Note: All the six-foot tables for the Florence Festival of Books are sold out. There are only 11 eight-foot tables left before we are totally sold out. This is not unusual! It’s a popular event with authors.

When you listen to the news, it’s not hard to go into the doldrums, get angry, or start crying all during the same broadcast. That’s when I need a good laugh.

And one of my best sources is the “Catalog Favorites: casual, comfortable & fun” catalog. It’s full of women’s clothes and accessories interspersed with pages of T-shirts with funny sayings. I stop at those pages and read each one. They run the gamut from wise to stupid, and there are enough truly funny ones to make the effort worthwhile. And some are laugh-out-loud funny. Those are the ones, I check and go back to when I need a good laugh. There’s even one that says, “I hate t-shirts with stupid sayings.”

These days, anything that makes me laugh out loud, goes right to the top of my list of good stuff. So, whenever one of these catalogs comes in the mail, it doesn’t go straight to recycling. I put it where it’s handy for when I need it.

About two and a half years ago, I bought three of their T-shirts and posted about it. One of them, I wear when I’m around my sister, “Back off! I have a SISTER and I’m not afraid to use her.”  It was totally appropriate when she was my caregiver for two weeks after knee replacement surgery. We both got a big kick out of it.

Then for the next couple of months when I was going to Physical Therapy, I’d wear the one that says, “I do all my own stunts, but never intentionally!” The therapists loved it!

And my favorite of the three, “Hey Autocorrect? Quit ducking with my swear words! You can go to he’ll mother forklift!” My editor friends and I think it’s hilarious! But in some places, I receive strange looks.

My current favorite covers my frustration at how every single, solitary thing simply has to have its own blankety-blank password. You’ll love it, “Just once, I want a username and password prompt to say, close enough!” We can all relate.

Here are some of my other favorites:

“So, apparently, I have an attitude!”

“I will put you in the trunk and help people look for you. . . . Don’t test me!”

“Sometimes I wonder what happened to the people who asked me for directions.”

“My doctor asked if anyone in my family suffered from mental illness. I said, ‘No, we all seem to enjoy it.’”

“I just did a week’s worth of cardio after walking into a spider web.”

“It takes real skills to choke on air, fall up the stairs, and trip over nothing. I have those skills.”

 “It’s weird being the same age as old people.”

“I thought it would take longer to grow old.”

“Went to an antique show and people were bidding on me.”

“I told my wife I wanted to be cremated. She made me an appointment for Tuesday.”

“At my funeral, take the bouquet off my coffin and throw it into the crowd to see who is next.”

I hope you enjoy these as much as I do. Cheers!