NEW RELEASES
Ho ho ho!
Typical Monday
Ava’s out all week. She’s trying to use up her vacation time because Bank of No Forks won’t let you roll over any vacation time. Essentially that means that the entire office is trying to fit in all their days by the end of the year. There’s hardly anyone here on any given day.
With Ava gone all week, I have to get my amusement where I can get it.
Some back story. The night janitors who come to our office after hours are fairly worthless. The only reason I’m convinced that they come into our office at all is to use our sink to dump their mop buckets. Apparently, they are also moonlighting at the zoo and, before they get to our office, they mop out the elephant enclosure. Our sink drains about as fast as molasses so every morning when we come into make coffee the sink has a five-inch ring of mud in it. Grooooooooss.
I had our receptionist complain about it to building maintenance. I love to sic the receptionist on people. She’s like an attack dog with ribbons in its hair.
Flash forward to today. I’m in my office. Jojo Kitty is asleep on my desk. The phone is ringing with disgruntled customers. I’m considering getting drunk. It’s fairly typical for a Monday morning. The only difference is that Ava isn’t across the hall.
The receptionist comes into my office during a lull and plops herself down in a chair and grabs the Self magazine on my desk. I have no idea why this magazine comes to my house, but it shows up every month without fail. I assure you I am not paying anyone for it. It has stupid articles like how to make your hair look like Kate Middleton’s (I suggest you buy a good wig), or that if you don’t sleep well, it could be that
Self Magazine Nov 22
you’re afraid of the dark and don’t even know it (eye roll).
The receptionist leafed through it and read me the headlines and commented on pictures and features and such. She stopped when she got to a pull out section on yoga. Clearly she’s never tried yoga cause she looked at these poses and acted like they’re so easy. The added whammy on these poses is that you’re supposed to do them against a wall amping up the pressure on your arm or whatever other spindly appendage is supposed to be balancing your weight. She shows me a plank where the skinny girl’s feet are on the wall and she’s perfectly straight.
“Oh, that looks easy,” she says.
“Really?” I look at her in disbelief. I happen to love yoga and that shit looks impossible to me.
“Sure. It’s just like a push up.”
“OK, try it right there.” I pointed towards an empty space in my office.
The whole thing worked out as well as you’d expect only now when the landlord comes down to see to our complaints, I’m gonna mention the feet prints on my wall.
So….
December 7
Wow – what a weird time of year, especially out here in the desert. It’s been in the 80’s which is so strange when you’re listening to Christmas carols and singing about snowmen and such. We’re not complaining, though. We hate cold more than we hate any other weather. Especially windy cold. We found some things to laugh about this week. Here they
are. Take what you need.
1. Baby makes 3. Or maybe 4 if you believe the tabloids. Just like everyone else, we’re fascinated by the British royals and we’re completely smitten with Kate. The Duchess was in the hospital this week – you may have heard something about it. It was all over the news. We have no idea what’s happening with the “fiscal cliff” but we know the intricacies of the royal vomit. Since she was in the hospital the royals were forced to admit it was because she is pregnant instead of leaving it up to the imagination of the tabloids. If it was us, we’d have come up with some interesting cover story. Kate is in the hospital because, while riding a sheet pan down the royal staircase, she banged up her knee. OR Kate is in the hospital because, while visiting one of 
those third world countries she’s always being forced to visit, she contracted Beriberi. Anyway, we’re hoping for twins. However, for a successful pregnancy, we suggest she eat a couple of sandwiches or something. She’s much too thin for twins.
#2. Dave Brubeck. Dave died. We’re sad. We love us some good jazz and Dave was a master. If you’re 
feeling blue – pop onto Youtube and listen to Take 5. You’ll feel better.
#3 Bears on the run. Down south from here, the bears have been invading. They’ve broken into a few houses and raided some kitchens and given some joggers a lovely greeting. Safe and sound up here, we’re quite amused, but we can see why perhaps they are a problem. Thats not to say if a bear showed up in our kitchen we wouldn’t be thrilled and offer her biscuits with honey and perhaps a hug. The wildlife officials authorized a “population management hunt” to kill the bears that were being the most threatening. Well, apparently the bears got the Quill Sisters’s memo and they’ve all disappeared. The Wildlife people called off the hunt for now because 
they assume they’ve all gone into hibernation. We doubt it. For Zeus’ sake is 80 degrees. Who hibernates when it’s 80? We don’t know either. But if they’re still listening – RUN YOGI! RUN!
4. Trip to the Moon. We are going to ask 750 million of you out there to send in a dollar. We really want to take a trip to the Moon. There is a new company headed by ex-NASA officials called Golden Spike Co who is putting together a proposal to send people to the Moon two at a time for $750,000,000 each. If you guys would each send in a dollar – which isn’t that much to ask really for the entertainment value – then we’ll have some sort of contest between Amylynn and Ava to figure out which of us gets to go. Come on. It’ll be fun.
5. Amylynn’s cover. Oh. My. God. Isn’t this thing gorgeous? It totally is. Our very lovely and talented friend Jaycee did an outstanding job. Keep tuned for updates when and where you can purchase it.
That is a definite NO
This morning The Bandit was babbling some story to me and, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really listening. You can’t possibly listen to everything your children tell you. It’s impossible. Sometimes it makes you feel like a bad person, but they talk all the time. ALL THE TIME. If you listen to everything your head would explode. God’s honest truth. Their stories never go anywhere. The sentences never actually end they just wander off to a pointless question. There’s always a question at the end and that’s where the trouble is. You can’t just blindly agree because then you’ve agreed to let them shave the dog and you don’t want to say no because maybe, just this once, they asked if they could go clean their room or something.
Just this morning I listened to twelve minutes of Sassy’s latest dream before I had to tune her out and just do the nod and “uh huh” trick.
Then The Bandit came up with his nonsense while I was making school lunches. It was something about space aliens and the car and somehow the principal of the school.
“…then I said he was an ****,” the Bandit told me with enthusiasm.
I swear to Zeus he said “asshole”. NOW I was paying attention. “Did you just say someone was an asshole?”
“No!” He looked at me aghast. “I’m not allowed to say that word.” There was a pause then he added hopefully, “Am I?”
Yeah, no.
May the odds ever be in our favor
We were on another one of our epic conference calls at Bank of No Forks today. Mostly Ava and I don’t pay much attention – especially to these town hall type of calls. Today we screwed around on Pinterest and complained that we were starving and that the call was too long and who were these bozos anyway?
Finally at the end they tossed up the question and answer section. That’s when we always tune in. The questions can either be stuff your sorta interested in or they are so freaking stupid you can’t believe the asker is able to get through the day under their own locomotion.
Today one of our fellow associates stated that everyone was worried about layoffs (Duh!). He stated that it was awfully close to Christmas and that fact really amps up the level of concern. He basically asked if the upper management on the line would just come clean and tell us how many people would be laid off and when.
Oh sure, like they’re going to say there will be 172 of you in the next 37 days.
Then I thought – hey – what if they made a game out of it? Like a combination of Thunderdome and The Hunger Games. Or we could put up the Octagon in the parking lot and just go at it like Ultimate Fighters. 500 employees enter – only 250 leave.
We could get someone really cool to do the theme song like Tina Turner did for Mad Max.
Ava and I are really looking forward to the cool costumes.
Cake Proxy
Amy and I spend many the entertained hour at Bank of No Forks. We keep a lot of the stories to ourselves because you wouldn’t get them unless you worked here. However, readers of this blog know that that’s not always the case. We have been accused of making sh*t up all the time. I assure you, we do not . . .
The other day we got an email telling us that we were to have a small, end of year celebration and it was to include a sheet cake. And maybe some fruit – budget allowing. We weren’t going to have to do anything; it was all going to be handled by corporate. “Really?” I thought. How was corporate going to order sheet cakes all over America? But, what do I know . . . certainly not much since I work here.
My question was answered rather quickly in the form of a second email requesting the following:
- Point Of Contact from your team that I can reach out to with any questions I may have as I am placing orders etc, if it’s not you. This will be the person the cake is delivered to on 12-14.
- Verify your Cost center.
- A local bakery phone number you utilize.
- *Please note I may request for an associate to pick up the cake for the Celebration in the event that the bakery does not deliver.
Hmmmmmm – after I provide all of that info AND go pick it up how is that being handled by corporate? You know how? It’s not. It’s being handled by me.
A third email arrived with two “job aids” attached for ordering cake. “Job aids” tell you how to do something – step by step. Thank the gods that the job aids arrived; I was at my wits end over ordering cake. “How?” I kept asking myself, “How would I ever be able to order cake?”
Oh no. One of the instructions says to order the cake by 11/30. Except the email came today, 12/4. I felt a panic attack coming on . . .
Luckily, a fourth email came and was an invitation to attend a 30 minute conference call for ordering the cake. The email states if I can’t attend, I needed to provide a cake proxy. I sh*t you not. A cake proxy. A conference call to order cake to go with two job aids . . . I couldn’t even get the words out to explain all of this to Amy.
She all but called me a liar. “You DO NOT have a conference call to order the sheet cake. They do not require a cake proxy if you can’t make it. You did NOT get job aids to order cake.” ***Note from Amylynn*** I’d like it noted I was not made the Cake Proxy. Apparently I’m not to be trusted.
The real issue isn’t receiving four emails to obtain one sheet cake – the real issue is that we don’t have forks to eat it with. Where are the instructions for that?
I know that Santa is watching and I’m very repentant
Sometimes I worry about myself.
My car has been acting funky. Just the other day it wouldn’t start for no damn reason. Then don’t you know it started right up for My Honey later when he came home. Nothing pisses me off more than that. I’m pretty good with car diagnostics and I hate looking like a fool.
That being said, after a long and soul crushing day at Bank of No Forks, I hopped in my car. I have the satellite radio turned to the Christmas channel. I was in a better mood leaving work than I was when I got there in the morning, so I turned down the radio and called my mom. I’d been pretty awful to her earlier in the day.
Let me remind you, I was in an absolutely WRETCHED mood. It was Monday morning, Bank of No Forks SUCKS, and there was another guy from corporate there today so we couldn’t bring the cat. Ava describes our attitude as “painted with hate.” Don’t we sound like model employees? We’re really quite fun to work with, I assure you.
Anyway, my mom called this morning to ask me – gasp – what I wanted for Christmas. The conversation deteriorated from there when I accused her of ignoring our Words With Friends game. And then I hung up on her. I’m an awful ungrateful child. She called right back and asked, “Did you hang up on me?” I told her, “all of a sudden you were just gone.”
I don’t deserve presents.
SO, I called my mom back as I was leaving the dark parking lot and remember I turned down the radio down a bit so I could hear the phone.
While I was waiting for the phone to ring, I kept hearing one of the warning bells that usually accompanies a warning light on the dash board – only no lights were coming on. Ding! It would do it again and yet no damn light would come on. **Ding** What the hell? Great now the **Ding** stupid lights aren’t even coming on to tell me what’s **Ding** wrong. God Damn it. **Ding**
Then I realized it was a bell on the stupid Christmas carol on the radio.
What a maroon!
PS – I’m very sorry Mommy. I do want a present.
Lady Belling’s Secret
I have a cover. I have a cover! A COVER!!!
The lovely and talented Jaycee DeLorenzo of Sweet & Spicy Designs did an outstanding job of making my vision come true.
This makes it feel like the book really is coming out. For real.
Tell me what you think….
November 30
What happened to this year? How is it possible that eleven months just disappeared like that? Did we all fall into a coma or something? We find it really hard to believe that almost an entire year has passed and we can’t hardly remember any of it. We suspect shenanigans. Still, we do believe the calendar when it say that it is indeed the end of the year. Doesn’t that usually mean cooler weather though? That’s what we thought, too, except that it’s like 80 degrees here. It’s hard to get into the Christmas mood when you’re shopping in flip-flops and a t-shirt. All kinds of good stuff went on this week. We laughed a lot. Sometimes it was maniacal laughter when we plotted the demise of Bank of No Forks. Sometimes it was the laughter of the doomed when we discovered that in fact we had not won the Powerball and had to retract that co-letter of resignation that ended with, “Go fork 
yourselves.” Still, laughter is laughter. Here’s what we’ve got for this week.
1. Hijacked chocolate. 18 tons of the stuff was hijacked in Vienna. Apparently, someone pulled up a tractor-trailer and loaded 33 pallets of chocolate and drove away. We want to make it perfectly clear that Ava and Amylynn have valid alibis for this day. We were nowhere near Vienna
oh barf!
and we don’t really like chocolate that much anyway. We gotta go – we hear the beeping of our semi backing into the driveway we hear a our mother calling.
2. Thinning the herd. So another person died under ridiculous and disturbing circumstances. This time, a fellow in Florida (why are they always in Florida?) died after winning a cockroach eating contest. The prize for the winner was an ivory ball python for Zeus’ sake. Earlier in the day he had entered a super worm eating contest. We didn’t make any of this up. How could we? The idiocy plays out when this jackass wins the contest after eating dozens of giant cockroaches. He complains of feeling sick (?!?!) and starts vomiting before collapsing in the store. He’s declared dead at the scene. The autopsy revealed he choked
to death with “arthropod body parts” blocking his airways. Oh, ick.
3. Beautiful ass kickings. We’ve long thought that really beautiful people are crazy. We are the exception that proves the rule. Or we are crazy and not prepared to deal with that truth. Whatever. For the purposes of this story, we’re referring to REALLY beautiful people. The fact is, we think all the attention they get from being extraordinarily beautiful makes them bat-shit crazy. We have no real proof of this it’s just a very scientific hypothesis we made up. Anyway, Halle Berry is outrageously beautiful. That is undisputed. She had a long term relationship with another 
shining diamond of gorgeousness named Gabriel Aubry and they had a child together. They ended badly and have been in court arguing over their daughter. Halle has since become engaged to another stupendously attractive person, Olivier Martinez. On Thanksgiving, Olivier and Gabriel got involved in a knock down drag out fight – presumably over who is prettier. Probably. Gabriel claims not to have fought back and has released the following photo. HOLY CRAP ON A CRACKER! We’ve long held lustful feelings toward Gabriel. In fact, Amylynn used him in her head as the model of the hero in her second book. This is an atrocity. Can you even imagine what that fight looked like? We’re rushing over right now with an icepack and a New York Strip steak. Poor baby.
4. 12 Things of Christmas. PNC Wealth Management has done the annual accounting of what it would cost to give someone the 12 Things of Christmas this year. At $107,000, it’s up 6.1% from last year. Hmmmm. Here’s the thing. If Mr. Bright and Mr. Louis show up with this nonsense under the tree this year, we hope they kept their receipt. Who the hell wants nine ladies dancing in your living room? And Amylynn’s house is plenty loud already without 11 pipers and 12 drummers marching around in there. Eight maids a-milking might be alright. We do go through a lot of milk. Really, all we’re interested in is the five golden rings. And maybe a partridge. They’re kinda 
cute. Otherwise all those birds are going to make a real mess out of the upholstry.
5. Absurd compliments. Someone called Amylynn a “ray of light” today. She and Ava laughed about that for a good twenty minutes. A Ray of Light. BLALALAHAHAAHAHSAHAHASHGHAH. **snort**. No Ray of Light should have the advanced aptitude for swearing as Amylynn has. Yeah, we got your Ray of Light right here, buddy.