It all started when my Beeg Seester sold her very large-big-huge house to a cash buyer who, for some strange reason, put a reserve on her whiteboard calendar.
Seester sold much of her furniture, packed most of what was left into the Pod storage, and wrote the moving date on the white board.
But, "moving day" next Friday became "new moving day" two weeks later, and then a simple "?" two weeks after that.
The buyer's money was tangled up, and Seester and Bro were drawn into weeks and weeks of waiting.
They began writing, "no", "nope", "nada", "ain't gonna happen", and other such telling comments on the calendar days which were passing by.
And when it became clear that there was no firm date at all, they decided to put their house back on the market.
Showing the house with a big whiteboard full of nopes and nadas would never do, but Seester and Bro had put their lives on hold, and they knew a big blank calendar would not do either.
So Seester decided to invent a life.
She paused.
She reflected.
"What do people who have exciting lives have on their calendars?", she thought.
She filled in the whiteboard.
She took flying lessons, sang solos at church, attended and hosted dinner parties, played tennis, had an art show, ran a marathon, and had friends in from France.
She told us what a great exercise it had been to invent a whole life for them.
"That sounds like a lot of fun", I said.
"You could write down all the things you really want to do and get a feeling for how your life could be", I said.
"You could even draw the Inchies", she said.
"You could call them Finchies or Phinchies", the Prince said, "for fake and phony Inchies".
"I should make up a whole week of Finchies and stories", I said.
"I could make up stories about things I actually plan to try some day, and draw the Finchies to go with them", I said.
So I did.
I made up a whole, wild week of fun for myself.
Then I packed up the car and started off on my actual wild week - camping and hiking in the Colorado Rocky Mountain National Park.
But I should have taken the keyboard, or Gwen, with me.
She posted every one of those Finchies as 'Gwinchies', and she published every one of those tall tales as though they were true stories.
Oh! I could tell just how much fun she'd had when I got home and saw that big smirk on her face.
But there are rules.
And I made her apologize to all those Dear Readers who'd believed every word she'd said.
Those Dear Sweet Readers whose trust she had betrayed.
She won't be allowed to use the computer for a week.
I'm sorry.
But she's been bad.