read. laugh. write. repeat.

We have a passel of lost pens in our home. Some of them hail from faraway places that we’ve never been to, or tout people we’ve never voted for let alone met, or promote drugs that we’ve never been prescribed.

This should explain why we were using a pen emblazoned with VIAGRA on it during the 57th Street Children’s Book Fair in Chicago last weekend, where hundreds of our little customers and their parents picked it up to sign our email list. Or glanced at it in horror. Please accept our apology.

Certainly, you can sympathize. Go through your home now and I know you’ll find something from a lobster shack in Maine that you’ve never been to.

I didn’t realize the faux pas until a mom handed me the pen and said it wasn’t working. (Just put your own joke here.)

So I quickly took it from her hand, hid my horror at the site of the VIAGRA label, and handed her another pen.

After she left, I sighed and looked at the replacement pen, which was labeled GUINNESS.

No, not as in Book of World Records.

Most of us have driven past an injured animal on a roadway and wished there was something we could do to help. But how many of us would actually stop?

Here’s a woman’s amazing story, and how her act of kindness for a suffering cat brought her an unexpected reward.

Sally Geer was driving to work on  country road in southern Michigan when she saw a cat crouched beside the road. As she drove by, she realized that something was terribly wrong with the cat’s face. She turned her car around to get a closer look. The injury was horrific: The cat’s eyes had bulged out of her head, presumably from being hit by a car.