One of the hazards of living in the desert is that most of the plants are very pokey. Or stabby. Things which look soft definitely are NOT. You just learn to deal with it. Don’t touch the plants, that’s my motto.

Somehow this year our front yard went to hell. Literally. There are a million, A MILLION, goathead stickers out there. They attach themselves to your shoes,

Look at these evil bastards

your clothes, your aura. They’ve made it into our house. We’ve pulled a zillion thorns from our feet. There have been a couple of times when I thought the only recourse was amputation of a foot.

I am of the opinion that we need to set fire to the front yard.

I set this scene for you so you can see how stupid I was this past weekend.

I went out to fetch the newspaper Sunday morning. In my pajamas. With no shoes. I went out on the walk way and stared at the paper. It was in the yard approximately two steps away from the concrete. I pondered. I debated.

Then I went for it. I figured if I went slowly…

The first step was alright. It was the second step where things went horribly wrong. Imagine me out in the front yard, in my Mickey Mouse jammies, standing on one foot like the Karate Kid in the flamingo pose. I can’t go forward. I can’t go back. I lifted that second foot and saw at least 45 goatheads stuck in my skin. I brushed them off but when I looked at the ground to decide where to place my foot, I saw no clean space. My first foot was in the only clear place in an

Not ocean. Picture thorns

ocean of stickers. It was a total fluke.

It was like I was surrounded by sharks. Evil, sharp sharks. I had nowhere to go. I didn’t have my phone to call for assistance to Prince Charming on a white steed to swoop me up. Or bring me shoes.

I considered I could simply die there, standing on one foot while I slowly dehydrated. At least I’d have the newspaper to read.

OR I could improvise.

That’s what I did. I executed a yoga move that would have gotten me a 10 by Olympic judges if yoga was an Olympic sport. Balancing on one foot I bent down to grab the newspaper, my other foot lifted toward the sky. I opened the newspaper and laid the sections down using them as toadstools. Remember that game we all played as kids where you had to walk on top of the furniture because the floor was lava? Substitute awful freaking stickers for lava. Stickers are way worse.

I picked up the paper as I moved off each piece and bundled them back up as I went.

I figured I was either a complete moron or a total genius.

The neighbor who clapped probably would have sided for genius.

I kept yelling at my kids to leave me the hell alone while I’m in the bathroom. It was ridiculous, all that banging and commotion on the other side of the door.

Then I realized it was Jojo Kitty. Therefore, I love this video.

I had Monday off from work. No one else in my family did, so I had the day to myself. I immediately went to my favorite café for breakfast and writing.

I get so much work done there or at Starbucks. Even though the people watching is fabulous, I don’t get nearly as distracted as I do at home.

He looked just like this one.

Speaking of people watching, I need to tell you about one guy I saw.

A man came in for a late breakfast with his seeing-eye dog. It wasn’t wearing the blue vest that designated it as such, but it was wearing the big-ass leather halter and leash. Also, the guy was clearly blind. He wasn’t wearing anything so obvious as black sunglasses, nevertheless it was obvious by looking at him that he couldn’t see.

I bring all this up because of the seeing-eye dog. I didn’t catch his name, but he was a beautiful shepherd.

He was also a bit of a maniac. He had no intention of taking this blind guy where the guy wanted to go. He had another agenda all together. If I hadn’t known for certain the man was blind, I would have sworn he was faking so he could bring his dog into the restaurant with him. That’s how bad this was. Maybe it was this dog’s second career. His first one being something totally unrelated like flower delivery or something. He walked this guy into chairs and kept steering him toward the door back into the restaurant when the guy was trying to leave. The oddest thing had to be that the dog flat-out refused to take the man to the bathroom. Super sensitive nose, maybe? I don’t know. All of this the dog did with a very concerned look on his face.

It was everything I could do to control myself from cackling out loud. It’s just further proof that I’m not a good person. I didn’t want to intervene. Clearly he and his dog need to  come to peace with each other, but I was relieved to finally see there was another person with him who managed to get them both out of the restaurant and I assume home.

Ava and I have considered faking a seeing-eye dog before. I’m going to make certain we fake it better than these two who clearly weren’t faking.

Here’s what happens when your sixteen year old get’s his driver’s license:

1. He does not drive the car to school in the morning, he still makes you do it by lying about having a test to study for while you drive. (Note – He

I make the boy wear a suit when he drives me around

doesn’t study and he admits he lied because he doesn’t like to drive.)

2. He starts to drive to school because he’s tired of hearing you whine about it. You play with the radio purposely picking out songs he doesn’t like because he lied about studying for a test.

3. He drives to school everyday but demands to be in charge of the radio because he’s driving and when you used to drive you were in charge of the radio because “I’m the driver.” You point out you own the car but he can’t hear you because he has Iggy Azalea on too loud.

4. The boy drives to school and his sister decides she’s riding shot gun from now on. Both insist they are in charge of the radio since they’re in front. You sit in the back seat where you paint your nails, read the paper, and text your sister.

Congratulations, your diabolic plan of obtaining a free chauffeur has come to fruition. It may have taken sixteen years and you may have to have airbags installed in the back seat but, hey, it was worth the wait!

Mom moves a lot. Like a gypsy. It would probably be better for everyone if she just got herself a cute little caravan and moved that with all her stuff in it every time she gets the urge.

At least she’s stopped asking us to move her. Now that all her kids are in their 40’s we feel that we never have to move another human being ever

Look! This is adorable.

again. Not even our mother.

But this time there was a bribe involved. She offered us some bedroom furniture if we’d come and get it. Here was the sneaky part. We’d also have to pick up other furniture way across town and drive it to the new house a million miles in another direction.

Sigh.  We agreed. We met mom at 10am. We carried the worlds heaviest furniture to the moving truck and went to the new house. Where we picked up carpet and drove it all the way back into town. Back to Mom’s old house to pick up the heaviest furniture (for real this time) and brought it home. It was 4pm and we were so tired. My arms were jelly and my hands were killing me–they frequently hurt from all the typing, so this totally sucked.

Here’s where I prove to you that I’m insane.

We walk into the bedroom to figure out where to put the new furniture and the following words came out of my mouth.

I think I’ll paint the room since we’re moving everything.

Clearly, I was possessed by some sort of evil house painter. I knew that My Honey had band practice and I’d be at this on my own. Actually, sadly, I was not on my own. Jojo Kitty helped. The cat really participated more in a supervisory capacity. Sassy also helped–and did pretty well–until she got mad and threw her paintbrush into the bucket.

It took like 37 coats to cover the wall I painted brown once upon a time. By the time My Honey got home at 10:30ish, I’d done everything except the ceiling and that’s because the extension pole broke.

The end of the weekend brought lovely warm-white walls, new furniture, and an exhausted Amylynn who never even turned her computer on until late Sunday night.

So much for plowing through another chapter this weekend.

There was fall here this week. It stopped by for two days and then left. We’re back to 80 degrees. Seriously, you’re all just jealous that we’re still wearing sandals. The reason that’s good is that it makes for more opportunities for Amylynn to wear two different shoes. Yep. That happened again. Amylynn would like you all to believe that she does that for fun, to keep Ava and TWGR amused. Totally not true. Amylynn clearly cannot get dressed by herself. Sometimes it’s complicated. Mornings are bad. The real problem is that Amylynn only got 4 hours of sleep and, honestly, you all should be happy she remembered pants. Here’s more funny stuff.

1. Don Draper. We’re very slow coming to the Mad Men party, but we’re happy the invitations finally arrived. We LOVE the clothes and we think we really should start drinking at work. Speaking of the clothes. We need those clothes. Really need. Also, we couldn’t be happier that someone finally did something with Peggy’s hair, because it was awful. So awful, we wanted to snatch it off her head. We’d also like a bit of that tall drink of water Don Draper. We’ve only just finished season 2, and we’ve heard that Don goes off the rails, but we don’t care. He’s hot. In the beginning, Ava didn’t think he was anything special. She has since decided that she didn’t know what she was talking about. It’s not really up for debate. He is gorgeous. (Ava here – he’s no Jared Leto but he’s alright.)

2. Hair. Amylynn is even more soulless than usual. In a crazy moment–a moment that actually took 2 months to decide on–she cut off her hair and made it an even darker red. We’re pretty happy about it. TWGR says it looks like Black Widow’s hair. Any comparison to Scarlet Johanson can’t be bad. Also, if that can work as an “in” to get a job as an assassin, that would be super.

3. Tragic expectations. We had to go shopping at lunch today. It was a sacrifice, but we did it. That’s how we are. Ava went off to find jeans. TWGR and Amylynn didn’t want to watch her cry in the dressing room so we wandered off to the housewares department. We may or may not have been perfectly innocent when two giant bottles of gourmet olive oil crashed to the ground. We toddled off to find someone to clean it up then we returned to the scene of the crime to continue shopping. This is what we heard from the back room. “I’m twenty-five years old, in a dead-end-job, my life’s going nowhere, I’m going bald, and now I have to clean up olive oil.” When the guy came out we gave him a big hug and told him that sadly life wasn’t going to get any better. Also, to think of Jason Statham for inspiration on that bald thing.

4. Oh, those Russians. They took down a statue of an iPhone in the college campus in St. Petersburg because the CEO of Apple has announced that he is gay. WHAT? Obviously, that is ridiculous. Does that mean they’re not selling Apple anymore? Amylynn needs a new iPhone ever since she dropped hers in the CLEAN toilet. Actually that was two years ago and the thing still works great. Nevertheless, we’d be happy to take one of those wretched gay Russian iPhones off their hands. In fact, we’ll take any electronics anyone wants to send us–even if it has a touch of Ebola, we’ll just Lysol that right away.

5. Free boxes. We’re beginning the onerous job of packing up the office. We’ve got excellent gossip that we’re out of here in the next two weeks. We have a lot of stuff here. A lot. There are approximately 182 nail polishes, three curling irons, a hair dryer, a television and blue ray player, scads of movies and televisions shows, an elliptical exercise machine (unused), 67 jigsaw puzzles, a waffle iron, blender, electric skillet, 238 books and Zeus only knows what else. Thank God for office supply deliveries. We need all the boxes we can get.

I want to tell you a true story. You might get the impression from our blogs that we’re silly women. Or that we’re obnoxious. Or that we’re ridiculous.

This is possibly all true.

Nevertheless, I find myself more inclined to characterize us as dramatic.

The layoffs we’ve been expecting for three years are imminent. Like within the next two weeks. We’ve been wracking our brains to come up with jobs that don’t involve the industry we’ve been in for the last combined 30+ years. The thought of doing that makes us want to cry. Sadly, that’s what we’re most qualified for and our resumes are top-heavy in that industry.

Every time someone brings this to our attention with an employment possibility (none which have come to fruition yet) we don’t take the news well.

Today, someone contacted Ava about a possibility. She came out to tell me and The World’s Greatest Receptionist about it, and we didn’t take the news well.

In fact, we both threw ourselves on the floor in a fit, unwilling to take this news like adults. As we lay there, pouting, something unexpected happened. Something that had never happened  before when I’d flung myself on the floor in a work-induced fit. (I’ve done this many times in the past. I find it really makes my point with flair.)

So this thing was weird. A one in a million sort of thing.

As I was shouting, “NOOOOOOO!” in an exuberant manner, I accidentally spit in my own eye.

Ick, right? (Ava here – Ick is right and this is absolutely true. I almost choked myself to death laughing at her.)

This is not the sort of thing that happens to normal people. Presumably, normal people don’t fling themselves on the floor while at work. I don’t recommend it.

Today is National Stress Awareness Day. The Sisters don’t understand this. We think, if you’re stressed, you’re aware. Your hair falls out or you pick your cuticles until they bleed or you talk to yourself about running away to Fiji. So, there you are in Fiji with a clump of hair in your bloody fingers. That’s stress.

Ava is the unofficial president of the Tom Cruise fan club. She didn’t realize that was the case until she recounted that three of her favorite movies star Tom – A Few Good Men, Jerry McGuire, and Rain Man. Amylynn just shakes her head at her and continues to indulge her in this and many more peccadilloes.

But this is genius. Everyone will agree.

We love John Oliver and, apparently, we love A Few Good Men. Most importantly we love dogs.

Here you go.

We love science. Amylynn is fascinated by Astrophysics – not that she understands any of it, but she’s awed by it just the same. We’ve long had crushes on Neil deGrasse Tyson and we’d take Bill Nye to lunch and share a dessert with him if he’d only answer our emails. Linda can barely contain herself with neuroscience factoids, and if Sam Harris wants to join us, we’d buy him his own dessert.

Why won’t you come play with me?

So imagine how fascinated we were when we read that researchers are building robots they can use to sneak up on penguins. Apparently, penguins are very shy. We understand that. Researchers can be intimidating. As can the FBI. Oh, wait, that’s a different blog.

The first robot they built didn’t work out. It scared the birds, and obviously that’s not what the researchers were going for. After 5 different scary attempts the perfect one was found. It’s covered in gray fur, has black arms, and black and white-painted face and a black beak. This one is so adorable it doesn’t make the penguins scamper away. In fact, it’s so realistic, at least to them, that the momma and daddy birds sing to it. The researchers are thinking they’re actually trying to arrange marriages between the robots and their chicks.

How sad that they never get an answer. I hope the penguins don’t become litigious and sue the researchers for breach of contract or something.