I can’t wait until the classroom presentation portion of the assignment
The Bandit keeps losing teeth. He’s ten so it’s not unheard of, but he looks really goofy and charming at the moment.
He lost one last week. Then on Saturday we were eating frozen yogurt when he lost another one. Sassy and I didn’t believe him. Who loses a tooth eating yogurt? But holy cow, there it was, in his palm.
Today when I got home from work, he handed me yet another tooth.
What the heck?” I asked. “I didn’t even know you had any loose ones.”
He shrugged. I mean really, what’s there to say?
Later we went to the grocery store. We were standing in the dairy section when he caught me looking at him. Back when he was younger and lost a bunch of teeth he was actually excited about it because it made what he called “a cheese hole”. This was a gap in his teeth in which he could insert pieces of shredded cheese.
A cheese hole. Obviously.
So there I was staring at him in the dairy section.
“What?” he asked.
“Jeez with the holes you have now, we could shove cheese wedges through there.”
He giggled at the prospect. We proceeded through the store imaging what else we could get through that gap.
“Pretzel sticks,” I suggested
“Baby corn,” he countered.
As we went down the aisles. “Small carrots. Thin cookies.”
“Very skinny breadsticks.”
You know, the science fair is coming up… Finally, an experiment that might be fun.
Exchange “school” with “work”
Boy, do we hate having to go to work when our families have the day off for a holiday. Yes, we work in the finance industry. No we don’t get MLK Day off work. Half of the companies we work with will be closed, but not us. Nope.
When our families are all still nestled in their beds with a warm cat and maybe a fuzzy dog to snuggle with, we will be getting up and putting on work clothes and going in to be harassed by too many emails and impractical expectations.
Sigh.
January 15
Well, hasn’t this week been a kick in the ass? We’re pretty sure that no more people we love need to die this year. Surely the quota has been met. So we wallowed and whined and moaned. We laughed too, but they were tears from a clown. Or something like that. Anyway, the Quill Sisters respectfully ask you to take good care of yourself. It seems the best plan is not to turn 69. Just ignore that age. Go from 68 right to 70. Because we love you, we’ve done some serious research on the internet to find you five
funny things this week. Read on and it’ll boost your spirits. Well, it won’t make them worse. We promise.
1. Someone who clearly avoided the curse of 68+1. This took place in Maryland. An 87-year-old fellow answered his door to a stranger. The guy at the door said there was a problem with the old guy’s well and it needed to be checked. The old guy wasn’t falling for that nonsense. This old dude reminds us of our dad – cantankerous. At this point, we imagine he old guy told the stranger to get off his lawn. Sadly, the stranger ratcheted up the encounter and pulled the old man to the ground whereupon our hero bit him. Now here comes the best part. The old man has a kick-ass wife who then showed up to save the day by punching the bad guy in the head. And there you have it. Don’t mess with old ladies.
2. It look us 350+ to get a decent one. Donald “Chip” Pugh has gotten himself in considerable trouble. Enough trouble to necessitate a mug shot. We’re not sure if he was just in a foul mood at the time, although that would be reasonable considering a mug shot usually happens after an arrest, but he was very unhappy with the one the police in Ohio were using. He disliked it so much that he actually sent the police a selfie and asked them to use it instead. This time, he was wearing a sport coat and sunglasses. “Here is a better photo,” he said. “That one is terrible.” We agree.
3. We want the fuzzy kind not the slick kind. If you haven’t seen the video yet, you need to hop on over to the Facebook page for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Last month a wild California sea otter swam into their tide pool and hung around. The employees were concerned that she might be injured, but then she popped out a baby! Honest to Zeus, this may be the cutest otter in the history of otters and that is a long and illustrious history, my friends. We have boomeranged sea otters to the very top of the list of Animals the Sisters Must Possess. We’ve always known they were cute, but HOLY MOLEY. The way this baby floats around on his momma’s belly and she lifts him up for little kisses… Melted hearts.
4. If we’d won the lottery… You’ve probably heard that the Playboy Mansion is for sale. It’s listed for 200 million dollars. That seems like a hell of a lot for a fixer-upper, in our humble opinions. We’ll be the first to admit, we’ve not been in the Playboy Mansion but we imagine the interior decorating is atrocious. We picture a whole lot of crushed velvet and leopard prints. We did some internet searches and found this picture. Sweet Jesus. Nevertheless, we’d consider buying it if we won that 1.5 billion dollars solely because of the famed grotto at the pool. That’s the perfect place to keep otters. Apparently, if you buy the place, you have to let Hugh live in the apartment over the garage. Alright, fine, but we’re going to need him to make some room for the otter chow. Amazon is delivering it, two-day shipping.
5. A new career path. We found new jobs. We’re moving to Virginia next week. There’s probably several more openings, so feel free to apply yourself. Caromont Farms is hiring baby goat cuddlers. Squeeee! They’re expecting about 90 kids in mid-February and they will need to be fed four times a day and cuddled. Apparently, all this love and attention helps them grow into strong goats who make good cheese. We LOVE goat cheese – especially with blueberries and walnuts. We were excited about this prospect until we read the last part. Then we went certifiably over the edge. One of the goat cuddler duties will be, “dressing them in small goat-sized sweaters that need to be worn on the regular to ensure they stay warm.” That’s right WE GET TO DRESS THE GOATS!! We don’t even need to get paid; we’d do this for free.
Always
The Sisters are crushed, saddened, despondent.
Of course he is our beloved Snape. I read one ode to him today, I wish I could remember where I read it so I could give proper credit, but the author said that they suspected all along that Snape would be some version of a tragic hero. Otherwise why would they ever have cast Alan Rickman?
But when Ava called me on the way to work today to give the awful news, it was Colonel Brandon who first came to mind. This is one of my favorite scenes in the entire Alan Rickman repertoire. Just listen to the beautiful baritone. Oh we’re so, so sad.
Bow to the bedazzler
Did you all watch the State of the Union Address? Now you know we don’t discuss politics on this site. Instead, we’re equal opportunity eye rollers. Also, we find that during these speeches the best viewing is of the audience.
Remember with Ruth Bader Ginsberg fell asleep last year because she had a glass or two of wine beforehand? She was adorable and quite charming about the incident afterwards. Besides, we love her – if not for the fact that she’s a woman on the Supreme freaking Court, but also because she soups up those boring black robes with those nifty collars.
This SOTU speech audience had plenty of great audience moments, but not were so fabulous as this woman.
You know how sometimes you see a person and you think, “Oh, I hope this is me in thirty years.”
Maybe not. Maybe we’re the only ones who do this. The Sisters have plans of growing old together, wearing evening gowns to the grocery store, having more animals than is prudent, and being a constant embarrassment to our children. It’s going to be fabulous!
This woman – Miss Edith Childs – is perfect. Everything about her outfit is perfect. Look at that hat! Sweet Lord that hat is exquisite. How much does it weigh, do you suppose? It looks heavy, but that sort of neck ache is worth it. Beauty is pain.
And her expression – we’re going to start practicing very day to master that look. That expression says, “I’m taking zero shits from you. I might be bored. I might not be. You’ll never know. I’m mercurial. What do you have to say about that? That’s what I thought. Now skedaddle.”
We know you think we’re being smart asses, but we’re not. Miss Edith is our patronus. Our future role model. Who we want to be when we grow up.
Miss Edith, you rocked the hell out of SOTU.
I made her admit she was jealous
I’ve been playing Words With Friends with friends (ah, now I get it **eyeroll**) and family for a while now. My mom and I generally have several boards going at once. Right now there are four in various stages of completeness.

55 points!!
I’m just as competitive about this game as I am about everything else. That can be translated as VERY. I don’t know why I’m like this. Is it because I’m a first born? Does my Type A personality cause it? Am I Type A because I’m a first born? I think it’s probably my dad’s fault. He’d never, ever let us win at anything so when we finally got a win it was for real.
Whatever, I’m hyper competitive. Even I find it annoying at times.
So back to Words With Friends. I’d just won a game with Mom so I went ahead and started another game. My letters came up all scrambled as they do, and I started at them for a bit. I started giggling when I realized that I could play all my letters at once.
That’s a big freaking deal if you don’t know. I mean think about it. How many times do you get seven random letters at once that actually spell a word? I don’t know what the odds are. I’m not a mathematician. I’m a writer. I can spell mathematician without spell check, but I can barely add tax in my head.
So I played STEALTH and then giggled uncontrollably. I was giddy. I immediately went to the comments section where you can leave each other little notes. Usually this area is dominated by us bitching because we have no vowels or too many vowels or we’ve been cursed by drawing QJZX all in one draw. Sometimes we get to use the comments to brag on a really good play. Like any time you score 100+ points in one turn (I’ve done that 11 times by the way). Things can get pretty hairy when that happens. I’ve never been especially good at trash talk, that is until Words With Friends came along.
This has really upped my game.
I even had to call Mom to tell her to go look at that board and to marvel at my prowess! Things wound up on the call as you’d expect. She called me a mean name (spoken out of fear of losing, I’m sure) and hung up.
Bwahahahahahaahaha!
How dirty is your house?
The Sisters have made an appointment for this fellow to come by on Tuesday. We’ve asked for extra elbow grease. Wanna come watch?
January 8
The Sisters took a nice long break from The Five Thing That Kept Us From Slitting Our Wrists This Week. It’s because Christmas and New Years fell on Fridays and our innate laziness keeps us from posting on holidays. And sometimes you just need a wee vacation. Our holidays were nice and not too hectic. We hope you had the same luxury. Did you make any resolutions for the new year? We made a few–mostly they involve animals and trying to obtain them without a) getting divorced and b) going to prison. The year is early, yet. Who knows what kind of shenanigans we can
get up to. We assembled some things for your amusement and ours. Enjoy.
1. A potential candidate. We love how we’re always finding new animals — adorable animals — that we never knew existed. That seems kind of crazy, doesn’t it? The prehensile porcupine comes immediately to mind. So anyway, we found the aardwolf – an adorable beastie with a name similar to aardvark only way cuter. They’re freaking adorable, right? They don’t get very big, only about 20 pounds when fully grown. That’s relatively small when you consider Jojo Kitty is 16 pounds. Here’s the best part–well after that adorable ruff on its back and the fact that it can rotate its ears–is that they eat bugs. Termites especially. It’s going to be so easy to feed this one. We’re adding South Africa on to our travel itinerary in 2016.
2. NOT a potential candidate. Now this one we can go an entire lifetime without seeing in person. Holy shit look at this thing. It’s a new species of shark they found in the Pacific Ocean and named Etmopterus benchleyi after Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, but they call it a Black Ninja Lanternshark. This is just one more reason we Do Not go outside. Good god. To make matters even worse, it glows in the dark. WTF? Why be solid black if you’re going to then go and waste all that energy on glowing? We don’t get it. Doesn’t matter; odds are we’d never see it because it lives more than a mile beneath the surface. It’s teeth are tiny, and sharp, and nearly translucent. Ummm…no.

NOT the real sapphire
3. We like round, blue things. Take for instance this star blue sapphire. It’s purported to be the largest in the world weighing in at 1,404.49 carats. The current owner from Sri Lanka wants $300 million for it. We think that sounds reasonable. Seriously, the thing is as big as the man’s palm. It would nestle nicely in a tiara we’re looking to commission. We’re going to start practicing walking with better posture – that can be a resolution.
4. Setting the bar pretty high. There was a hullabaloo at the Walmart. A 25-year-old man proposed to his 20-year-old girlfriend there. Yes, at the Walmart, right in front of the employees and other shoppers. Sadly that same night the fellow was arrested for shoplifting. What do you abscond with on the night of your engagement? An edible thong and a sex toy of

This would never have happened under the Aqua Net regime.
course. What did you steal after your engagement? Good news, though. It was confirmed that the fellow actually paid the $29 for the Walmart engagement ring.
5. All praise the Aqua Net! We were children of the 80’s. We have a fine appreciation for good hairspray. Apparently, so does Donald Trump. He was just quoted bitching about the state of hairspray, saying “they” are making him use pump hairspray instead of aerosol’s that have chlorofluorocarbons that harm the environment. There is no explanation for who “they” are, but clearly they have excellent senses of humor. Has no one bothered to tell Mr. Trump that there haven’t been chlorofluorocarbons in hairspray since the late ’70’s? Still, he’s using the pump ones that, “come out in big globs, right? And it’s stuck in your hair, and you say, ‘Oh my God, I got to take a shower again, my hair’s all screwed up,’ right? I want to use hairspray.” So is that seriously the real story behind that hideous mop on his head? It’s all due to the hairspray situation? We’d really like to shake the hands of “They” because they’re perpetrating one of the biggest long cons in history.
Urp!
I think you might be able to surmise from our years confessing all of our craziness on this blog that Ava has a bit of a germ phobia.
If you don’t, it’s true. She’s a whack-a-doodle when it comes to germs. She wears a face mask to the doctor and sits on a

I don’t know that radiation would clean this
plastic bag while in the waiting room. Don’t ask her to take you to the hospital. All she’ll do is slow down and expect you to roll out at the emergency entrance. She’ll pick you up pretty much the same way. Just saying – call me. I have a very strong stomach. I’ll wait with you during the worst of it, and we’ll text Ava updates. Really, it’s best that way.
Now that you know this peccadillo of hers, it’s all the more strange that she refuses to wash her office coffee mug.
You have never seen anything so disgusting in your entire life. After two weeks of coffee sludge drying to the inside of the mug, only to be revived every morning with a new cup, that thing gets pretty hazardous. It looks like toxic waste. We’re all horrified.
So this morning, I had a near death experience.
She and I were standing at our friendly office Keurig, chattering away. Ava brewed her coffee in her two-week-old mug and added cream. I slid my newly washed mug into position and set it to brewing. Ava stepped into a friend’s office and chatted with her while I finished up.
I added cream to my cup and took a nice long swig of heavenly hazelnut scented coffee. You know how you look into your mug while you’re drinking? I couldn’t figure out why the inside of my mug seemed to be leaching down the sides. And what was that thing that just floated up from the bottom?
And then… Oh the HORROR. I realized I’d accidentally grabbed her coffee and was drinking out of a mug that appeared to have survived Three Mile Island.
So much for having a strong stomach.
Us tired people need all the help we can get
I won a Fitbit at our company Christmas Party. That’s right. The fat girl “won” the Fitbit. I had no idea I wanted this, but it’s actually pretty fascinating. Do not for one second believe that this Fitbit business ties into a New Year’s Resolution. I have made no such thing. I refuse to set myself up for that kind of failure. There are plenty of third party sources that can disappoint me. I don’t need to do it to myself.
Nevertheless, I had no idea this Fitbit would be so cool. Get this – it promises to chart how I sleep.
Blahahahahahahaha. That made me laugh when I read it. I don’t sleep. Stupid Fitbit. Now I have proof. For example, last night it told me I got 5 hours and 19 minutes of sleep BUT I was restless 17 times and woke up 1 time for a total of 39 minutes awake or restless.
No wonder I’m crabby.
Of course it also counts my steps. Sadly it can’t tell when I’m just walking or when I’m storming down the hall at work to go yell at someone. It seems like I should get more credit for furiously stomping, don’t you?
Do I get extra points for flailing my arms when I’m gesticulating wildly? No, I do not.
Also, gritting my teeth – no points.
Speeding to get to work on time? Nope.
Hollering at children is basically useless from a fitness point of view.
Hey – Fitbit people – what can you do for me on this? Seems like you should up your game.