NEW RELEASES
September 13
Thank goodness we found these five things to laugh about this week because Ava is mainly not in a laughing mood. Why you ask? Ava can be counted on to laugh at just about anything, right? Well, not when Amylynn goes off on a small vacation with her adult family members and leaves her at Bank of No Forks all alone for two days – Ava is not laughing then!!!! But she did let out a small chuckle and a tiny guffaw over these . . .
1. Dennis Rodman – The sisters have always thought Dennis was a bit of an idiot. After all, he
Remember this? WTF?
SoftSoap King
2. Robert Taylor 1936-2013 – Who is Robert Taylor you ask? Well, we’ll tell you who . . . he’s the guy who invented hand soap via a pump. His company introduced Softsoap in 1978. He says he came up with it because he hated the mess left behind by bars of soap. I hate the mess left behind by the children who live at my house – can someone invent something to take care of that? Well done Mr. Taylor, well done. You’ll be missed. 
3. That’s MR. Siri to you – Finally, the Apple people have come up with an improvement that the sisters have been hankering for. We like Siri well enough but it always bothered us that she was a girl. The sisters don’t respond well to being pushed around by other women. Siri can now switch gender to a male voice. We’d like our 
male voice to be British. Like James Bond. We won’t mind being pushed around by 007. We don’t know any real women who would.
4. Crown Tattoos – Ava doesn’t have any tattoos but she saw a crown tattoo that she fell in love with. She showed it to Amy, who does have tattoos, and to several other ladies at Bank of No Forks and now they all want one. We’re all going to go over to the tattoo parlor after work on Friday – who’s in???!!!
5. A Balanced Budget Amendment – As you readers know, we’re not a political blog even if we keep 
calling up the white house with our excellent suggestions for the running of the country. They need to stop hanging up on us or we’re going to think they don’t want to talk. We came upon the excellent idea of the federal government having a balanced budget when we saw a poll showing that better than 72% of Americans agree. Americans can’t agree on anything and ba-da-bing – there it is, an agreement. If we have to balance our budget at home and suffer, everyone has to. We will presume that Mr. Rodman did not vote in the poll since he’s out of the country . . .
In case your lobotomy actually worked
Amy and I make lots of fun of Bank of No Forks – all the time. But when it’s time to admit that I learned something very valuable there, I’m willing to say so. I have mentioned in previous posts that I have many job-aids containing step-by-step instructions to order cake (if you need help, just let me know . . . ) and this month, more job-aids have arrived!!! Go get your learning face on because I’m going to share.
This month’s never-ending conference calls involve the ordering of pizza, salad, and a small dessert. There were the usual dumb questions that are always asked: What happens if I go over the $10.00 budget? What happens if I am under the $10.00 budget? What happens if I live in Utah and we don’t allow pizza within the state boundaries? What happens if everyone on the call kills themselves because of all of these dumb questions? It’s like a never ending parade of stupid. And just when I think it can’t get any worse it does. The lady leading the call, seriously and with no sarcasm, says the following:
“I’m just going to go ahead and describe a small dessert. A small dessert would be a cookie or a small brownie.”
WHAT??????
Well – thank all of the gods already invented and the ones to come!!!! There I was too embarrassed to unmute myself and ask “Just what the heck is a small dessert anyway?” And more importantly “Can we get large dessert and small pizza and salad?” Or, how about “Can we just skip the pizza and salad and get a giant dessert? Can you describe what that would look like?”
All I want to know is what moron made that explanation necessary? Exactly who is the Bank of No Forks hiring to manage its offices?
With no sarcasm or irony, I unmuted myself and asked the leader if she could email us a picture of a small dessert for reference. Not five minutes after the end of the call – here’s what we got:
a small brownie
Now you to know what a small dessert looks like. Aren’t you glad you stopped by today? You’re welcome.
Sept 6
This week has been a doozy. There has been way more bakery items consumed than should be necessary to maintain our happiness. Cookies, cake, brownies, ice cream – dear God. And we wonder why we’re never losing weight. We blame Bank of No Forks. That place would depress Richard Simmons. It’s either eat a plethora of dessert while we jigsaw puzzle or we’ll never stop crying. Nobody needs that. Nobody. Least of all
the bakers in town who are counting on us to maintain their business. We did manage to giggle about these five things.
1. Unhappy fans. There has been a great deal of hullabaloo over the selection of Ben Affleck as Batman and Charlie Hunnam as Christian Grey in the 50 Shades of Grey movie. The Fan Boys/Girls lost their freaking minds over this. We just want to go on record and say we believe that Ben has the chin to pull off Batman, and we’re totally willing to suspend judgment until the movie comes out. The second selection actually made us squeal. We’ve paid as much attention to the casting of Christian Grey as the next red-blooded American women. We read the books and were not especially 
impressed but the names bandied about for the lead in the film version did give us pause. We are more than happy to pay our $37 admission fee to see the beautiful Charlie Hunnam run around with torn jeans and no shirt. You boys need a pep talk, come on over. We have cake and kind words.
2. Dilbert. We are 97% certain that Scott Adams works at Bank of No Forks. There is no possible way he can understand so succinctly the irony and insanity of what goes on over here if he doesn’t work here. Really. It’s uncanny. We read the morning comics and after getting to Dilbert we check under our desks for sneaky, eavesdropping cartoonists.
3. OTHER banks. For the sake of clarity and to dispel any rumors before they get started, we want it to be perfectly clear that we DO NOT work for Azizi Bank in Kabul, Afghanistan. Now that we’re all clear – a young female employee is 
missing from the bank. She worked there for three years in the money transfer division and then one day she just disappeared along with $1.1 million. Wisely, Bank of No Forks doesn’t let us anywhere near any of the money. We think that’s best, don’t you? Think of how many bakeries we could keep in business if we had that kind of access.
4. Fall Fashion Mags. We’re talking seriously serious magazines here. Vogue alone has 902 pages of “Fabulous Fall Fashions” and In Style has 716 and is the “biggest issue ever!”. We can only hope the mail man doesn’t have to deliver both of these on the same day. The poor fool could get a hernia since each one weighs eight or nine pounds. Imagine an entire subdivision of fashion minded moms. Gads. 
5. Surprise rain. We love rain. Those of us in the desert are fascinated by water, boarding on obsessed. We love nothing more than a huge rain that comes out of nowhere. We were told by the professionals (smirk) on the local news that there would be no more rain. Not today. Not tomorrow. Maybe never. We lamented the heat and the dryness. We did some whining and – we’re sure you won’t believe this – but we also complained. Then lo! Out of the blue the sky opened up and rain poured down. There was thunder and lightning like all respectable storms must. The best part? The sky was blue during the entire episode. Really. The desert weather is very weird.
Godzilla AKA Ed vs. Mothra
Ed and I went to bed last night and as soon as we turned the TV on a GIANT freakin’ moth appeared out of nowhere. It was so LARGE that you could hear its wings when they hit the wall. You know you’ve been married for more than 25 years when you have to turn to your spouse and say “Oh My GOD, are you going to get out of bed and kill that moth or not??!!”
Luckily for him, he jumped out of bed and sprung into action. I stayed right where I was, under the covers, hoping 
Mothra would only see Ed as a target and ignore me. While I was cowering, he got a towel from the bathroom and started trying to kill it. (Normally, I would laugh hysterically over my husband running around our bedroom naked trying to kill a bug – but this was no laughing matter considering the size of the enemy.)
I thought this was a good plan until he actually hit it and it disappeared.
That’s right; a three-inch moth just disappeared. We couldn’t find it anywhere. How is that possible?
I told him he couldn’t get back into bed until he found the carcass – preferably dead. He looked everywhere in our room, places it couldn’t even actually be to appease me. I even tried to wake up the dog that slept through the entire “search and kill” mission but all he did was open one eye and re-shut it.
Hours later, I let Ed give up. Then he said the exact wrong thing, like only a man married for 25 years can – “Maybe it crawled under the bed.” A bed, I will have you know, that can’t be moved and has a platform that you can’t see under.
After he got back into bed, he asked me if I was going to sleep. Ed knows me well.
“Nope, how am I supposed to go to sleep with a giant moth under the bed? Don’t you think its waiting until we fall asleep to come back out and kill us both?”
And what did my dear husband say to that? Here’s the direct quote, “SNORE”
How anyone could fall asleep with Mothra in their house is beyond me, let alone under their bed. I made sure parts of Ed were out from under the covers so the moth would get him first and then I covered up every square inch of myself under the blanket.
25 years don’t mean nothin’ when it comes to being attacked by a giant moth in your own house – it’s every man for himself!
Pretend it’s not obnoxious
August 16
The Five Favorite Things is brought to you by the letters C, A, and T. We’re not sure what’s wrong with us exactly, but one day this week we went to a Humane Society store front at the mall. We thought we could handle it. We couldn’t have been more wrong. There was a whole passel of kittens racing around. Now we’ve spent the rest of the week pining for little gray tabbies who bat at your fingers with their giant paddle sized feet, and lazy black ones who peep at you with their little kitten voices when you make kissing noises at the glass. Mark our words, this will not end well. Here are five funny things about cats that kept us giggling and
doesn’t he look thrilled?
1. Deep sea kitties. The engine of a tuna boat exploded near Portland, OR sending the owners into the ocean. Fortunately, there was another boat nearby. Unfortunately, they jumped into the ocean leaving their two cats on the boat. We’re trying really hard not to think too unkindly about these people. After all it was a life for death situation, and we’re sure everyone was quite frantic, and it was difficult to think clearly. Still, we’d like it noted it’s not OK to leave your animal on a sinking boat. Things do end well, so don’t call PETA just yet. Once in the safety of the rescue boat, the owners saw both their cats, Topaz and Jasper, on the bow of the boat. We’re sure they wore matching expression that said in a distinctly feline way, “What the f**k?” Both cats jumped into the ocean and 
successfully swam the hundred yards to the rescue vessel. Once safely on shore, we suspect there was shunning from those cats no matter how many apologies were offered. Cats are epic grudge holders.
2. “New” kitty. There’s a new animal out there. Well, actually, it’s not a new animal just a smaller version of the one that was already out there. Meet the olinguito. It’s a smaller version of the olingo. There was one in the zoo here in the US and the poor thing was shuttled all over the place to other zoos where they were trying to get her knocked up. She refused. As it turns out, she wasn’t discerning, she simply prefered animals of her own species. Seems fair. Heck, she could have been a total tramp if you got her in there with a hot little olinguito of the male persuasion. They are described as, “a fuzz ball…kind of a cross between a teddy bear and a house cat.”
You see where we’re going with this, don’t you? As soon as we get back from South America we’ll introduce you to our new “cat.”
3. Cat scientists. Those fabulous Brits have a database of British Felines. For the first time in history, cat hair helped convict a criminal. We knew there had to be a use for the stuff. Just like human hair the DNA of cat hair can be traced back to a very specific animal. The moral we’re taking away from this is not to molest the 
cat or nuzzle his belly just before you head of to manslaughter someone.
4. Kitties who can eat you. There’s been another mountain lion sighting in our area. Amylynn always gets super excited when ones of these shy kitties wanders out into the public. She’s never been lucky enough to see one herself, but if you ever meet My Honey you should ask him about his encounter. In this latest incident some hikers got totally freaked out when they felt like a mountain lion was threatening them. We think the kitty was just curious.
We’d really like to touch a mountain lion, but the odds of us hiking in order to find one are slim to none. Shame really.
5. Glow in the dark. They make glow in the dark bunnies. They do this by combining rabbit DNA with jelly fish. We’ve seen enough bad sci fi movies that we know this could have gone horribly, horribly wrong. If those scientists have any brain at all they had to have been extremely nervous they first time they tried that scheme. Now that there are not in fact bunnies with too many legs or fuzzy jelly fish, we’d really like to try that with a kitty. How cute would a flourescent kitten be? Off the cute scale, that’s how cute. You could use them as night lights when you get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. They never let you go to the bathroom alone anyway.
The bakery whisperers
So, Amylynn & Ava, how is your diet coming along?
Now why would you ask that question? Why? You’re just going to get yelled at.
Well if you must know, it was going fine, thank you very much. Well not fine exactly. Let’s just say it’s going and not delve too far into the actual mechanics. We’ve been eating a lot of diet food and we’ve been bitter about it.
It doesn’t help that we’re putting a puzzle together at work that’s all desserts: cupcakes, candy, brownies, etc.
Agreed that it’s probably not one of the smartest moves we’ve ever made.
Bank of No Forks has been especially awful this week.
We were bound to break eventually. Do you have any idea how loudly a bakery can yell? Really freaking loud. The bigger problem is that Amy and Ava are very easy names and even the sweetest inanimate object can pronounce them.
Turtles have no business in a bakery
Sugar Sweet Bakery is a new place right by our office. It’s super cute and their menu descriptions are adorable.
For example: Toffee Turtle cookie: A chewy brown sugar cookie with pockets of salted toffee. (does not contain turtle.)
Hahaha.
The car steered itself over there. We had no control.
We walked around the bakery and waited until something spoke to us. That’s how you approach a new bakery. Chat up the dessert case. Make friends. One of them will speak to you.
The Chunk-e-Monkey spoke my language. Inspired by Ben & Jerry. We took this flavor out of the freezer and put it into the oven. A swinging combination of bananas, walnut chunks and gooey chips.
Don’t think for a minute that Ava was above all this. The Peanut sidled right up next to her and whispered in her ear. Brace yourself for peanut bliss. This flourless cookie is perfect for die hard peanut butter enthusiasts.
Our only complaint was that the lady (owner?) had no personality. We adored the store and we’ll be back. There’s a lemon cookie on the menu that promises a semi-orgasmic state. The really disturbing thing that we learned from all this is that we have the perfect personalities to own a bakery.
We’re never, ever, ever going to be thin again.
August 9
Today winds down the Mardi Gras celebration of Amylynn’s birthday. We’ll go out with a bang. We’re going out to dinner with our long-suffering husbands to a very nice restaurant sans children. Amylynn has already made it clear that there had better not be anyone kicking anyone else under the table during dinner because she’s had quite enough of that, thank you very much. And the children wonder why we don’t like to go to dinner with them.
1. Non-John. The Boy-Who-Lives-at-Ava’s-House came up with the brilliant nickname Non-John for the interim host of The Daily Show. When Jon Stewert took a leave of absence, we’ll be honest, we panicked a little. We have serious crushes on Mr. Stewert. He’s the only crush we have at this time who isn’t extraordinarily white-trash. We love our intellectuals – especially when they’re witty. Then along came John Oliver to hold down the fort. Amylynn
adored him from the get-go, but Ava had to warm up to him. We have come to the agreement that he’s hit his stride. He’s damn funny. And English. If we love funny then we REALLY love funny Brits.
2. New Careers. We’re always looking for a way out of Bank of No Forks. We saw an article in the Picayune where the city has come up with $40,000 to hire an outside contractor to collect abandoned shopping carts and then hold them ransom for a fine payable by the retail owner of said cart. First, let us just say that we’d rather they use that $40,000 to fill some Volkswagen sized potholes in our city streets. We don’t care if they just withdraw 40,000 one-dollar bills from our bank and shove them in one of the holes. Whatever it takes, ya know? Anyway, we thought we’d be excellent Cart Pirates. We’d use cut out
magazines and newspapers to send ransom notes and everything. Hey City Council are you listening?
3. Manolo Blahnik. It’s no secret that we love shoes as much as cake. We’d love to open a cake/shoe/book store. We’d call it All The Good Stuff. We’d definitely sell Manolo’s. There’s an adorable quickie interview with him in Vanity Fair this month. Apparently he lives in adjoining Georgian houses in England that’s full of shoes to the tune of 25,000 to 30,000. He’s lost count. He calls it a shoe mausoleum. Sounds like heaven to us. We wonder, if we show up with cake, would he take us for a tour?
4. Super criminals. This was the headline that caught our attention, Police Seeking Man Who Ran Over Himself. What an auspicious beginning to a fabulous saga of a master criminal, that’s what you’re thinking, right? How 
the hell did this happen? you wonder. We wondered, too, so we read on to this section: Still determined to avoid the traffic stop, the man climbed out the passenger window of his moving vehicle, but “his foot caught in the window and he was pulled under the car and the back tire ran over him.” And yet he still managed to evade our crack police force even after the car ran over his torso. Not just his foot, his entire torso. Then the unmanned car ran into the dumpster at a Burger King. The last the police saw of our victim (?) he was running across a busy street. Yes, the police had a motorcycle to give chase and still managed to lose him. We presume he was at least limping. Wouldn’t you think? They’re describing him as 18 or 19 years, 5 feet 8 inches, wearing a black shirt and sweat pants. 
We also assume he would be identifiable with the tire marks across his chest.
5. Complaining for profit. Ava has decided her new side job is going to be professional complainer. The other day she successfully negotiated for $525.00 in compensation for multiple transactions that had been unsatisfactory. That’s a pretty good day’s work we say. Besides, you get to be surly and mildly crazy. Do you have a complaint which has fallen on deaf ears? Do you want a professional to take a crack at it?
A tale of two Amy’s
Sometimes, through absolutley no fault or plan of my own, I am led by others to misbehave. That was the case when Amylynn and I went to the romance writer’s convention. We had a very trying time checking in, and things just went downhill from there. When the very next problem occurred, I called the front desk for help.
Hotel Associate: “How may I help you Ms. Bright?”
To Amy, holding my hand over the receiver: “They just called me Ms. Bright!” Evil smile.
Every time we called the front desk, they answered with “How may I help you, Ms. Bright?” as if no one else could be in the room but the one person who made the reservation. I want you do know that I am an Academy Award winning “Amylynn Bright”.
Hotel Associate: “How may I help you, Ms. Bright?”
Me being Amy: “There is a hole in my sheet. I thought housekeeping would change the sheet today but they did not. How can you make up a bed and not notice a hole in the sheet? I spent all last night trying to avoid it, but I kept putting my toe in it anyway because I couldn’t stop myself . . . because I knew it was there. I can’t spend another night like that. (I said all of that rather dramatically as if it was the end of the world.) ***Amylynn here*** I had to draw the line when she experimented with voices. I mean really.
Amy: Oh for goodness sake, just tell them to come change the sheet for me. I should have called myself. You’re making me sound like an idiot.
Me: Evil smile.
We had so many problems during our one week stay; I’m not sure how many times we called the front desk for help. I have never enjoyed calling to complain so much in my whole life because it wasn’t me. It was Amy! By the end of our stay, we were certain that the front desk people thought Amy was the most complaining guest they’d ever had.
We could just hear them: “By God, that woman complains enough for two people!
Me: Evil smile.
THIS is why you pay attention in parking lots
Quite frequently, I am confronted with the fact that I just might not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier. I especially enjoy having this point driven home to me at the beginning of the summer here in the desert. No, I don’t go out without water, even I know not to do that.
Here’s what happens, sadly, every year. When the summer hits, everyone starts using their car windshield shades. Not just to try to keep the heat down in the car (it doesn’t work but try to tell a native desert person that . . .) but to keep the sun from causing the 
steering wheel to heat up to 9000 degrees. The sunshield actually does help with that, a little. Don’t get all crazy, it was 107 today – so by saying it helps, I mean it’s possible to drive the car if you keep oven mitts in there.
Anyway, every year it takes me about a week to stop backing out of parking spaces before I take the shield down. Then I freak out because I can’t see out of the windshield. It’s like a comedy routine. It’s like when I set the dish towels on fire and stand there with it burning – it takes me a minute to realize I need to zip the sunscreen out of the window toal see. Idiot.
The above results in immediate contact with Amy via text:
June 15th “You cannot drive your car w the sun screen on. Just like last summer.”
June 17th “Day 2. Still can’t drive w sun shield. The communist are winning.” ***Amylynn here: I snort coffee out of my nose every time I get one of these.
I guess I don’t need to ever wonder why Amy never let’s me drive anywhere, even when I rarely offer to – she usually shouts “Good Gods NO, I’ll drive. I want to get there today and not by using the right lane behind a bus the whole way.” I always promise to take the sunshield down but that just results in an eye roll. ***Amylynn here again – It’s for all our sake’s that I drive. Really. You’re welcome.