I made this Halloween design several weeks ago, intending to work on some other designs before October rolled around, but I've been so incredibly busy that I just never got around to it. I like this one, but I'm not sure if it's what I want for the whole month. I'll have to see whether I get some time to work on a new design at some point this month.

When I got home from work Friday night, there was a note written on the back of an envelope next to the phone. It said, "Your mom called; dinner for your dad's birthday on Sunday, and there's a show about crop circles on at 7:00 tonight."

Bob wanted to be sure that I got the message

I had to write that exactly the same way I said it yesterday at my parents' house, because my dad said, "Oh, you mean Bob wrote the message," which was only funny because we'd just been talking about ghost stories and extrasensory perception and various spooky things. I guess he was saying that the way I told the story, it sounded like the message just spontaneously appeared . . .

So anyway, as the message instructed, I went out to my parents' house yesterday to celebrate my dad's birthday. I took him one of the willa.com polo shirts that I'd saved for him, and he immediately went and changed his shirt and put the new one on.

I helped my mother fix lunch, and we (my mom and dad, my brother and sister-in-law and their two children--my sister was sick and one of her daughters had just had oral surgery, so they didn't come) ate and sat around and talked for awhile, then my mother said, "So, do you want to see the crop circle program? We taped it."

She's absolutely fascinated by crop circles. I gave her and Dad a book about them a couple of Christmases ago, and the author of the book was on the program. It was pretty interesting, actually, and had lots of nice photographs of circles that were pretty obviously not made by some guy walking around in a circle pulling a two-by-four on a rope.

Even though it was interesting, I was having a hard time staying awake. It was right after lunch, in the first place, and I'd had that really long night on Friday night, then Saturday I stayed up until 1:00 finishing a freelance project because I knew I wouldn't have time to do it on Sunday, so I was fading. My nephew was sitting on the floor in front of me and he leaned over and put his head on my knee and fell asleep, and I would have liked to do the same.

But I didn't; I made it through 'til the end. When it was finished, my brother and his family left, and my mom and dad and I went outside to load some wood into my trunk--a huge old redbud tree in their yard had had a limb break off, and dad had cut the wood into lengths for a fireplace--and when we opened my trunk, dad saw something in my trunk and asked me what it was.

It was the armrest/center console that I had bought at the dealership for my new car over a year ago. I had seen that the cars in the brochure had center consoles, but mine didn't, and the salesman said it was an option that I could order. I asked if it had to be installed, and he said no, it just clamped on or something, so I ordered it. It was expensive--$100--but I kind of missed not having one.

It came, and of course it didn't "clamp on," but had to be installed, requiring drilling. I suppose I could have told him I didn't want it at that point, but I thought I'd take a look at it and see if I thought I could install it. Of course, I never did, and it's been riding around in my trunk ever since.

He asked me if I would like him to install it, and I said of course, that would be great, but I didn't want to make him feel like he had to, and after all, it was his birthday . . .

He installed it, of course. Mom and I loaded the wood into the trunk, then sat out on the porch swing and talked and watched him work, then we went in for dinner, and sat around the table and told ghost stories.

My mother's mother, the grandmother that I feel I had the greatest spiritual connection to (and still do), was psychic. Not to the extent that she could predict what could happen, or that she went around making dire predictions, but there were several instances in her life when she foresaw things that were going to happen, or dreamt about things that had happened.

One in particular I remember happened when she was a little girl. She came to her mother and told her she had had a dream in which her aunt had come to her covered in flames, and her mother told her that her aunt had fallen while carrying an oil lamp the night before, and had died.

My father had a strange dream one night where my brother called him on a cell phone and told him to come to 3rd & Holmes "right away." My dad remembered it because of the sense of urgency that he felt in the dream--and when he woke up the next morning he read in the newspaper that there had been a murder the night before--at 3rd & Holmes.

One of my sisters is particularly psychic as well--she often knows things that are happening that she had no way of knowing in the normal sense.

I started to write, "My whole family is a little bit psychic," and as I thought that, I thought, "Bob would say my whole family is a little bit strange," but I don't mind that. I kind of like it. Strange and interesting.