Last night Payton asked Emily what she would wish for if a genie gave her 3 wishes. She said she’d wish for 1,000,000 more wishes. “No, you can’t wish for more wishes,” he says. So she says she would wish for 1,000,000 more genies.”

That was lulzy enough for me, but when Emily asked Payton what he would wish for, he said he would wish to punch her in the jeans all 3 times. This is probably only hilarious if you’ve heard this Lonely Island song.

At 7-Eleven, a customer in front of me was complaining at the cashier because they turned the pizza ovens off too early at night. He kept hitting his fist on the counter to make his point, so I started doing it along with him and he kept eying me, but didn’t stop yelling at the cashier. He started walking away from the counter, still complaining, and I picked up his keys and said, loudly and obnoxiously, “Don’t forget your keys, MISTER COMPLAINER!” He shut up and came back to take them from me, looking like he wanted to hit me. It ruled. That really made my day. Even moreso than this Slurpee and hot dog. Oddly enough, the cashier didn’t seemed amused by my behavior at all. If I worked there I would love for someone to shut up a loudmouth customer.

The Spessas & Family came to visit me for a week and left just yesterday. As usual, details are sketchy. On Monday we did The Phone Show on our brand new station, Manic Radio! That was a blast, because the regulars in the Manic Radio chatroom didn’t like us at all. The PLA listeners were saying hilarious things to the mods and other regulars, which was easily upsetting them. The station owner was woken from sleep and told to come in the chat room to see all the craziness going on. Things were crazy, both in the chatroom and on the air. Two days later, Manic Radio fired me. It was the best thing ever! More details are on the PLA Forums.

Wednesday I went to the Veterans Day parade with the kids. Eventually we jumped into the parade and started marching with everyone else, walking the entire length of the parade. Last year we kind of blended in, but this year we were in sort of an empty section so we were more noticeable. We got frequent claps from people and even cheers a couple of times. We had a little candy with us, so we threw that at some little kids. Some old guy yelled at us to throw some candy and Emily says “Okay!” and threw Nerds at the ground in front of him. Not boxes of Nerds, but open candy. It was great. There’s a small video clip of all this on my Facebook, which I will attempt to embed below, but I’m not sure if my privacy settings will allow it.

I think it was also Wednesday that we drove to Portland, sans kids, and saw the Mountain Goats. It was a pretty small venue and we were just 20 feet or so from the stage. Was an awesome concert. On either side of the stage there were giant flatscreen TVs and while waiting for the show to start I tried turning one on with my keychain remote and it worked. On the screen there was a Verizon page that allowed people to text words and pictures onto the screen, which people immediately started doing. I managed to get a few messages on it myself before the show started.

As the show started, the TV was turned off, but I kept turning it back on during the show. Since the lights were down, it was really bright on the crowd. The staff eventually decided to shut off the Verizon feed, so that the screen was black when I turned it on. But after about 30 seconds of blackness, the screen would turn bright blue, flooding the crowd with light. It was enough to make everyone squint. I kept doing it in between songs, hoping the Mountain Goat guy would say something about it, but he never did. Finally the staff cut the power to the TV so I couldn’t do it anymore. I resisted the urge to make my way to the other side of the auditorium to start in on that TV. I need to get a more powerful TV-B-GONE.

A lot of other things happened throughout the week, mostly kid-related. We took the kids to Wonderland (the nickel arcade) and to see 2012 and some other miscellaneous things that I can’t remember. On Saturday we went to see The Pixies in Eugene, which was really great. They played the entire album Doolittle, in order. Halfway through the lady announces, “Okay, here’s side B.” Then after that they played a bunch of stuff I didn’t recognize.

Friday: Jessica and I headed to Salem to go to a haunted house. On the way, decided to give Rocky Horror a try too, so called Kate and got directions to it. Before we got there, Angela called to tell us both shows were sold out. Stopped by a bar for food and drinks. Left after 1 drink cause the food menus sucked. Went to McMenamins instead to eat, then to The Nightmare Factory for the haunted house.

It was a standard haunted house – giant maze with people jumping out at you all the time. We took a few deliberate wrong turns, just for fun. Ended up in a back hallway at one point, where we weren’t supposed to be, and could stick our hands out through the walls and scare people. We ended up coming out of a hole under a desk/table thing. Found an empty room later that we hung out in for about 15 minutes, jumping out at people as they came in. After the haunted house we went to a bar in Albany and listened to horrible karaoke renditions of old country songs and played tons of pool.

Saturday: Tried to sleep in, but failed. I don’t know why I can never sleep very late. Hung out around the house most of the day with the kids. Made some Halloween cookies around noon and they ended up being our lunch. At 6pm, they dressed for trick-or-treating and we drove to a neighborhood that Jessica recommended. It was awesome – hundreds of kids walking around in the streets. Much more active than our own neighborhood. Went around a few blocks there, then headed home. Would have stayed longer, but Emily hasn’t been feeling that great. Left her at home while me and Payton hit up all the houses in our own neighborhood.

Got quite a few submissions these past couple of days for the PLA pumpkin carving contest. I’m surprised at how much effort some people put into it.

Sunday: Went to Salem to see Up at a ridiculously cheap movie theater, only to find out that it was sold out. So we bought tickets to Harry Potter 6 instead, which started an hour later. I hadn’t seen it yet, but the kids had. They both really wanted to see it again. The theater was awesome! There were long tables in ever aisle to set your food and stuff on, which meant tons of feet space. In the very back aisles there were reclining chairs instead of movie theater seats. There was a full bar in the lobby. The theater does all kinds of non-movie things like football games and comedy shows. Definitely gotta go back there someday.

Since we had an hour to kill, we walked across the street and I noticed we were in front of the same bar Jessica and I were at on Friday. Walked over to an ice cream place and hung out for about 30 minutes.

As long as I’m doing several days of updating here, I should mention Wednesday. I didn’t have much food in the house and didn’t feel like going shopping, so we went out to eat at Applebees. Turns out Wednesday is kids night there. You’d think that would just mean low prices for kids food, but not here. They had a magician going around to all the tables, doing tricks for everyone. He did tricks for us as we sat there and waited for a table, keeping us there for an extra minute or two after our table was ready. Then he came over and did card tricks while we were trying to eat food. It was annoying, but funny. They also had a giant table set up to decorate mini pumpkins, which the kids did for about 20 minutes after we ate. We’ll definitely have to try Wednesdays there again someday.

Man, xkcd.com has been doing amazing stuff lately. But that image up there, that’s just insane. Click on it to view the full sized version of it. I want to know how long those took him. And the Primer one cracked me up – I just happened to see that movie last year when Netflix recommended it to me.