This has been an awesome week for book sales and rankings – at this very moment Miss Goldsleigh’s Secret is ranked #5 in Regency – and a very bad week to expect us to pay attention to anything that isn’t book related. How can we be expected to pay attention to work stuff when there are much more fun things to obsess over? We have no idea. At this point, the children are fed and clothed and the pets are alive. That’s really all we can be expected to accomplish right now. Maybe when this whole thing gets much more blase, then we’ll be like, “Whatever, #1, that’s nice.” Now, though, every time we move up in the rankings there is a new and exciting happy dance. It’s a veritable disco over here. We’re in such good moods we’re laughing all the time. Here are five things we picked out to share with you.

1. Crafty bears. We might be missing for a couple of days. We’re driving up to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. There is a young bear up there who has figured out how open car doors.  It seems he climbs around in parked cars looking for food. We picked up a bunch of lunch

We’re gonna live right there

meat and a roasted chicken and we’re going to leave our car “unattended” in a parking lot. We’re going to name him Stewart and he’ll be very happy in our backyard.

2.Greece will be ours! Oh, yes. It will be ours. They keep getting in more and more trouble over there and pretty soon you’ll all be eating your scoffing words. Things are so out of control they’ve been booted from the list of developed countries by the MSCI. We don’t know who they are, but they’re making our jobs much easier. Still, we ask, how the hell can the home of democracy and freaking math no longer be a developed country? When the Sisters get over there, things will be much better. You’ll see. Before you know it, everyone will be breaking plates, drinking ouzo, and eating baklava. All will be well.

3. Oldest man in history. The fellow finally died at 116. That’s not funny, but his picture in the obit is. He looks like quite a jolly fellow. Of course they interviewed his family. His nephew – WHO IS 80 – said lovely things about him. That always amuses us about these

squirrel and raccoon friendship

stories. The “kids” are always like a zillion years old themselves. Anyway, good on you, Mr. Kimura.

4. Squirrel and raccoon. Would you look at this? Just look at it a moment. Don’t you feel your blood pressure decreasing? Normal people have that reaction. The Sisters don’t, but we’re certainly not normal people. When we see this picture or the bear above our immediate reaction is to yearn for whatever fuzzy animal has been placed before us. You know those idiots that are always getting mauled because they stupidly pet a wild animal? That’ll be us one of these days. We’ll be the one drowned by the whale and sliced up by the mama tiger and trampled by the elephant auntie. Just you wait and see. This is a cute story. Follow the jump and see.

5. Sir Stanley. This has been a real crappy hockey season – what with the strike and losing half of the damn thing. Playoffs picked up with some really tight series and now the first game of the Stanley Cup kicks off by going into THREE OVERTIME PERIODS. Holy cow. Amylynn will tell you she’s a Blackhawks fan but that she likes Boston, too, so she’s just happy to be watching good hockey. Ava doesn’t like either team but she’s from New Jersey so what the hell does she know?

We vowed that we’d stop complaining of the heat out of deference to the people on this planet who’ve been living with deadly weather like tornadoes and tsunamis and hurricanes. Unfortunately, it turns out that either we’re really awful people or total narcissists because every time we go outside the first thing out of our mouths is, “Wow, who turned on the dryer?” Somehow we do manage to make everything about us. It’s destiny. Sorry. We’re repentantly shallow — at least where heat is involved. To be fair, we don’t like wind or too much rain either, and we detest snow. We’re equal opportunity weather haters. Even while we melt, we do find things to laugh about though. And we do share.

1. Jeans. Since no one ever notices us here at Bank of No Forks, we’ve taken to wearing jeans everyday. That is a glorious thing. What is it about wearing jeans in an office that makes you feel like you’re getting away with something? Honestly, jeans are kinda hot and depending on how much cake you’ve had recently, tight. But still, we LOVE wearing our jeans. Especially when we’re not supposed to. We figure, if this is the reason we get fired after all this nonsense, then so be it. Levis for everyone! Power to the denim.

2. Souless. We’re very intrigued by steampunk. It’s so stylized and interesting. We’ve tossed around a couple ideas of our own for steampunk stories, but we’ve got so many other projects going on that we’ve restrained ourselves and not started another project. Don’t know what steampunk is? Dear lord, where have you been? It’s everywhere. You know all those interesting people you see wearing copper stuff and sporting goggles? They’re dressing the part. Anyway, we LOVE this cover. The story is delightful, too. If you’re interested in tipping your toe in, give this one a try.

3. Pretzels. You know how when you’re craving something it keeps showing up everywhere? For us this week it was pretzels. Funny how that seems to happen to us at the same time. Or perhaps we’re both highly suggestible. Either way, we wanted pretzels. On Monday, Ava suggested we head over to Philadelphia on our lunch hour for a nice street vendor pretzel. Amylynn was game, even though that would have put us over our hour by quite a bit. On Tuesday, Amylynn wrote soft pretzels into her current work in progress. On Thursday it came to fruition. Glorious pipping hot ubber salted pretzels with mustard and cheese sauce. All is right with the world again. Until the next craving…

4. Food craziness. Dunkin’ Donuts has introduced the Glazed Doughnut Breakfast Sandwich. It’s eggs and bacon sandwiched between two glazed doughnuts. Swear to Zeus. Now you all know we’ve been seriously dieting. For the most part that’s been going pretty well – for some of us. We really don’t have any intention of eating this concoction. First of all, Amylynn doesn’t allow her food to touch so this is unspeakable heresy (Ava would eat this). Still we do love ourselves a good glazed doughnut. And you have to hand it to the Dunkin’ people for basically showing the health food demographic the finger.

5. Thinning the herd. There is a woman in Seattle who’s decided that she can live off of water, air and light. She’s not eaten anything for 32 days. She’s lost 20 pounds – which we thing is a hell of a way to diet. She’s reported nauseousness, dizziness and exhaustion. Really. RE-freaking-LLY **eyeroll**. She’s part of a growing number of lunatics who call themselves Breatharians. We call them idiots. Or delusional. We wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to find that we’re related to several of them. We certainly hope they have a lot of money to inherit because this working for a living thing isn’t’ really working out.

Well, we’re glad that’s over. This past week at Bank of No Forks has been brutal. Especially after coming back from vacation. You know how when you come back from vacation you can never remember your job? Or your passwords? No worries. BofNF switched Amylynn’s job while she was gone and no one  else knows what they’re doing either. We fit right in. Ava participated in 75,264 conference while Amylynn was gone and still has no f**king clue. You know what makes that so funny? It’s totally true. Knowing what we go through every day, is it any wonder we spend so much time screwing around on the internet? It’s good for you cause we finds lots of funny stuff to tell you about. Let’s start with these five.

1. Good penmanship. In January, President Obama nominated his Chief of Staff to be the new Secretary of Treasury. Ever since Jacob Lew has been practicing his signature. Apparently, it’s so bad as to be unreadable and apparently that isn’t good if you’re going to be signing all the new money. A series of loops that bear no resemblance to “Jacob Lew” simply won’t do. We guess that’s why Ava’s never going to be nominated for the Sec of Treasury because it wouldn’t matter how many months she practiced her handwriting, it would never be legible. We wonder if Mr. Lew is left-handed too?

2. $600,000+. There is no point in you buying a Powerball ticket this week. The Sister’s have that all sewn up. We’re so confident that we’re going to win that we’ve already spent a good deal of that money. See item #3 below. And we contacted a real estate company in the Caribbean to find us a nice little island. Also, the diet is over because we’ll be paying to have ALL that fat sucked out. We’re done with this nonsense.

3. DIAMONDS! We love diamonds. We think it might be genetic. Gina Lollabrigida just sold a 74.53 carat yellow diamond ring that used to be owned by the Shah of Persia. It sold for just shy of $3 Million. Also, a 101.7 carat flawless diamond ring just sold for 26.7 million. Are you not sure how big that is? Go find a baby and have them make a fist. That’s a 101.7 carat diamond. It looks gorgeous around our necks.

4. Harry and Chris. Two of our favorite men were tooling around New Jersey together. Prince Harry and Chris Christie. They played on the boardwalk. They toured disastrous sites. They were funny and charming. Girls all over the North East swooned and craved an ice cream. When we heard they were in the same state we started cruising the internet for pictures. We really wish we’d been invited because this would have been a fun field trip to be on. Chris is hysterical and Harry is adorable.

5. Drinking on the job. We don’t actually get to do this, but for all the attention we get paid down here in BofNF Pergatory, we could build an entire bar in our office and start charging people and no one would know. Starting Monday we’ll be running a special on margaritas. Besides, the day’s go so slowly we need something to keep us occupied. We have fairly decent health care here so we can all do rehab next month.

The Sisters are having a very different week from each other.  Generally, it’s fairly the same, seeing as how we spend 9+ hours a day together.  But not this week.  No. One of the sisters is toiling away in 26 hours of training at Bank of No Forks while the other is at Disneyland.  Disneyland. The one in Disneyland is hereby disinherited from the family fortune.  However, that did not stop us from laughing at the

following –

1. 1. Governor Chris Christie #1 – Bug Killer – this is not a political blog but there are some politicians that the sisters LOVE even though they are politicians (Hi, Hillary!).  Governor Chris Christie of NJ is one of these people.  Here’s one example of why – just this last week he had a bunch of kids in his governor’s office and killed a spider with his bare hand.  Now we’ll admit it’s a large hand but he didn’t even hesitate to save the lives of those kids without any concern for himself.  One of the sisters has Arachnophobia, she’s mentioned it before.  I swear, if she wasn’t already married she’d be on her way to NJ to propose.

2. NJ Kid Attempts Murder with A Stapler – this kid is part of the above story but deserves his own spot.  After the Governor squashes the spider, one of the boys says “Let’s staple it.”  That’s a NJ kid right there.  The PETA people are insane over the whole incident but Amylynn thinks the spider got what it deserved even if it didn’t involve a

stapler.

3. Governor Chris Christie #2 – Dieting – Mr. Christie revealed that he had secret lap band surgery in February.  We just love this guy: he diets like us, he kills spiders, he tells people to get off the streets when a super storm is coming by looking directly into the camera and saying “Yes, I’m talking to you.”, he loves Bruce . . . the list seems endless.  If he ever becomes president, we’re moving to Washington to help him out.  We think he’ll need fan girls.

4.Disneyland – the Sisters can’t remember if they’ve ever had Disney as a favorite thing before but it’s here because one of us is there.  (One of us, not both.  Which is wrong.  Not that Ava is bitter or anything.)  There isn’t anything not to love about Disney.  We love, love, love every square inch of it.  Except “It’s a Small World”.  We are deeply suspicious of anyone who doesn’t like Disney or anyone who likes “It’s a Small World”.  Something is really wrong there . . .  We do

1. debate which is better – CA Disney or FL Disney.  I believe a trip to both is in order to solve this argument.  In fact, we’d better get over to Paris and Japan so we can speak from experience.

5. Monte Cristo Sandwich – this delectable sandwich is made of turkey and cheese.  It is dipped in egg batter and fried to a beautiful golden brown and served with powdered sugar and preserves.  The Disney people make these at the restaurant housed inside the “Pirate’s of the Caribbean” ride – but only for lunch.  TIP: you should make reservations before you get there or you won’t get in.  Holy deliciousness – now we’re starving!

This was a tough week with the Boston thing and then Texas. Fortunately, the world continues to turn and human beings are notorious for doing stupid/funny/perplexing stuff. You can always count on hilarity to happen, even when you think the world is shit. We found a bunch of evidence for this theory this week. A bunch. We narrowed it down to five things – hold on to your shorts. Here we go.

1. Ducks don’t cuddle. When we read this story we honestly thought, “There but the grace of God go I.” In fact, we almost thought that there was some sort of space/time continuum thing going on because truly this could have been a story about us. The only thing that proves our innocence is that it involved a duck. Ducks aren’t fuzzy, ergo we weren’t involved.  Michael Hubbard doesn’t have the same prejudices we do about the feathered creatures. He tried to smuggle his pet duck into the Honolulu courthouse. The security personnel noted that his duffle bag was squirming. He tried to deny there was an animal in there, but they weren’t falling for it. He had to leave his duck outside. Mr. Hubbard – we suggest you get a note from your doctor and find a little blue vest for your duck.

borrowed from the Washington Post

2. Egg rolls are the fifth food group. A six year old boy stole his father’s car because he was hungry for Chinese food. It was 6:00 on a Sunday morning. He managed to drive the three miles to the restaurant only to find it closed. How disappointing, right? When he left the parking lot, he hit a stop sign. The little dude was conscientiousness enough to want to have the car repaired before he went home and that’s where the police finally caught up with him.  There are a couple of amazing things happening here. We’re caught between thinking he had planned the hell out of this scheme and thinking he was clueless. He could remember where the restaurant was located, but didn’t consider it might be closed at that time on a Sunday morning? He thought to fix the car, but how he was going to pay for breakfast and the repairs. Dad was asleep and knew nothing about it until he was awakened by the police to come fetch his kid. Of course he was sleeping. What the hell else would he be doing at 6am on a Sunday? This kid is either going to be a criminal mastermind or King of the Universe.

borrowed from The Tucson Weekly

3.  Some people are very aptly named. Dr. Giggleman is an elephant chiropractor. Of course he is. What else could he be? To be fair, he’s not just an elephant chiropractor. He also does adjustments on dogs, cats, snakes, hamsters, gerbils and a guinea pig. Thank you Dr. Giggleman. Not much is worse than a grumpy, misaligned gerbil. How do you even know a gerbil needs an adjustment? Does it run on his wheel sideways? Does ObamaCare cover this?

4. Le Cave’s. Where in the world can you get mango filled donuts, Mexican cookies, empanadas AND comedy gold you can laugh about for weeks? Le Cave’s Bakery. If you want to go off your diet – way off, like all-the-way-to-New-Zealand off, the Le Cave’s is the direction to go. There is a secret password to get into the place. As you approach the door, repeat to yourself in a whisper, “Push, push, push,” and

from: 4shorties.blogspot.com

everything will be fine.

5. Morons. A guy was injured in town when he was attempting a stunt. Go ahead and roll your eyes now. You can do it again later if you want, and you probably will. The stunt was to go as follows: Put the truck in reverse, jump out of the driver’s seat, run to the back of the truck. Let the vehicle roll completely over him then jump up and run back to the driver’s seat and stop the car before it hits anything. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Not much really except the truck differential got stuck on top of him. Four firemen and a police officer had to lift the truck up so another firefighter could pull the unconscious idiot out from under the truck. There was no mention if alcohol was involved, but we bet from the above description you can extrapolate your own answer. Also, possibly he should consider a diet and stay away from Le Cave’s.