwilling to help me. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been with Sprint for like NINE years. They don’t seem to care that other servicers are begging for me to switch over. Apparently, even in this wretched 
economy, customer loyalty means absolutely nothing. Not a God damned thing.
Ava seems to think we should go to a Sprint store instead of dealing with the 800 number. She thinks we’ll have better luck. All I think will happen is that I’ll get arrested for starting a riot. Everytime I go in there I become hostile. Those customer service people are unbearably snotty and frequently deserve a slap upside the head, but the police frown on me and my vigilante justice.
So – to sum up: The Quill Sisters and their entourages despise, loathe, and abhor Sprint and the crappy Samsung phones we’ve been saddled with.
What companies do you just hate to deal with?
Ava says – Amylynn just threw that last question on to feel like she isn’t the only person with such a heated dislike of a national company. However, she did’nt really need to do that. SPRINT is by far the worst cell phone company in the world. My phone is such a piece of crap it’s amazing. I had this great Verizon Android cell phone that worked like a dream. We were with Verizon for over 20 years but they would not match the prices at Sprint – they also do not care about customer loyalty. In this case, you get what you pay for. I took my phone back toBest Buy, where I got it, and the 12 year old girl there took the battery off and redid something. That didn’t solve any of my problems, it just wasted a half hour of my life. I went on the Internet to see if I could find a solution and what I found were a whole slew of other Sprint Samsung customers saying – guess what? Their phones are crap too! Deep sigh . . .
Soooo important
The Sisters abhor censorship in any form. Our official uncle, www.newmexiken.com, has something very important to say.
Stop American Censorship
I’ve censored the following, in protest of a bill that gives any corporation and the US government the power to censor the internet–a bill that could pass THIS WEEK. To see the uncensored text, and to stop internet censorship, visit: http://americancensorship.org/posts/13645/uncensor
██████ ██████████ ████ at his █████ ██████ ████ on ████ ████ in ████ at the age of 67. █████████ to the ███████ of ████████, his ████ █████ ██████████ ████: “I ████ ██████ █████. I █████ you for ████ ██████████; but I ████ you to ████ no ████ ███████ █████ me. Let me go off ███████. I ██████ ████ ████.”
I’ve made it super easy for you. Click the link and follow the jump.
It’s your civic duty. Besides, Santa’s watching.
I can feel the ostracization already and I’m fine with that
I took my kids to a birthday party. If there’s anything I like less than sitting in a park with a bunch of parents I don’t know, pretending that I share any of their interests, and that their snot-nosed kids are just adorable, I don’t know what it is. Now after typing that, I will admit that there are several of my kid’s friend’s parents that I genuinely do like. A lot. Of course I met them at some party or another, but with few exceptions, I don’t like other people. This is a general rule of thumb.
So at this party, which was agonizing, the hostess handed my son a goodie bag. The Bandit looked inside and pulled out a
whistle. He didn’t glance my way, he simply held his palm out with the whistle laying on top and said to the mother, “Yeah, my mom won’t let me have this.”
I started to laugh because he’s absolutely right. He can’t have the whistle. Any mother who let’s a child in her house with a whistle deserves whatever torture she’s sure to get. The mother looked at me quizically and I shrugged and nodded in answer.
The Bandit peered back into the depths of the bag. “Is that a flashlight in here? She won’t let me have that either.”
Again, the mother didn’t answer. She looked at me and I nodded my head vigorously. The flashlight is even more forbidden than the whistle. A chronic migraine suffer such as myself doesn’t want a flashlight within a hundred yards of her. I live in fear of flashlights. Nothing insures a migraine faster than a bright flash of light right in the eyes.
I guess The Bandit can never aspire to a career as a cop – no flashlights and no whistles. I think I can live with that.
So I wouldn’t let my kids have half the crap in their goodie bags and I didn’t chat with the other moms. I tell you what – I leave a hell of an impression.
Winifred the Mighty
Well, quiet little Winifred as definitely developed a personality. I think for a minute, My Honey had the misconception that a little girl puppy wouldn’t be as much work as boy puppy. If that was the case, the man was totally delusional.
I am currently writing this with a hole in my right palm. It’s in the perfect shape of a tiny little puppy tooth. I don’t know what I was thinking, putting my hand down there near her face.
Roscoe has decided she needs to be kept an eye on. She’s resting for a minute under the coffee table because she was racing full speed into the living room with a mouthful of something she wasn’t supposed to have and nearly knocked herself unconscious bouncing under the table.
She’s an absolute doll – when she’s sleeping. Once awake and fully engaged in a wrestle, her growl is the stuff of horror movie monsters.
Just now there was maniacal yipping coming from the bedroom. My Honey tells me she found another bossy little puppy in there, lurking in the mirrored closet door. Of course, that only kept her attention for a few minutes before, “Hey, is that a sock?” and off she ran.
The other day I tickled her nose with her tail and the look on her face when she realized that funky little thing was always there was hysterical. Unfortunately, now it must die. When she’s not chewing on Roscoe, she’s yanking on her own tail.
Speaking of Roscoe, who is easily five times her size, she is absolutely fearless.
Please don’t misunderstand. I adore her and am not in anyway complaining. Even when I have a hole in my hand. I’m merely reporting the facts. Except that I am 100% certain it’s not true, I’d postulate that she might have rabies, she’s such a lunatic.
If you come over, remember this advice and remember it well: don’t look her directly in the eye and don’t stick your hand down there. She’s 7 pounds of terror in a polka dotted collar.
It’s just a red nose, jeeez.
My father said this years ago only he used the word bigot. From the hysterical geniuses at Shoeboxblog.
You want to know why? This is why.
Arf!
- See her cute pink polka dotted collar.
I would like you all to meet Sweet Winifred. She came to live at our house today. You know what this means, don’t you?
I have a puppy! A PUPPY! A Labrador puppy.
sigh.
OH. MY. GOD. All is right with the world again.
She is all inky black with gray eyes, a waggy tail and a lickey tongue. Her little belly is velvety soft and her ears wee triangles of silk. Adorably, she snorts in her sleep like a little piglet.
Her first shopping trip
I HAVE A PUPPY!!!
Roscoe can’t decide what he thinks about her. She smells pretty interesting and she runs kind of funny, but her kisses freak him out. She only weighs seven or eight pounds so she’s much too small to join in any of his many shenanigans. I can’t imagine her climbing up on the kitchen table for months yet. We were going to wait to give her to the kids for Christmas but maneuvering that would have been difficult. And besides, I was already in love with her. I couldn’t have allowed her to be fostered somewhere else no matter how competent.
We’ve discussed with the children their new responsibilites. The unfortunate thing though is that now the children fight over who gets to sleep with her (neither), feed her (Bandit), and clean up the puppy messes (both).
It doesn’t matter what they think about “their” dog. We all know she’s mine. Even Winnie knows it.
It's very exhausting being a puppy
HOLY CRAP! I GOT A PUPPY!
Post script Since for whatever reason our blog software freaked out and didn’t post this blog, Winnie has since gained some personality. I brought her to work with me this morning. She was sleepy and shy when we first arrived and won everyone over with her adorableness.
Then she woke up. I brought her toy with her, a flat racoon, just in case she was interested in playing. Well, she definitely wanted to play. I actually heard her growl under my desk while she wrestled with it. She also chewed on my shoes – while they were on my feet – and nibbled on the strap to my purse. I took her outside to pee and she viciously attacked some dead leaves. She also loves tug-o-war.
It amuses me to no end that she dreams so much, running and grunting with elan. What could a seven week old puppy have to dream about? She’s never chased a wild animal, never even seen a real racoon. It must be in their DNA.
What the …..?
I wrote a blog last night and poof it’s gone. It was an exciting and important blog. 
It’s a mystery.
I’ll rewrite it tonight and try again.
Stay tuned for important and exciting developments.