*sigh*

I hope you can go back to Arizona to see them all soon!!! With my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew 2,500+ miles away (with a new nephew on the way), I miss them everyday. I can't imagine if nearly everyone were so far away.

RYC: Wow, which do I pick? LoL I've had paranormal experiences since I was a little girl, so I'm used to it. But my favorite ones have to do with my pets that've passed. My cat Buzzy was my first real loss so I took it very very badly. That night I felt this unmistakable energy field on my right shoulder, where he used to sleep from time to time. I even moved slightly and I no longer felt it, but a second later, it came back. So I know it was him moving over to sleep on me. About a week later, I had a can of Pounce (cat treats which he LOVED), and I was calling for my cat Muffin. I called up my stairs (I had an attic room) and shook the can, and I saw this black shadow dart down my stairs and disappear at the bottom of the steps. It scared the hell out of me at first, but once I realized it was Buzzy, it made me smile. And the craziest thing in the whole saga had to do with a leaf. A few days after he died, I went and found a HUGE maple leaf that'd just fallen off our tree (it was October and he used to love watching the leaves fall). I went to his grave in the yard and stuck it into the dirt and said "I thought you'd like this leaf, Buzzy." The odd thing was...through ALL the crazy weather we had that fall/winter (tons of rain, hail, whipping winds, snow), as every other leaf around it crumbled and blew away, that leaf never changed. It looked exactly the same as the day I found it, and stayed that way until early April. In that time, other things would happen in the house, I'd hear him meowing clearly when Muffin would be upstairs asleep. In the end of March, I got my cat Pooky. And within that week, after 5 1/2 months of staying perfect, that leaf started to wither and then blew clean away. So I know Buzzy was stuck with me because I just couldn't deal, but once Pooky came, I was finally able to let go and he could be free. I tried to take pictures of that leaf, but that ended up being the time we THOUGHT we had film in the camera and didn't...so no pics. That truly sucked. But it was amazing to see that leaf untouched by the elements all that time, I can't even explain what that meant to me.

Then I had one experience after my dog Scruffy passed. There's a phenomena called "phantom smell," where ghosts manifest themselves in scents. Well, poor Scruffy had been really sick his last year and smelled pretty bad. It'd been nearly a year since he passed, I was sitting in the living room going through circulars. And out of nowhere, the ENTIRE ROOM smelled like that. My first thought was "Oh my God, that's disgusting!" My second thought was "Scruffy!!!" Poor thing, that was the only noticeable thing he could come back smelling like. LOL But it made me smile and I felt the energy in the room, and then within 30 seconds, it all disappeared at once. But he came to visit me, and that was a wonderful thing.