A few quick announcements:

- Tomorrow will be very exciting, because the Jocasi discount month begins! And, November. But we are thinking of it as Jocasi discount month.

- The Bunnyshop tote bags are on the way! We are going to fill them with loads of amazing samples and send them out all holiday season. We are very excited about this.

- Anyone who would like to know our book tour necessities, the fabulous This Next crew is being all lovely and publishing them. Plus an interview with us. If that is not too super boring \ pimp-y.

- And! Do you, or someone you know, live in Denver? We would love, just love to see you at the Tattered Cover’s Colfax Avenue store— 2526 East Colfax Avenue at Elizabeth Street —tomorrow night, Thursday, at 7:30 p.m. If you come, and you are one of the first to do so, we will give you a Bunnyshop tote bag when they arrive in about three weeks. Also, and very crucially! If you know someone in Denver, and convince them to go, we will give YOU a Bunnyshop tote bag packed (in the sense that it will include at least one) with sample[s] from our favorite makeup and beauty-making companies. All they need to do is let us know who sent them. We would like to say that the wonderful Beth D. of Austin will be the first to retroactively benefit from this. If a link makes this easier to send to anyone you know in Denver, this is one.

- We are looking for more BS Hearts from people, as the BS \ LB are almost out of them. Any ideas? Email us here.

- Remember, Astrology Zone forecasts should go live today!

- And everyone have super super super fun tonight. We will be home, stewing, and thinking about how much we enjoy the Fourth of July.

So we have long maintained that Le Sportsac—it is so weird, we actually cannot hear anything in our head but “Le Sport Suck” … ooh, copy writing job, here we come! Anyway, our friend \ soulmate K. was accompanying us on a sizable portion of our book tour, and, in the process, counting for a sizable portion of the audience and contributing a sizable portion of our emotional stability. We digress. In any case, she was with us for like five days, and managed to get everything in one nof her like nine LSSs she purchased last year at a sample sale. She had asked us to go to this sample sale, and we were all, “Pass,” and quite snotty about it, but now, as with so many things, we are totally envious.

We don’t know—sometimes they go a little Vera Bradley for us, but in general, we’re totally into them. As K. says: “And it’s good for like a few nights, and only $80! And not, like $200!” It’s weird: We don’t totally swoon over any of them, really, but if someone gave us one, we would be soooo happy. And by the way, their website is totally fun, as you can just choose a blank bag and then see how it looks with all the different patterns. We’re easily amused.

Above: Le Sportsac overnighter in Beebop, $88

Isn’t this one sort of weirdly Kara Walker, but without all the terrifying slavery imagery? She pretty much owns the whole silhouette thing, we’re thinking. Silhouette Symphony overnighter, $88

We do not have a stressful job. We are not brain surgeons, or rocket scientists, or teachers. We’re not even working in an environment where deadlines exist. Yet, remarkably, we get stressed out while at work.

Perhaps this is because our cubby mate, the Sleeper, astounds us and makes us tense. Yesterday, he honestly asked if we were off for Halloween. The day before, he asked us how, if we have items shipped here, does the mailroom know it’s for us?  Yesterday, he also asked us how it was outside when we went to lunch – which was odd because we hadn’t left our desk for more than 10 minutes, save for a meeting.
He then packed up his things, as is customary at 4:30; having worked a very full 6 hour day. Without calling us to let us know he was two hours late. But normally he comes in so late in the day, that 2 hours normal-time is like 15 minutes Sleeper-time.

This stresses us out a lot. We could go on for days about how he makes our eye twitch, but we’ve found that paging through sale sections on websites is actually quite distracting and calming.

Today, as he blindly sent us an email that literally had 6 numbers in it – with no explanation what it was he needed, or what the numbers even were – we opened ShopBop and looked at sale. We couldn’t deal with random numbers for information that isn’t ours, we don’t have access to, and we don’t worry about
Much to our surprise, among the bikinis, white pants, and espadrilles were these really cute Earnest Sewn jeans! Excellent! We love jeans on sale!

They come in nice washes! And most sizes! And bootcut! We love you, and thank you, pretty jeans for chilling us out.

Earnest Sewn Keatons, $59.40

-LB

We love Halloween! We do! We love kids in costumes, dogs in costumes, the general spookiness, the Great Pumpkin and Charlie Brown, and everything else!

And hey, what other day can you wear AA’s Vegas Leggings and get away with it?

Vegas Leggings, $42

-LB

So we are going to stop talking about our summer adventure just about now, and even our little Donate Cow over there will be going into the metaphorical, electronic dustbin, but! We could not recommend anything more highly, and this year’s sign-ups are happening tomorrow—that’s Halloween—at 9 a.m. ET. At least we think it is. It’s 14:00 GMT. Everything’s all weird with Daylight Savings Time. Anyway: If anyone is thinking about doing it … we will say that we seriously wavered, and we were thisclose to not doing it, not least because we thought we had a job we were very excited about. Needless to say, they blew us off, we remained underemployed, and we have nice pictures of Mongolia instead of a retirement package. We still prefer the former. (We are not entirely confident what our position on this will be in about 40 years.)

Anyone thinking about doing it—and we have been short on details: It’s a four-week drive in a tiny little car from London to Mongolia, however you choose to go, in very short—and it was fucking awesome as anything. And we will also say that if we were in a position to be looking for a smart, hot, funny, single person to talk to, and we were a heterosexual woman (or, now that we think about it, a gay man), this is the world’s top concentration of them. We’re convinced.

All the details are here.

We have just spoken to your regularly scheduled writer, and she is near/in/around New Mexico with 2 more hours of driving. We are not entirely sure what her endpoint actually is – but we know she’ll get there, come hell or high water (or concrete parking block, as she’s already had to overcome one of those).

We are quite used to barely being able to keep up with her – our iGoogle homepage is set with 3 different world clocks, all for wherever she may be. We leave our time zone (EST) maybe once a year. But that got us wondering – where do our readers read us from?

We’d be really grateful if anyone who felt so inclined left a comment and told us where they were reading from. We’re totally going to geek out, buy the Rand McNally map shown above, and stick t-pins here our readers are.

Laminated wall map, $9.95

-LB

So it seems as though we’re buying a lot of presents lately. We are a member of an auxiliary group, and every year we have a secret pal event. It’s, essentially, a reason for us to anonymously send our secret pal tiny little presents. So, what do you get someone you may or may not know very well, may or may not want to spend a lot of money on, and quite possibly have NO idea what they would like?

WE FOUND IT. We don’t think anyone could dislike these tiny woodland creatures we found on etsy. We generally find etsy a little overwhelming – remember the key fob from last week? But when we came across these tiny guys, we loved their story (inspired by a book from the artist’s grandmom), the price is right (all under $10), completely unique (the one we bought is no longer listed) and they’re stupidly cute.

We’re loving the tiny chipmunk, above. He’s $7 + shipping.

If anyone wanted to get us a little something, we’ll take him! Or the snowy owl!

-LB

So there are some occasions when a fruit basket will not do. We have standard gifts for some people in our lives; our former boss gets art books, our sister gets whatever she likes, our loved one usually gets some kind of bicycle parts, our mom gets a sweater, our dad a Philadelphia Eagles book. But what do you do for the other people you’re close to?

Well, we like to create. When we left our last job, we made a retirement themed mix CD (including "Career Opportunities" by The Clash, and "Gimme the Loot" by Notorious BIG), hand created, assembled, decorated and written thank you notes, and cookies. We will ignore that we lifted the paper from our then-boss (she got a long, long thank you on said paper – it wasn’t really a secret). We have a very important friend’s birthday coming up, and we were totally set to make him a small collection of our photography work – as he seems to like it.

Sadly, we had a large amount of darkroom difficulty and time constraints, we didn’t know what to do. He claimed to not want anything photographic/equipment, and his girlfriend- who already seems to dislike us – would probably not be too happy if we gave him a really nice cashmere sweater.

What to do? A mix CD would not be enough. Cookies – pshaw. Thankfully, by way of flickr, we found a site called blurb.

Three (or four) hours later, including two stiff knees, one glob of dog slobber, and two heart stopping minute when the program crashed, we have a completely awesome, 24 page hardbound photo book. We combined photos from our flickr account and his, and we’re so, so stoked to order this book. We think it may be the coolest gift we’ve ever given!

We were going to make a joke about how now we’ve published a book too, but it’s a LOT less cool when you do it yourself with templates on a website. But either way, we’re excited. And hey- we forgot to mention, it’s not that expensive. Our 24 page, hardbound book comes to around $25. If we like it when we get it, we’ll let everyone know – if anyone is interested, we can try to work out a discount with them.

-LB

We do not like to run. Ever since we were small, and made fun off HORRIBLY by a girl we have continued to actively dislike since 4th grade. It makes our lungs hurt – the running, not the disliking; our knees cry, and our motivation just kind of craps out after, like, a week.

Enter the NYC Road Runners Complete Book of Running and Fitness. Despite having a rather lengthy title, it’s actually a good book. Someone in our family actively enjoys running – she’s run marathons in places we’ve never even been to. She bought us this book – rather, she accompanied us while we bought this book, highlighted important sections, and told us to get a move on.

So today, we did. It was our first day back on the treadmill, and despite almost throwing up (from choking on toothpaste), our commute being double what it should’ve been, forgetting our headphones, almost falling off the treadmill (trying to change the channel on the tv) and then accidentally asking the man in our work cafe if he thought we were hot, it was a good morning!

We actually feel GOOD. We are not sluggish or starving or terribly pained. We’re going to keep it up, and in 52 weeks, we’re going to run a marathon in Disney World or something.

New York City Road Runners Complete Book of Running and Fitness, $17.95

-LB

We went away this weekend, and we in the last three days, we have:

*spent 11 hours in the car.

*paid $25 for a haunted forest event – despite the fact that we absolutely DETEST being startled and/or scared, our vision at night is still not where it should be, and we hate the cold. We actually hit the first ‘ghoul’ who came at us; not hard, and we apologized profusely afterwards. We also got into a disagreement with another ghoul because people were tripping over a wire on the ground (in the dark. In the woods.). So when he said to us, in his spooky voice, ‘KEEP GOING’, we calmly said, ‘Sir, there is an exposed wire. We don’t want anyone else to trip (our friends had just FALLEN over it). He said, ‘WELL GIVE IT TO ME THEEEEEEN’, to which we replied, ‘We would, but we are STUCK. IN. THE. WIRE.’

*gotten hit in the eye at said event. Which is awesome when we feel like we’ve just had eye surgery.

*watched our loved one ride his bike in a bike race, while we wore three sweaters, a scarf, rubber boots, a jacket, and were still cold.

*and, lastly, did something we hate doing – slept on the couch. We feel that we are at an age when sleeping in a hotel is preferable to sleeping on a friends’ couch. That is why we have a job. But, we have lovely, lovely friends who have a comfortable sofa bed. So we slept on it. For two days. We have to send them something, so our friends will be getting a fruit basket.

Have you ever tried to buy a fruit basket? Who even does that anymore? If you’ll recall the Slurper at our office – he receives fruit baskets OFTEN. We actually heard him say that people who don’t know him think he’s gay (not a shock), and when his wife sent him a fruit basket for their anniversary, he wondered aloud if she was ‘trying to tell him something’.

His boss, the horrible loud talker, received a fruit basket last week. She made a point to invite EVERYONE in our area to have some, it was delicious, it was so nice – except she did not invite my boss and me. So eff her, we’re getting our own goddamn fruit basket. And we’re not sharing with her, or the Slurper. Jerks.

But we HAVE had pieces of the fruit from these fruit-arrangement baskets before – and they’re delicious. So, since we want to buy a fruit basket, we know these are good, and unlike other online stores – it’s not just pears.

If we sleep on your couch, you’ll have one of these in your future.

Perfect Pear Edible Arrangement – $65 and up

-LB