To Whom It May Concern:

In my family we make up stories. Some would say "big fish" stories, but I think maybe it is a way of getting closer to a truth. When I am making up a story my brain is filtering thru every random fact and image I have ever come across, trying to make the story as plausible as possible. And by the age of 28 when at least 25 of those years have been spent in school absorbing facts and images, aided by my newspaper reading which started seriously in 7th grade due to Mr. Schmelters newspaper reading assignment and has been greatly helped by my internet browsers home page being set to nytimes.com for the last 8 years... that's a lot of data.  And well my parents are "older" so of course they have lots of facts and images in their heads too. Okay so that's a lot of words to say we are kind of a factoid-y family... The question "What do you make up about that?" comes from the book, Failure and How I Achieved It, by Mike Courtney. 
In the course of writing this post, my mom called. Both of us were on our cell phones. There was an altered sound: "gobledy gouck, charlie, alpha, tango, grgwrrrrrrrr _______________" Beep, beep, beep.  Dropped call. Cell phone service is notoriously bad in our area. So in the time it takes for her to call me back I have already made up three stories. 1. Cell serivice is bad; must be solar flares. 2. It was a message from the military island across the channel and they are running tests on how to infiltrate the airwaves and broadcast messages sub-audible, but someones elbow just jostled the device and we overheard the conversation. (This idea is strongly influenced by Trenton Lee Stewart and The Mysterious Benedict Society.) 3. It was the black-finned monkeys similar to the blue-footed boobies which are like the mice in The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Those three ideas are not really "What do you make up about that?" worthy, but they are the "What do you make up about that?" moment of the day, so far, we haven't had dinner yet...