I’m back. Back from the crystal blue water of the Caribbean. Back from the land of dessert 24 hours a day. Back from never cooking or washing the dishes.

Back to the 9-5 hell hole. Back to piles and piles of laundry. Back to bills and groceries and an empty gas tank.

Yea me.

I have a long post written about the trip but I’m waiting for photographic proof. I’ll post it in a day or so. I wrote it during the 18 hour epic day of travel on Saturday. It started at 7:00am EST and ended at 11:18pm AZ time. I’m really proud of the fact that no one, either of my own family or a complete stranger, was slaughtered. It certainly wasn’t because I didn’t consider it several times throughout the day. Man, there are some really obnoxious people out in this world and I believe they congregate in airports. Perhaps that is their meeting location. How horrifying would it be if we discovered they had an actual club? Maybe we ought to consider infiltrating such a club because that can’t go unchecked. We need to make a stand to protect the sanity of those of us on the edge.

A woman and her ten-ish year old daughter sat in front of me on the plane ride from Fort Lauderdale to Las Vegas. Soon after they were joined in their row by a hip young man in his mid-twenties. He had a short ponytail and wore a Jimi Hendrix shirt.

The trip from Florida to Nevada is five hours and I’m quite certain that guy had no idea he would be discussing American Girl dolls all that time. Seriously. The woman was obsessed. She literally talked about nothing else than American Girl dolls. Somewhere over Lousianna, the man was glassy eyed and itchy. By Albuquerque, I think he was ready to chew himself out of his seatbelt.

“We just love American Girl dolls,” she would intone. She told him about all the clothes, highchairs, car seats, cribs, and hair accessories. It was mind boggling. “We just love American Girl dolls.”

Why he didn’t just blurt out, “You know what I love? Guitars and girls with huge tits.”

We need to start checking into this club. The membership rolls must be huge.

Oh. My. Word. Do you realize how close it is to Thanksgiving? You know, right after that is Christmas. That’s quite alarming, don’t you think? It gets faster every year. How does that happen? Are we getting closer and closer to all the black holes or something? We think Ava needs to get back on PBS and pay better attention. While we ponder the deeper things, we found these things to amuse us.

1. Names of minerals.A UofA professor recently had a newly discovered mineral named after himself – Bobdownsite. Oh, we so totally want that. We can think of so many amazing things we’d lend our names to. Minerals not so much, but how about new cupcakes recipes? If it must be something natural then how about The Quill Diamond? OR, how about a hurricane? Not a benign-blows-out-at-sea-and-doesn’t-do-any-real-damage hurricane either. You’d understand if you ever went out to lunch with us. Which brings us to…

2. Waitstaff with a sense of humor. Every once in a while, the Sisters encounter a waitperson that can hold their own with us. One that can take our crazy substitutions, teasing, fifty mile-an-hour zingers, and general wackiness. We encountered one such jewel this week. Adela was her name and she hung in there like a trooper. For once, the Sisters were sure that we left a restaurant without a server quitting or throwing them-self on a steak knife in the walk-in.

3. Pedicures. Are you familiar with the sound Homer Simpson makes when he eats donuts? That’s the same sound you should make when you’re getting a great pedicure. And at the end – you have pretty toes. And the best part isn’t the reflexology massage or the kneading of your calf muscles or even the pretty paint. The best part is you didn’t have to fold yourself in half in order to smear paint all over your cuticles.

4. Bradley Cooper. People magazine has named him the sexiest man alive for 2011 and the Sisters are not of a mind to dispute them. He’s ridiculously pretty with great hair and piercing eyes. He speaks French. He’s very funny. You’d know this if you saw The Hangover and if you didn’t go to Netflix right away. You know what we want for Christmas? Bradley Cooper delivering our red pandas. Get on it, Santa.

5. Husbands Who Rescue You at the Grocery Store When You Lock Your Keys in the Trunk.  At the end of a long work day, one of the Sisters stopped at the grocery store for a few needed items.  All went well until the very end – sometimes that’s just the way it is.  After opening the trunk, the Sister threw her keys in because she had no pockets.  She has done this before (No, Ed, she won’t do it again.  Really, just stop already).  After loading up the groceries, she closed the trunk and took the cart back to its cart corral home.  Walking back to the car, it started to dawn on her that perhaps, just maybe, she’d left her keys in the trunk.  She had.  Luckily, she had not locked her purse in the trunk because she had her crappy Sprint cell phone in there.  One quick call to the husband resulted in a “less then 10 minute later” rescue.  May I point out, this would not have happened if the Sister had not been driving herself around and we all know that’s never good – SEE?

So I took the day off work so I could get my family ready for this vacation.  By the end of the day, I actually feared my “vacation” was going to turn into something else entirely. More of an “on the lam” kind of episode rather than a relaxing respite from my life.

One of the imperative things I needed to accomplish was to pick up My Honey’s suit from the dry cleaners. I took it in on Monday and stressed what day it needed to be ready. They assured me it would be ready the night before.

I dropped the kids off at school and went there first thing this morning.

No suit.

I reiterated that it MUST be done today. The manager called the “plant” and they said they held it back because of a stain on the tie. They promised to have it ready by early afternoon. I sighed deeply and left with the assurance they would call my cell phone the minute it was available.

After lunch around 1:30 I dropped in again even though the manager hadn’t called. Still no suit and I could tell by the surprised look on her face that she’d forgotten all about it. She launched herself at the phone and called the plant again. I put on my angry eyes and told her to tell “the plant” that, as far as I was concerned, they could throw the tie in the dumpster. I didn’t care about the tie. I could buy a new tie. I could not, however, buy a new suit this afternoon. The manager repeated my speech almost word for word to the kidnapper of the suit. They didn’t get the full effect of my glare over the phone, but she managed to relate some manner of my menace to the person on the other end.

She swore on a stack of coupon books that the suit would be there around 2:30. She showed me that she still had my cell number. She told me there would be no charge due to the screw up.

I picked up the kids at 3:15 and still no call. I went to get gas for the car and planned to stop there afterwards and scowl at them until someone showed up with the damn suit. I also planned to bring the children and let them fight in the store. I figured if my scowling didn’t prompt them into immediate action, the sound of Sassy and The Bandit bickering would drive them to it out of desperation.

Fortunately for the dry cleaners, I did not have to murder anyone. The suit showed up – clean as a whistle. The tie, too. All will be well.

Best of all, now the dry cleaner is terrified of me.

As you’ve been made aware of before, the Sisters are none too happy about their current employment. Two of us are floundering away at Bank of No Forks and the third one is trying to make hard decisions about re-entering the torture circus in a big way.

But there is good news. We’ve found our new jobs and we’re really quite excited about it.

yeah, white's not gonna really work for us. We'll check with Michael Kors to see if he can whip up something cute.

NASA is hiring astronauts for the International Space Station. They describe the ideal candidates as having creativity, ambition, and team work. A sense of daring and a probing mind. Oh. My. God. It’s like they’ve been reading this blog! Frankly, we’re surprised they didn’t just come to us directly.  

We pulled the listing off USAJOBS .com and we think we could totally handle it. The requirements are not nearly as forbidding as you’d think. There is a height requirement of 62 inches. Amylynn, the shortest of the three, just squeaks by, and there is no weight requirement. Also, they require that your vision be correctable to 20/20 and they’ll pay for the LASIK or PRK. They babble something about “anthropometric” requirements for the “extravehicular activity mobility unit” (space suits ) but, honestly, we’re not too worried because of the next point.

They try really hard to scare you with discussions of “arduous” training that takes 2-3 years so we figure that any issues we may have with the “anthropometric” nonsense should be resolved with this training.

We’ve really thought this through. We figure our husbands will love it because we can’t spend money shopping, unless there is internet in space. You lose weight in space what with that zero gravity business. Sold! Ava has been watching Nova on PBS and she thinks she’s got a pretty good handle on this physics thing. According to her, time moves slower the closer you are to a black hole. For example, two hours at a black hole is equivilant to fifty years on Earth. If we’re at the International Space Station (ISS) then we’re closer to a black hole than we are on Earth, ergo we’ll come back

We've been wanting our own apartment...

thinner and younger than when we left.

See! this is a win-win.

Additonally, we’ll have various duties, but we’ve already split them up amongst the three of us. Amylynn will be in charge of driving the thing or any other vehicles since she is the designated Quill Sister driver, and Kelli and Ava are both quite skilled in maintenance tasks so what ever they come up with we’re pretty sure they can handle it. Any robotics issues we come across that we can’t handle, then we’ll just call Ava’s fourteen year-old son who totally has the robots area covered.

They are looking for bachelor’s degrees in various sciences, which Kelli has, but Ava and Amylynn think we can get our work experience as an equivilant. We’re quite sure that once they interview the three of us they’ll completely understand that we’ve got this covered. For goodness sakes, if we can learn extensive lending guidelines we can certainly handle this. Besides there’s that 2-3 year training. Which by the way, happens quite a bit in RUSSIA.

You know what else? We’re really looking forward to the “frequent travel” they warn you about.

I was all ready to type up my blog tonight. I’d seated myself on my spot on the sofa, turned on my laptop, and got comfortable.

It was brilliant. Possibly, it was the best, funniest, most inspired blog post I’ve ever written.

And then the Internet went down.

Down.

As in no Internet. Oh. My. God. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I wanted to call the cable company who holds all of my communication capabilities in their ineffective hands. I didn’t know the phone number. You know how people get phone numbers these days? THEY LOOK ON THE INTERNET.

I fidgeted on the couch. I tried to watch TV. I focused on reruns of The Big Bang Theory (the funniest show on television, bar none) but no dice.  I asked My Honey to go see if he could get on line with his desktop computer. He went and did that AFTER he made considerable fun of me.

I don’t know what I thought was going to happen. The Internet was down. No one can get on line. It’s down for everyone, not just my laptop. Why, when the Internet goes down, you feel like it’s localized on just your computer?

I felt certain I was going insane. I turned my computer off and on again. Still no Internet.

The phone book! I remember that there were still phone books in the kitchen. I got the phone number for the cable company and called on my cell phone. A very annoying man’s voice came on to tell me that there were receiving so many calls that they couldn’t take MY call. He cheerfully suggested that I try again later. I roundly cursed the idiot on the recording and tried the Internet again.

ARRRRGGGGG! Nope. I called again. Same recording. And again and again and again and again. I paced. I cursed and threatened to cry. My Honey informed me I was being dramatic and then he laughed at me. I cursed at him and accused him of not loving me.

Clearly I had rounded the corner of Distressed and loped merrily into the sad little neighborhood of Lunacy. I memorized the zip code. I figured I’d be there a while. I called the cable company again. That jackass was still answering the phone. Have you ever noticed that you can’t furiously hang up on anyone on a cell phone? Pressing that end button – or in the case of my piece of shit SPRINT phone – sliding the “end” thingy on the touch screen is wholly unsatisfying. Ava pointed this out to me weeks ago, but I hadn’t the opportunity to experience it until tonight. I sincerely missed the “good old days” when you could slam the receiver down in a fury and everyone would know about it.

I tried the internet again. I wept a little. I pulled up my current manuscript. I hoped that if I focused on my hero and heroine and Regency England – a time, I’d like to note, that did not have internet – that I could keep my mind off the fact that I was completely cut off from every other person on the planet. Unless, I wanted to call them on my STUPID SPRINT phone that doesn’t work.

I was saved by Sons of Anarchy. The show finally ended at 12:30 and I was more than half asleep. I tried the Internet one more time before I toddled off to bed.

IT CAME ON!!!!!!!!!!! I’m wide awake now and showing everyone on the Internet who cares to pop on over here and read about my psychosis that I’m completely insane. Yes, it’s true. I’m not right. And now that the Internet is back on I can go on to WebMD and diagnose myself with all kinds of brain malfunctions. All is right with the world again.