So My Honey had to take a five-hour CPR class at work the other day. He claims there isn’t anyone in his shop he’d want to save, but they had the class anyway.

They learned all kinds of important live saving skills including how to use an EpiPen. Several hours in when they got

This fellow looks like a Walter or maybe Edgar.

simulate jabbing the needled pen into someone’s thigh, apparently My Honey got extra zealous with his foreman. Said foreman probably should have thought about his attitude during the week prior to the training. Just sayin’.

So I asked My Honey if they had a CPR dummy to work with.

“Yeah,” he said.

“What did you name yours?” I asked. A perfectly reasonable question says me.

He gave me that look. Ava and get it a lot. It’s a look that says, what the hell are you talking about?

“I didn’t name it.”

And this is Sheila or maybe Marge.

“What do you mean you didn’t name it? You got intimate with a CPR dummy for hours and didn’t name it? Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“No,” he said with a head shake.

“Seriously?” I’m aghast. “Ava and I would have named that thing within five seconds of meeting it.”

Really. Hello, this is Roderick, my dummy. Nice to meet you Roderick. We would have created a full story involving Roderick and then ultimately breaking up with him after we couldn’t revive him.

“One woman did. Named it George.” He said this with derision.

When I got to work I questioned people. I couldn’t believe that Ava and I are anomalies. Turns out that my assistant had CPR training and she didn’t name her dummy either.

Ava and I have come to the conclusion that some people just don’t like fun. We don’t get it.

Think of the peanuts!

One of the things we wanted to do for our appearance at the Tucson Festival of Books was to have sample chapters of our latest — but not quite ready to publish — newest books. We put the covers up last week. Here are the flats – so gorgeous.

Anyway, we wanted these booklets. We had like a month to get it done. Immediately, we cleaned up our pages and contacted our favorite editor. She said she had time and we sent them right over. Then our cover artist agreed to get us stuff right away. Editing always takes longer than you plan. The artist’s entire family came down with the flu.

Everything seemed to take longer. I started pricing out the cost of printing and we almost had a heart attack.  To get 125 printed would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $420.

So of course we decided we could put them together ourselves.

On Saturday two very sick and pitiful Sisters spent three hours printing 3,500 pages – including color covers. We tortured poor Jacob at the printing company the entire time. First off, Ava insisted on calling him Tristan for a reason I still can’t fathom. There was another fellow copying an entire text-book who spent at least an hour silently laughing and shaking his head at us. We’re pretty sure that Tristan/Jacob quit after we left.

We were delighted as hell to find a paper-folding machine at work. I bought a special stapler that will staple in the middle of the page. After work on Monday, we were going to stay and fold all 250 of them and staple them together. Then VOILA – we’d be done.

Promptly at 5:30 we hauled in a box of booklets and stood in front of the machine. There were no instructions, but a lot of dials and levers and adjustments that could be made. We tried some sample pages and it never worked out right. What it did do, however, was scare the living hell out of us. There may have been screaming. A scary roller ball grabs

It looks innocuous but it’s a Stephen King-like machine that wants to eat your fingers

the paper and whips it through the folder mechanism at approximately 95 miles per hour while simultaneously making an excessively loud BANG! noise. This is seriously not a machine you want to get your fingers or hair caught up in. Neither of the Sisters are especially trustworthy in this regard. I once got my long hair caught in a paper shredder and Ava stuck her fingers in a moving blender. There is family history of digit loss.

I went back to my office and pulled up the manual on the internet. I watched a YouTube tutorial and learned absolutely nothing. I could hear Ava in the copier room messing with the thing. You could hear the BANG all the way down the hall. Even if we could figure out how to get the fold in the right place, there was no way we’d be able to use the machine during lunch. Any one of the people in the offices surrounding the copier room would come in and kick our ass after 10 minutes of that BANGING!

Eventually we deciphered the instructions and got to work in the slowest possible assembly line ever seen. Lucy and Ethel ate a hell of a lot more chocolate than we managed to fold booklets. It was ridiculous. We’d be there forever. Ava and I decided we could fold them this slowly at home in front of the television with a LOT less BANGING!

Mine are finished. All 250 of them stapled together. Of course I can’t use my right arm anymore. Ava thinks we need to move around more, but I’m not sure what exercise prepares you for making 500 staples.

Anyway – if you’re going to be at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend, come get a free sample of our next books. We’ll give it to you with all 10 fingers and a very sore arm.

Oh my goodness, the Quill Sisters are in bad shape. Ava has had a terrible run of what she insisted was allergies for more than a week. That’s what she always calls it – allergies. It’s a text-book case of total denial.

She damn near died at the Walmart when she went to buy Musinex and a toilet brush. That’s only part of what makes the story so funny and hopefully I’ll get her to tell it here. The incident which she is certain is in Walmart security footage somewhere had her nearly asphyxiating from a coughing fit. Two little old ladies and an ancient paramedic ran to her side, but she waved them off with the toilet brush, insisting that she didn’t need or want them to call 911.

She blames me because I wasn’t there to keep them from ministering to her, but I’m certain I wouldn’t have been much help. I’d have been laughing too hard, which inevitably would have thrown me into my own coughing fit and we would have both been dragged away in an ambulance.

Just to prove my sister’s delusional I want you to know that she didn’t buy the Musinex because it cost $15. As opposed to the co-pay for the ambulance. She did however pay for the toilet brush.

I fully admit I have a cold. Or something akin to Legionnaires disease. I’ve been running a low-grade fever, my nose is a faucet while at the same time I have crazy sinus pressure. My eyes are watering and I’ve never sneezed so much in my entire life. I’m completely exhausted and über whiney. This is all Ava’s fault.

We both felt so bad we never even got around to writing the Five Favorite Things this week. We apologize. It’ll be especially good this coming week. We promise.

We’re working fast and furiously to get everything ready for the Tucson Festival of Books. It’s a week from Saturday and it’s a very big deal. We’re pretty proud that we’ve been involved with the festival since the beginning and now it’s HUGE – last year 130,000 people showed up.

Our list of stuff to finish was really, really long and we’ve managed to mark almost every single thing off. One thing I have left to do is pack up the stuff for our displays. That involved cleaning off my desk. It’s about three feet high with the flotsam and jetsam that builds up with a family. There are boxes of books in the family room. Here’s another box of stuff by the side door. I gathered all of those things in one area and started taking everything apart to see what I had.

I missing a bunch of stuff and I have no idea where it could be.

In my luggage from New York? That seems unlikely since I used that luggage in Las Vegas in November.

Maybe in my car? I don’t think so because I’ve cleaned out Dave and what’s missing would be in a big-ish box.

Still under my desk somewhere? Must be.

Where the hell could that be? Where?

I’m mystified.

We can’t wait to show you how gorgeous our new covers are!!

This is Ava’s

And this is mine.

More info to follow soon!

If you want to see a sample and read the blurb, find us at the Tucson Festival of Books on March 12 & 13

The Sisters are fascinated by the “sport” of curling. We think we might be curling savants although truthfully we’ve never tried it.  But we really feel like this could be our calling. One of us is very, very good with a broom and the other is superb at telling at inanimate objects. Maybe you’re like many Americans and you don’t know what curling is. Here’s a brief explanation. This should tell you everything you need to know.

Have you seen what’s in the Oscar gift bags this year? It’s worth $232,000 – for people who make millions of dollars a year. Sort of nauseating, don’t you think? Boy would we love to get our hands on one of these. There are all kinds of trips:

3-day stay at the Golden Door Resort & Spa in San Marcos, CA ($4,800)

3-night stay at the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria in Sorrento, Italy ($5,000)

3-night stay at the Grand Hotel Tremezzo in Lake Como ($5,000)

10-day all-expenses-paid trip to Israel ($55,000)

Private walking tour of Japan for up to 15 days ($54,000)

Lots and lots of fitness and beauty things which I added up to $52,856.85 including a Vampire Breast Lift (???? – I’m certain Ava knows what this is) and A lifetime supply of Pu-erh Tea Nourishing Cream and Pu-erh Tea Cleansing Bar for 31,200.

And Chapstick.

Valued at $6.

But by far, the absolute best item, seriously, is Joseph’s Toiletries toilet paper. Yes, toilet paper. You’d think, hmmm, weird choice. In an Oscar gift basket? Really? Yes, it’s valued at $275.

For toilet paper.

I had to look it up on the internet. The company that makes it is Swiss and they call it, “a miracle in the art of papermaking”.

They’re very proud of their product saying, ““Each individual sheet is a multi-layered microcosm of form and function constructed with comfort and cleanliness in mind. Tender virgin new-growth fibres are refined with a provitamin B5 and essential mineral coating to provide maximum skin protection even in dry use.”

You’ll be pleased to know if you buy the wall dispensary for $550 it comes in five colors including Natural Warped Ebony Macassar.

Apparently, now all our asses could be as fine as Gwyneth Palstrow – who apparently loves this stuff.

We’ll just have to give up lunches, and dry cleaning and affording a hot shower ever again.

Boy are we happy to find Friday when we woke up this morning. It was one of those weeks when you were pretty sure Wednesday was Thursday. That happened several times Wednesday. How many times in one day can a person be disappointed that it’s not Thursday? The answer is five. Five times you legitimately confuse yourself into believing you’re an entire day closer to Friday than you really are. Of course, that makes you feel like an idiot, but you going to do again anyway in about another hour. Then when Thursday actually comes along, naturally you’re already a day ahead and you have another 24 hours to make yourself miserable all over again. Yay. Fortunately, we found funny stuff to get us through.

1. Brilliant training. This is from a zoo in Tokyo. Apparently, they do this to practice in case an animal gets loose. In order to keep up their skills, they dress someone up in a suit — in this case a zebra — and run drills to evacuate the facility and corral the animal. Go ahead and giggle at how adorable this is. How fast do you think the fellow in the suit can run with that get-up on? Especially those enormous hooves. Have you ever tried to run in scuba flippers? Imagine the same result with those hoof shoes. Do you suppose they ever do lion drills? Does the person in the suit get to growl and snarl at people? That could be fun. That’s a job the Sisters would apply for happily.

2. Kristen our favorite Barista. We went to Starbucks on the way back to the office after lunch. We were feeling a bit silly when we ordered our iced Café Mochas at the drive through. The disembodied voice on the other end of the speaker asked if we wanted whipped cream and we answered, “Hell yeah!”. Then we cackled like idiots. When we got to the window Kristen appeared with hot Café Mochas. Our disappointment was evident. It’s 80 degrees. We wanted iced mochaed gloriousness.

Panda turtle by saturn2169

Kristen was a saint who then sent us away with two hot mochas and two iced mochas and then we vibrated for the rest of the afternoon.

3. Manageable fines. Back in December, we told you about an incident of turtle smuggling. It was not a well thought out plan and the guy was nabbed. Dong Yan’s trial just wrapped up and he was fined what amounted to $2,578 dollars American for trying to smuggled 38 live turtles into Canada by taping them to his legs. That amounts to $67.84 per turtle. This gives the Sisters hope. Way back in the recesses of our minds we have some concerns about getting caught with a panda bear in an airport. We can totally handle a $2,500 fine. That’s nothing. We’ll just sell lots and lots of books and maybe get two pandas. This is going to work out.

4. Better than a broken tooth. A woman in Washington was eating clams when she bit down on something hard. The woman claims she didn’t know what it was, so she put it in her pocket to examine at home. This seemed odd to us. Who practically breaks a tooth on something foreign in their dinner, then calmly removes it from your mouth and puts it in their pocket? Isn’t the first thing to complain to the waiter and demand to see the manager? No one actually takes things like that to a gemologist. Seriously. Fortunately, this woman did just that and discovered that it was an extremely rare Quahog purple pearl worth about $600. They said it was only one in a couple million odds. We like how scientific that answer

No thank you!

was. Now she can make exactly one purple pearl earring. No word on what she’s going to eat to make an earring for the other ear.

5. He did this voluntarily. A 23-year-old Ukrainian man was arrested for masquerading as a high school student. We’re not talking about just telling random strangers he was in high school. No, apparently, this fellow’s visa expired and he didn’t want to go home so he got himself a fake id and registered for high school as a freshman. Flash forward four years and he’s ready to graduate in a few months. Apparently this guy really, really enjoyed high school because he was a member of the National Honor Society, on the student advisory group for a food bank, and an active member of the school’s ROTC and Naval Sea Cadet programs. We don’t know how your high school experience was, but the Sisters would never relive that shit. Never We’ve not used Algebra since the first time we learned it, and we don’t need to try to pass that class again. Gads.

I have no idea how we missed this at Christmas time, but we did. This is freaking hysterical. Silent indeed.