This has been around for a while, but I still thought I’d share. In case you were ever wondering…

In Seattle a 32 year-old, well-dressed man was hit by a bus on his way to the Starbucks. He got up from the street and walked a  block further to get his coffee, even while bleeding from his head. When the fire department arrived apparently he wasn’t making a lot of sense. That seems reasonable. I certainly hope they gave him a free cup of coffee for that kind of loyalty. I mean that man really wanted a Mochaccino or whatever his poison is. They should make him their national spokesman. The Jared of Starbucks.

Ava and I can really understand that kind of single-minded determination.

The diet is moving along at a snails pace – agonizingly slow. We’re damn near desperate for a treat. At the back of our diet bible there are recipes. There are always recipes at the back of diet books. They usually suck, but you’re desperate. You see the word “cookie” or “brownie” and you lose perspective.

Don’t look directly at this cookie. It will steal your soul

You think this is the one. This cookie/brownie/pudding will be wonderful. I’ll be saved. Losing weight will be a piece of cake after this wonderful free cake recipe.

It’s the fat that makes you delusional.

Ava found a diet recipe for Almond Cookies. “Oh yea!” we shouted. “We love almond cookies.”

Sadly, we don’t love these almond cookies. They were bad. Really bad. I’m not saying bad with any implied irony here. BAD. AWFUL. Then you eat another one a couple hours later because surely it wasn’t as bad as you remember. It is a cookie, after all. Oh, but you were wrong. Dreadfully wrong. So, so wrong. This isn’t a cookie, it’s a cruel Nazi experiment. The real tragedy is that the next day you’re so desperate for some relief you’re willing to try that dastardly cookie again.

Don’t let the cookie win!

Ava summed it up best. “That cookie was so bad, I only ate five.”

I got Ava and family hooked on Justified on FX. I’ve been a huge fan since the debut of the series. I was drawn in because I’ve read a lot of Elmore Leonard and he was the creator of the character. The series really nails the Elmore Leonard feel, too. I’ve been pestering her for three seasons to watch the show and they finally started in on season 1 last week.

Once again Ava wandered over to my office. “You don’t think Raylan Givens is white trash, do you?”

I knew what she was getting at. She was referring to the main character on Justified played by Timothy Olyphant.

“Well…” I hemmed and hawed. Raylon isn’t white trash, per se. He’s risen above his birth to become a venerated, but frequently in trouble, US Marshall. “He is from the holler.” Raylon returns to the town he grew up in – the hollers of Kentucky where there’s moonshine and pot farms and every other thing you can associate with that stereotype.

“Damn it.” Ava snorted. “I was afraid of that.”

You can add one more to our list of Mid-Life Crises Crushes.

We had a new security guard at work today. He let me in the door because I was carrying my giant purse, my extra bag with my laptop and other necessary stuff, my lunch bag and Jojo Kitty in his traveling case. “You guys have a cat?” he said with surprise in his voice.

“No.”

“Isn’t that a cat?” He pointed directly to Joe’s pink canvas case.

“No.” Joe helpfully meowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“In that bag. That’s a cat.”

I just shook my head and walked into my office with the cat.

That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Ava came into my office later and plunked down into the chair on the opposite side of my desk and stuck her face in the kitty’s belly. She gave him a good nuzzle before coming up for air. “How much trouble – really – do you think we’d get into if we stole a panda?”

Oh come on! He can’t even be real.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. If we get caught in China we’ll probably go to prison forever. But if we’re here, probably not much. You know how those kind of crimes go.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “I mean really, what would they do to us?”

“I suspect we’d get a book deal out of it and go on Letterman.” I stared at my coffee cup and wondered if I wanted more. “You know all the husbands in the country would be watching the news reports and saying, ‘Oh my God. Look at those crazy women’ and their wives would be gasping and wondering how we did it.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “And even if they took it away in the end, we’d still have had a baby panda for a couple of weeks.”

We’ve really got to stop writing about this on the internet. Eventually the FBI is going to get wise.

I sort of played hookey from work today.  It was officially sanctioned but it had a real hookey feel to it that amped up the pleasure of a weekday off. I did lots of errands – but not awful ones, and I really enjoyed my day.  Like all days off by myself, I went to the movies. I didn’t see The Hobbit like I’m dying to

Do not be fooled into thinking this is popcorn.

because I was afraid My Honey would kill me. Instead I took myself to see Jack Reacher. Personally, I can’t believe it. I have a real aversion to Tom Cruise but nevertheless the movie intrigued me. I’ve heard of Lee Child’s books and the Jack Reacher series so that overrode the obnoxiousness of Mr. Cruise.

I liked the movie. What I didn’t like was foregoing the popcorn. This stupid diet doesn’t allow for a bucket of popcorn to be consumed by oneself. I “enjoyed” my movie with 30 almonds. What kind of crap is that, I ask you?

Crap crap crappity crap – that’s what kind.

This morning I’m down 3.5 pounds so almonds it is. I’m keeping an extensive internal list of all the foods I’m going to chow down on my official cheat day.

It’s going to be epic.

Do you have any idea how many feathers are in a feather throw pillow? I do. A lot. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a zillion.

Once upon a time, I had a pretty embroidered feather throw pillow on my couch. It was super comfortable for napping and settling your laptop on when it needs to be a little higher. Then a bored or frustrated dog decided that it had lived long enough and now must die. In a violent fashion.

When I got up this morning and wandered, bleary eyed and still in my Mickey Mouse jammies, into the living room I found the crime scene. Instead of blood there were feathers everywhere. At least two inches thick around the sofa, feathers also clung from the curtains and the lamp shades. It almost looked like it snowed in the living room.

The Bandit and I grabbed garbage bags and started stuffing handfuls of feathers inside. I had no idea ducks were so static cling-y but once those feathers touch you,  you can’t get them off. So soon the kid and I were both covered with ’em, too. We managed to fill two small garbage bags and it didn’t even look like we’d made a dent. 

We thought the vacuum was the thing. You’d think so, right? Not so much. The feathers simply clung to the sides. Some got sucked up and swirled around the Dyson, but they really didn’t get sucked up until I tried the hose attachment. That did the trick so long as you moved in a zone defense. I mentally placed a grid over the living room and sucked up two square feet at a time. I thought everything was moving along perfectly, until I turned around. 5,000 feathers had resettled over the clean grid.

We emptied the vacuum twice and threw away three bags of feathers. There was still a quarter of the feathers left in the pillowcase. I keep finding them everywhere.

Jojo Kitty helped, as I’m sure you can imagine. He kept liberating the feathers from the bags by making nifty gashes in the sides. I’m not sure he’s had as much fun since the Christmas wrapping. And you know the dogs had the time of their lives making the mess in the first place.

We are so excited about Amylynn’s book coming out this month we can hardly stand it. We still don’t have a date yet, but we will very soon. You’d better believe that you’ll be among the first to know. Besides the book, we’re just super excited to be putting away the Christmas decorations. Well, some of us are. Ava will leave that crap up forever. Granted, her stuff is pretty and Amylynn’s is child-centric. Still, Amylynn hates how nothing fits in the house with that stupid tree. Like everyone else, we had New Year’s resolutions. We told you about the diet one but there was another one, too. We vowed to stop complaining about Bank of No Forks. That lasted about ten minutes. Failure never felt so satisfying. We’ll never give up the option to giggle, though. Here’s what we found for this week.

1. Tanning Lady. This lady’s story has been around for a couple of months, but Ava just became aware of it. If you don’t know, this woman was charged with putting her 6 year old child in a tanning booth. She was arrested and went to court for child endangerment. The story faded away, but Time Magazine mentioned it in a year-end retrospective and that’s when Ava saw it. The reason we think it’s so funny is that the woman is really, really, REALLY tan. And also from New Jersey. Ava is from New Jersey too and we love to tease about the NJ stereotypes. Just to be clear, Ava is ghostly white with

Le pomme shoppe

lovely flat hair and conservative fingernails. She doesn’t fit the stereotype at all. Except for that fascination with fire. We don’t know what we’re going to do about that.

2. Apple Store a la Paris. Armed thieves stole $1.25 million dollars of Apple products on New Years Eve from the Apple store behind the Paris Opera House. They broke in and stole laptops and iPhones and iPads then loaded them into – and here’s our favorite part – a Mercedes van. If this happened in the States, you can be assured it would have been a Ford Econoline. How very classy to

rob a Paris store with a Mercedes, don’t you think. We mean really, how gauche to use a Chevy or a Dodge. Hey, if anyone knows anything about this, we would love a couple extra iPads and a few iPhone 5s.

3. Way worse than a speeding ticket. Our town uses radar vans to catch speeders. The police park them all around town and you have to keep your eyes sharp or you’re screwed. Apparently one local fellow wasn’t keeping his eyes open and ran right into the parked van. Was he playing with the radio? Was he texting? Was he practicing a especially damaging version of civil disobedience? We don’t know for sure except that he was arrested for suspicion of drunk driving. We don’t want you to worry. He, his passenger and the guy sitting in the van were not harmed. Neither was the radar equipment. Thank God for that, huh?

4. Hillary’s out. We love Hillary Clinton with a bi-partison sort of girl love. Many people don’t and you certainly have the right as an American to be wrong about that. Still, we love her and were very concerned about her care while in the hospital the last week for a blood clot in her head. Hospitals are where people go to die and we thought she should

hurry up and get out of there. We tried to call the nurses station to check on her, but the Secret Service asked us very nicely to stop that. Then several fellows in Foster Grant sunglasses and dark suits stopped by the office and made their position quite clear. We did make them promise to tell her we cared and are worried about her. Get well, Hil. Did you get the chocolates we sent?

5. White trash crushes. We have no idea how this happened. We were raised right – well mostly, and normally we have very high standards. It seems that we have developed serious crushes on several outstanding examples of white trash men and we don’t know what to do about it. Ava didn’t really want you all to know. She’s embarrassed, but Amylynn insisted that we confess all kinds of nonsense on this blog and we’re not going to shy away from telling you about this little quirk. Odds are, if you use estrogen, you agree with us anyway. We’ve asked a lot of our friends and they have all concurred. Maybe this is our weird version of a mid-life crises. So we bet you’re wondering who these guys are. Don’t judge. Alright, here goes: Jax Teller from Sons of Anarchy, Daryl Dixon from The Walking Dead, and Jace Robertson from Duck Dynasty. It’s

inexplicable. What’s really weird is that we’d never talk to them in real life. Jax might make us ogle but we’d never chat up an unwashed biker. We’re not completely sure that Daryl can string six sentences together to form a conversation, and Jace has a beard to rival ZZ Top. But holy cow – Jax is an over-the-top hot Alpha male. Daryl runs around on a motorcycle  with a crossbow saving everyone’s life and crooning to babies until our ovaries cramp up. And Jace is adorable under all that hair and blows you away with his college educated use of the English language, outrageous sense of humor and ninja level grasp of irony. We are complicated ladies, indeed.

Just ignore the fact that whoever wrote the sentiment used the wrong “were”.

We do FEEEEEEL thinner – after one whole day, but still….