Last night I got to bed around 3am. This morning, a Saturday, my doorbell rings at 8am. Ugh. I jump up and open the window to see a lady standing there, so I quickly get dressed and run downstairs to see who it is. She’s maybe 50 years old and asks me if some lady lives here. I tell her no, I’ve never heard of that person. Then she asks if I can call a cab for her. Doing an amazing job at being nice since she just woke me up at 8am on a Saturday, I tell her, “Sure, let me go grab my phone.” Before I can shut the door, she asks, “Is that your blanket?” looking at a folded green blanket sitting on one of my outdoor chairs. I’ve never seen the blanket before, but I’m not surprised because weird stuff is always showing up outside my house.

I tell her no and run back upstairs for my cell phone. I make the call for her, we say our goodbyes and she walks to the business next door. At this point going back to sleep is impossible. Once I’m up, I rarely go back to sleep, so I’ve been quietly hating that lady today as I drink Pepsi to stay awake.

The only reason I’m posting this boring story is because a few hours later, as me and the kids left the house to go to lunch, the blanket is gone. I guess the lady came back and took it. I was too asleep this morning to even wonder why she would ask me if a blanket sitting in my chair was mine. Why would she ask me that? It makes no sense. She knew something about this blanket that I didn’t! I told the kids about it as we walked to lunch and we concluded that the old lady was actually a ghost.

A couple days earlier, in the afternoon, the doorbell rang and I went downstairs to answer it. To get to the door, I have to walk down two flights of stairs and across the house, but I don’t think it really takes me that long to get there. I wasn’t fast enough for these old church people, though, because they were nearly out of the driveway by the time I opened the door. I stood there and watched them as they climbed into their car. When the man looked up and saw me, he waved so I slammed the door and went back upstairs.

Five minutes later, they come back and ring the bell again. Five minutes! What were they doing for five minutes? I sure don’t know. I opened the attic window, leaned out and yelled, “Hey, stop ringing my doorbell and running away!” Both of them looked around in confusion, but didn’t look up and see me. I yelled at them “Satan rules!” and the old lady gave an irritated “Okay” and began walking away. I felt bad so I yelled “I love you!” before shutting the window.

Last year, kids items started showing up on the table by my chairs. One day it was a purple stuffed dragon. About a week later a pair of shoes and toy gun was out there. I left the stuff out there for more than a week, hoping whoever mistakingly brought them by would come back and take them. I ended up giving the dragon to Emily and the shoes to Goodwill. I’m pretty sure a homeless man stole the gun. A neighbor of mine yelled at a homeless man one day because he was at their door, stealing cigarette butts from the ashtray. That’s the day that the gun was missing. This was one of those old toy guns made out of metal and could possibly be mistaken for a real gun since there was no giant orange tip on it. So if a 7-Eleven gets robbed by a homeless person, it might be my fault.

The last weird thing at my door was a sandwich in a ziplock bag, along with an unsigned note telling me that if I didn’t post a picture of myself eating it on Facebook, they would kill my children. This was last week and I’m pretty sure it was a drunken Lisa (friend of mine) and her sister leaving it. I threw it away without eating it and so far my kids are still alive.