I was glad to learn my team does a Secret Santa Snowflake with everyone participating, so I'm hoping that's the end of it.

My mom texted and said "I can see my list when I go to My Cart." I'm pretty sure she just put all her wishlist items into her shopping cart. This is going to take a phone call to sort out. Sheesh.

Yup, everything was in her shopping cart. But I talked her through moving it all to her actual wishlist. I told her she was getting nothing but coal for Christmas, and she said that she deserved it after that stunt.

The idea here, I guess, is that you can learn how to be sensitive or something -- that it's a skill, not a talent. Which, maybe, but my mother is not the person to develop that skill.

My opinion is that it's not something you can learn. I grew up in a couple of haunted houses; things moving around the house and TVs and stereos randomly coming on with no one in the room -type of haunted, in addition to figures I saw. My dad believed me and experienced the household electronics part, but never saw anything. He wanted to, and even worked with me so he could see things, but it never worked.

So, I'm still side-eyeing the conference organizers.

Sheesh, Steph, that sounds like something my sister would do.

msbelle, if you don't say that on Le Twitter, I'm gonna steal it from you! Too good.

Matt, I love hearing about people's ghostly encounters! Do you feel like sharing?

My opinion is that it's not something you can learn.

I don't think you can learn it either. It's sort-of like a musical talent. I took piano lessons for years and it never stuck, but my mom could play anything she'd heard once without a score. She taught herself to do that, but she had the talent to start with. You know? I think if you've got that "talent", you can improve it, but if you don't, you don't, and there's varying degrees of don't. Some people hear music as just noise, and some people could walk through the Amityville M-Fing Horror and never notice a thing.

I've seen a bunch of self-styled "psychics" going cuckoo over the "dark energy" of something that looks a little creepy, like a fake skull decorated with quasi-Satanic stuff, and I don't want to pull attention but there's literally nothing there. It's an inert object. They let their own feelings take charge.

Oh, they'd love my living room, with skulls all over the place.

I know, right, Connie? People have totally gotten the wrong idea about me, seeing all the skulls and weird bones and magick stuff in my place. I put most of it away when I started having housecleaners over, I didn't want to upset them, and I never brought them back out when I stopped the service. I should dig them up. So to speak. It's been literally years.

I love it when psychics and other magical practitioners tell me "how dark" my energy is, and that I should do more to bring myself into the light. They usually do this in front of my big brother, who bursts out laughing at them.

Yes, black clothes and jewelry made from bones equals dark magical energy. Of course.

(Mind you, my big brother is the one who occasionally reminds me that "we don't hex", and I laugh at him. I don't do it often, but I will hex people who really deserve it. Does it work? I don't know. But it makes me feel better.)

I've got people coming in quarterly to clean the furnace filters. I never thought about what my decor might look like to them.

Connie, trust me, they have seen scarier!

eta: I can no longer say trust me or believe me without a shudder thinking of the liar in chief.