Payton is Mario, Emily is Patrick (from Spongebob) and our neighbor is a sumo wrestler. I’m proud of two details on their costumes. One is the M on Payton’s Mario hat, which I cut out of felt and sewed on. I had to buy the hat for $15 from Amazon. The other is Emily’s Chumbucket nametag, which Patrick worked at for a short time. It helps identify her costume since a lot of people don’t notice who she is.

We went to the House of Fear in Albany this evening, which is some guy’s house which he converts into a haunted house each year for people to walk through. It was pretty neat and it looks like they put a ton of work into it. That’s the only haunted house we did this year. I waited til the last minute to do some others and we missed them.

Went trick-or-treating this evening in our neighborhood for about 2 hours. Payton kept telling everyone that our sumo wrestler neighbor needed extra candy since he was so fat and had more to fill up. A lot of them actually gave extra candy for the effort, but one grouchy lady said, “You only get TWO each!”

Check out this awesome PLA pumpkin that altalp made. It made my day.

A couple days ago I went on a midnightish walk where I ended up at the park and I decided to go into the woods and cross into the other neighborhood. It’s pretty scary in there when it’s so dark and quiet. Animals kept jumping away as I walked by them. Probably rabbits, but they sounded big.

My weekend plans will either be awesome or land me in jail. Either way should be interesting.

Last week I was chatting with John Sever (you may have heard of him, he’s very famous) and he mentioned a book that he really likes called A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny which is some kind of Jack the Ripper book. Since I haven’t read a book in months now, I decided to give it a try and reserved a copy on the library website, not realizing that I’d actually reserved a copy of the nearly identical titled, Night in the Lonesome October by Richard Laymon.

I picked it up the next day and it lay around my house for a week. Yesterday morning I finally got a chance to start it and I couldn’t put it down. I read it all day yesterday in between activities with the kids and finished it around 1am. Occasionally I would pause and wonder what it had to do with Jack the Ripper. This book was about a guy who went for late-night walks through neighborhoods and began stalking a girl, peeping in windows and going into peoples’ houses. There were bridge trolls, rape, murder, bludgeoning, stabbing, kidnapping, chasing after crazy old ladies on bikes, etc. I thought it was supposed to be Jack the Ripper: The College Years or something. It was a great book, though, and I’m really glad I made the mistake. Thanks for accidentally making me read this, John! Now I need to go pick up the Roger Zelazny version.

Speaking of books, I’m attempting to use Amazon’s Your Media Library to catalog books that I own or like. I’m still not sure I like it, especially since it requires others to log in to view it. Maybe I should just catalog my books/movies/music on my own website.

Yesterday I read that book all day, but we still managed to do a lot of other things. We went Geocaching in the morning and found two geocaches fairly easily. Then we went to the mall to return something at Target and had lunch in the food court. We stopped by the pottery place in downtown and picked up the plates that we painted earlier this week. Here’s what they look like:

Emily’s is the one with food drawn on it, Payton’s is a depiction of the video game N+ and mine is supposed to look broken. These plates were crazy-expensive! I was expecting them to cost maybe $8 – $10 and they ended up being $20 each. Quite a bit more pricey than the mismatched plates I currently use, which I got for free from Craigslist. It’s going to hurt if one breaks.

After going back home for a couple hours, we drove back to downtown Albany at 6:30 and attended a free magic show at the Venetian Theater. And man, did we get what we paid for! Actually it was a good, fun show. I guess as an adult I’m bored with magic since I’ve seen every possible trick that can be done about a million times now. After that we came back home and I read my book nonstop until it was finished.

I can’t really think of any other notable things that have happened this week. Last Saturday and Sunday I didn’t have the kids so I spent most of one of those days in downtown Salem, writing on the laptop. Mostly in the Blue Pepper internet cafe and a few hours in the mall food court where I had lunch.

Today we may or may not: find a haunted house to visit, go to Salem to buy Emily curtains for her room, go geocaching, go on a bike ride, or just sit around the house all day staring into various LCD screens.

Last week my son mentioned that he’d never seen Roger Rabbit so I ordered it from Netflix and we watched it tonight. Man, I’d forgotten what an unimaginative piece of crap that movie was. It tried way too hard. Disney pretending they’re Warner Bros. Sure, it was neat with all the live action combined with animation, but ugh. The scene in the theater where Roger Rabbit was going on about Goofy’s brilliant performance in the cartoon they were watching was sickening. “What brilliant comedic timing!” he yells. Disney cartoon shorts were the lamest, unfunniest shit ever. They all had stupid voices and tried to pass off the dumbest crap as comedy. Did people in the 1950’s actually think Mickey was awesome? I can’t believe Warner Bros. agreed to have their amazing characters alongside all that Disney crap. What a horrible blow for the 80’s.

I’ve done a lot of stuff lately, but I can’t seem to remember much of it. This evening the kids and I went on a hike with the hiking group, then had pizza at Woodstocks. There were about 7 of us total on the hike. At the top of the hike we were all just kind of hanging around and a guy was looking on his iPhone and mentioning that there was a Geocache up here. I said, “Oh really, let’s find it!” and he said that his dumb, useless iPhone doesn’t even have GPS so we couldn’t. Only he didn’t insult his iPhone like I did there. I said, “Well my Blackberry does because it’s about a billion times more awesome than your stupid phone that can’t even cut and paste text. Give me the coordinates.”

So he started reading the coordinates to me and I was typing them in. And before my GPS could even lock in, my kids emerged from a group of trees with a plastic container yelling, “We found it!” I guess it was hidden in a pretty obvious spot. They sure know how to take the fun out of a Geocache though!

Yesterday we saw City of Ember at the Pix theater. I don’t know how that theater stays in business. It was opening weekend for that movie and there were only 20 people in there. And that’s the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen there. I’ve spent the last week moving all my websites to a new server, which I think I finished today. I vacuumed a lot today and the kids cleaned their rooms. I know there was more. Dang memory. I’m going to bed.

Oh wait, I got a funny message on YouTube today. It’s from some girl named Ashley and she says, “I know you killed JonBenet Ramsey. Everything Richard said was right. I may be young at age 14, but I already have even more evidence pointing to you than Richard does. I know what I’m doing and you WILL pay for hurting this little girl and i will make sure of that if it’s the last thing I do.”

I replied with, “Shut up, bitch, or you’re next! Just kidding. I hope you’re more competent with your investigative skills than Richard is, though.” And I just now noticed her response. “trust me…I am a thousand times more competent…..is that a confession? did you really do this? please just tell me I won’t like turn you in or anything I’m 14. nobody would believe me anyway…and the Boulder police are complete dumbasses so even if i knew who killed jonbenet I wouldnt tell them because they’re retarted.”

I’m not sure what I’ll write back to her. If anyone’s forgotten, last February I found out some nutcase was claiming I was involved in the murder of Jonbenet Ramsey. Which I suppose I should point out isn’t true. I got an email from some other guy on YouTube last month asking if I was the guy they were talking about. I wrote back, “Yep, I’m the one he’s talking about. My friends and I have nothing to do with Jonbenet though. Richard Cardo is a nutcase.” I actually love Richard Cardo for making my life more interesting though.