Category: Geocaching

Geostalking, Windshields, Flash mobs, Karaoke…

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I think it was Thursday 2 weeks ago that I decided to help out the people trying to sell their cars on the side of the road by writing catchy slogans on their windshields. They like to park them on a busy highway next to my house with FOR SALE signs on them.

FREE TAKE ONE

I can only assume my first attempt at helping out worked, because the car was gone about 24 hours later. It might have had something to do with the cops ticketing their cars too since apparently it’s illegal to park your car there. People do it all the time, though, so I’m sure I’ll have plenty more opportunities to try and help out.

I think Thursday might have been the same night that I came up with the brilliant idea of stalking Foursquare users. Foursquare is a service that lets you use your cell phone to “check in” everywhere you go. It annoys your friends on Twitter and Facebook by posting your check in updates. Like “LOOK AT ME EVERYBODY, I JUST ARRIVED AT ROY’S TAVERN!” I tried it out since I’m addicted to social networking sites and my first thought was, “Wow, this is stupid to check into places because the type of people I know are the type of people to call these businesses and have them page me.” It’s happened to me plenty of times before, long before Foursquare existed.

So I started calling up places around the country that people check in to and having the Foursquare users paged so I could say silly things to them. I recorded the calls and they can be heard at www.phonelosers.org/stalker/. My favorites are I’m From The Future and Red Cross Telemarketing. There’s now a board on the PLA Forums dedicated to calling up Foursquare users. Several bloggers have written giant, complainy posts about my calls, one of them vowing to shut down the PLA forever. It’s been a lot of fun so far.

I went to Chasers later to tell Jessica and Anne about all my craziness that night. I still had the window paint in my pocket, so I ended up writing on a few more car windows as we left. The van outside the bar got FOUR SAIL on it.

FRIDAY we went to Geeky Karaoke in Portland again. This time it was me, Jessica and Kelsie. Me and Jessica started drawing on each other and soon the half the tables were drawing all over each other. Here’s the Facebook album. We sang My Own Worst Enemy and Don’t Stop Believin’. Both times we were introduced as Roy Gerbil and The Atlantas. On the drive home we kept stopping and writing on car windows. We wrote random, crazy things and then we wrote FOR SALE on a few along with my phone number, hoping the angry owners would call and yell at me for trying to sell their car. Turns out I can’t remember my phone number when I’m drunk though, so we accidentally put someone else’s number on them.

Saturday the kids and I went biking/geocaching. We went about 5 miles and found 3 or 4 geocaches. I think Sunday we hung around the house all day. Looks like awesome weather tomorrow so we’ll probably do some more of that.

Somewhere in between all this, the kids and I went to see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at Corvallis’ Darkside movie theater. It was our first time visiting that place. A very cool and bizarre independent theater. And the movie was nuts.

This past weekend, Angela and I went to some weird photography event in Salem. About 60 people showed up and our orders were to walk all over downtown Salem and take as many pictures as possible. We only took a few before quitting and just browsing random stores, geocaching and eating in a downtown bar. Then we went to a film festival at Northern Lights. It was like paying $3.00 each to watch YouTube videos. I’m not complaining, because we had a good time there, but the movies were pretty bad. They were fun to make fun of though.

On Tuesday, Evilgold and Evie visited me. They were passing through Albany on their way to Portland from California and timed it so they could do The Phone Show with me. That was a lot of fun. Apparently they stole my porch light before they left.

Evil and Evie

On Wednesday I met Cecelia and we went to Salem for a flash mob, but we were late and didn’t make it to the mob. Missed it by about 10 minutes. It was a pretty lame flash mob, though, involving about 100 people singing Singing In The Rain. It wasn’t even raining. Salem was more active than I’d ever seen it before – I guess it’s an event they do every week or month. We did a little downtown geocaching, had some food and just walked around a lot. I checked into the bar we went to on Foursquare, just to see if anyone from the PLA would call me. Apparently someone tried, but they we’d already left.

Tonight should be fun. I’m going to 2600 in Portland. Evilgold and Evie will be there. A guy who calls The Phone Show a lot will also be there, since I owe him some buttons and stickers from the game show he won. After 2600, we’re going to attempt to do some Foursquare stalking in person. Surbo and me came up with an idea to turn this into a game, where we drive to a place that a person checks into, find the person and confirm with them that they’re the Foursquare user. Kind of a combination of Foursquare and Geocaching. I’m not sure if people will like being found or if I’ll get punched in the face a lot, but I’m sure it’ll be a great time either way.

Geocaching in Tangent

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Biked about 15 miles today, looking for Geocaches. Had to quit when the battery on my cell phone died. Took a few pictures.


Closing in on a cache.


A microcache, hanging from a tree.


I think I’m going to bye this truck.


Hey look, a 38-year-old car for just $4,000!


A ripped up old chair with an arm missing for FREE!

Went Geocaching yesterday too. We did 8 or 9 of them during a hike. Had Mexican food and saw Knowing, which was a really bizarre movie.

Elephant Poop

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What good are those touch screen signature pads for signing for your credit cards really? All they do is make your signature completely illegible and the cashier still has to print out 2 slips of paper – one is the credit card receipt for her to keep and the other is your receipt. Isn’t the whole idea to be paperless? Why does she need a receipt? Why not just sign the paper that she prints out for herself so it’s actually legible? In the rare instances that I’m not using my debit card as a debit card and I need to sign, I draw stupid pictures or write my name backwards.

I wonder if there are people who have a phobia about using toilets that have the auto-sensing “eye” that flushes the toilet for you. There must be people out there that think that little red window on the flusher is an actual camera (after all, it sees you and knows when to flush!) and is too shy to pee in the presence of it. Even if they don’t think a human is on the other end watching, I bet they’re afraid for the machine to watch them.

My car freaked out the other day when I tried to start it. The “ding” sound was stuttering, no lights came on and I heard a relay switch under the dash going nuts. It was weird. I tried a few more times and it finally started like normal, but not before resetting my car stereo, causing it to prompt me for a code which I didn’t know. Guess that’s an anti-theft device for when people steal my stereo. I checked the instruction book and I’d written my code inside, but there were also instructions for resetting the code in case you lose it. So what good is that as an anti-theft device? I’m betting that a thief could reset the code just as well. Now I’m paranoid to take my car out of the city because I’m sure it’s going to have some bizarre breakdown and I’ll end up stranded somewhere.

My HD Flip camera is great. It takes excellent video, even in the dark, and has great sound. The only problem is that the file sizes are huge and that my laptop is too slow to edit HD video within a reasonable time span. So I think I’m going to take it back and get the regular Flip camera again. I don’t even care about HD quality video – I just wanted a wide screen camera and the only one they had was in HD.

Hey CK, thanks for introducing me to that UGK song in your LJ the other day. I downloaded two of their albums and I’ve really been enjoying them.

Cleaning up my hard drive

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I’ll get this out of the way first…

Last weekend I created my own geocache called the Telephone Cache which contains a bunch of telephone-related items. 5 people have found it already. One guy went out at night and found it within an hour of it being posted on geocaching.com.

Tonight I’ve been cleaning up my computer’s hard drive. Deleted probably 50 gigs of old stuff that I didn’t need anymore, most of it video. Back in the days before YouTube, I used to find funny videos through file sharing sites like Morpheus and I would store them in directories so I’d never lose them. I had gigs of the stuff, ranging from about 1998 to 2005. Lots of stuff. All gone now. I checked a few things just to make sure they really were on YouTube and, of course, they were. I love the internet.

Found quite a bit of old stuff that I’d forgotten about and did some organizing. Put up a few new videos on YouTube. So I was sort of productive tonight, even if it was only in front of the computer.

Speaking of loving the internet, I think it’s so cool that I can check my daughter’s grades in real-time on all her classes. Every assignment in every class is logged on a website that I can log into and it’s updated every few days. When there’s an ‘F’ or a missing an assignment, I can yell at her immediately instead of waiting for progress reports. It makes being a nosy parent so much more easier. If they’d had something like this when I was in Jr. High, maybe it wouldn’t have been so easy for me to fail everything.

Earlier this week I took a screen shot of my desktop for this thread. I added a bunch of weird icons and titles. I’m only stating the obvious so nobody reports me for being suicidal or for having plans to become a mass murderer.

Skipped 2600 tonight.

Not sure what the kids and I will do this weekend. Put up the Christmas tree I’m sure.

I was doing random YouTubing today and I came across an old Disney cartoon which talks about how awesome smoking is. As much as I was ripping on Disney and Goofy a few entries back, this has gotta be the funniest cartoon ever. Just for the absurdity of the message. Better than the Flintstones smoking, even. Watch it.

It was made about 15 years before Walt Disney’s chain smoking killed him.

Two Sundays ago my back started aching. Right after seeing Bolt, for no reason at all, it was just killing me. By Monday it was even worse. Walking, sitting, sleeping and pretty much everything else was painful. Bending over was nearly impossible. I’ve never had back issues before and I’ve always been really thankful for that, especially since I’ve seen my dad and brother deal with all that forever. The pain was gone by Wednesday, but I can still feel a hint of it. I’m hoping it was just a pulled muscle or something and it’s not me getting old. It’d suck to have to deal with that all the time.

Geocache Navigator

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I know I’m being annoying about Geocaching lately, but ever since I got this new program for my Blackberry I’m suddenly really into Geocaching again. Today I spent about 3 hours biking around Albany, finding caches by myself. I think this is the first time I’ve ever geocached by myself. I found 4 caches and failed at 4 others because there were too many people nearby. I just wrote this review of the new program on some geocaching forums and now I’m going to annoy everyone else with it too. So here you go…

I’ve gone through quite a few methods of Geocaching since I started in 2004. For my first year, I lugged a full sized laptop around with me with a big USB GPS thing attached to it. Surprisingly I never dropped my laptop while climbing up rocks, through forests and around lakes. Then for awhile, I used an HP organizer, connected to a wireless GPS via Bluetooth. That was nice for a couple years, but it sure was a lot of extra gadgetry to own.

For the past year, I’ve been using my Blackberry phone to find Geocaches. It’s got built-in GPS and free Google Maps, so I just print out the geocache on paper, manually type the coordinates into Google Maps and follow the dot until I get there. I’ve tried a few Blackberry applications for Geocaching, but I never really found one that I liked. Until now.

About a month ago, I decided to look around for Geocaching software for my Blackberry phone once again. This time I came across a program called Geocache Navigator. It seemed like a nice program, so I decided to give it a try. The catch was that it would cost $5.99 per month for a subscription or $39.99 per year. I’d have to like a program an awful lot to pay a subscription for it. I gave them $5.99 to try it out for a month.

I can’t express how much I love this program. It does everything I could possibly need. When I turn on the program, it immediately finds my coordinates via GPS. Then I can click one button to find all the Geocaches that are near me. I’ll get a list that looks like this:

Check out how it lists the distance from each cache. Those numbers automatically update as I walk around. And when I click on the cache that I want to retrieve, I get to choose from these screens:


My favorite for zeroing in on a cache is the “radar” screen. From the Cache Details screen, I can read the full description of the cache, look at all the log entries and even view the unscrambled clue. The GPS claims to work to within 3 feet of the coordinates, though I’m unsure if GPS is really that precise. The map section allows me to view street maps, topographical or aerial photos.

This program makes geocaching completely spontaneous. Like a couple weekends ago I was in downtown Portland and had some time to kill, so I viewed the caches around me, picked the closest one and went to find it. It’s so great not having to put any effort into looking on the website and printing out cache info anymore. I can just whip out my phone anytime I want, wherever I am, and go Geocaching. Preparation is a thing of the past.

Another advantage this program has over using Google Maps, is that this program will keep working even when your internet goes out. I ran into a problem earlier this year when I was in the woods, using GPS and the map would no longer load because I wasn’t getting good reception anymore. The GPS still worked, but it was just a red dot on a completely white screen so it was useless. This program will continue to track the coordinates even when the internet connection dies.

Here are my few gripes about this program…

1. I can’t log my find on geocaching.com from within the program. For that, I still have to visit the website when I get home and log it like usual. I suppose I could log it from my phone’s web browser, but I’ve never bothered to try. If I could log my find, I’d never have a reason to even visit geocaching.com again.

2. The aerial and map view doesn’t zoom in far enough. When I’m using my Google Maps application to geocache, I can zoom in pretty close which makes tough caches a lot easier to find. If I’m really stuck, I suppose I could copy/paste the cache coordinates into Google Maps (since the Blackberry allows you to cut and paste, unlike some other nameless overhyped phone), but that’s extra effort. I wish the program could just zoom as much as Google.

3. The price. I really shouldn’t complain about that since $39.99 comes out to just $3.30 per month if I pay for a year up front. It’s worth every penny of that. Disregard this complaint. I just hope they don’t suddenly realize how awesome they are and start charging $10/month for this.

If you have a Blackberry that lets you use your GPS (sorry Verizon Wireless users) then you should definitely give this program a try. I’m loving it and plan to pay for a year of usage very soon. This program is spoiling me and making me wonder how I ever got along without it. You can find it at www.geocachenavigator.com for Blackberry and a few other smartphones.

The Geocaching was fun today. I discovered a few new places in Albany and found 4 microcaches. I want to find every cache in Albany, so I’m going to work on finding the micros by myself and the bigger caches for when I’m with the kids. Micros are usually in 35mm film canisters and only contain a log sheet. The bigger ones have toys and other random junk in them, which is what the kids enjoy trading for.

One of my finds today was underneath a pay phone in front of a convenience store curiously named the GPS Market. Another was hidden inside a guardrail. And the one that took me the longest to find was hanging in plain site from the remains of a hundred year old bridge. I spent over 30 minutes searching for that one. One of my failures required me to climb up a pine tree. I only didn’t because I was alone and people were around. I’m betting it’ll be much quieter there tomorrow morning though. I think I’m going to spend half the day doing this again tomorrow.

Bolt

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Went to see Bolt this weekend with the kids. I didn’t realize that it was in 3-D. I also didn’t know that the theater was going to charge us NINE DOLLARS AND TWENTY-FIVE CENTS EACH to get into a matinee. That sucked. I guess with all the movies going 3-D, that’s going to be their excuse for charging us double the price. I love going to movies and I’ve managed not to complain about ticket prices too much, but this could seriously curb my movie-going addiction.

The 3-D didn’t really add anything to the film either. They didn’t do a whole lot with it. All the glasses do is darken the screen and make your face slightly more uncomfortable. Welcome to the future! On the upside, I actually was able to see the 3-D effects. My vision has always been screwy enough to make 3-D movies completely pointless for me, but I’m guessing that wearing glasses for the past year straight has done something for me, because the 3-D worked. This is a first for me. It still wasn’t worth the crazy ticket price, though.

Saturday we hiked and found a geocache. Sunday we did some local geocaching where we failed a lot. Then I took them to see the cool fence post cache. We also found a cache in the parking lot at the movie theater after our movie was over. We’ve decided to find every cache in Albany. We’re off to a bad start, though, with our 3 failures in a row on Saturday.

That image should indicate how many caches I’ve found. The number is low because I’ve always been lazy about logging my caches. I’m sure I’ve done over 100 now, between Illinois, Montana, Idaho, Texas and Oregon. I’m going to start logging all my finds though. If you’ve never heard of Geocaching, you should check it out at www.geocaching.com. Chances are, you walk or drive by several hidden caches every day. You don’t really even need a GPS to do it, just visit the website, put in your zip code, then zoom an ariel view map to the location you choose and print the map. Or cut/paste the coordinates into Google Maps for an even closer ariel view. You can even hide your own for other people to find.

Zoom this map to your current location and you’ll see how many caches are near you. There are over 100 in my city. It’s simple, fun, addictive, GO DO IT! And then post in the comments about how awesome I am for getting you started on a fun new hobby.

Good vs. Evil

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“If I were rich I would do a lot of Geocaching and I would leave $100 bills for people to find.” -Payton, in the car today, just me and him talking about random stuff.

“We should start a Geocaching team called the GeoCrashers and we’ll go around just destroying caches and taking all their stuff.” -Emily, in the car last week, just me and her talking about random stuff.

Today the new Xbox Experience update happened. Among other things, we can watch Netflix movies on the Xbox now. Hopefully I can still get some good money out of my Roku box when I sell it on Ebay. … Just checked! Looks like I’ll get anywhere from $80 to $100 for it. I think I paid $120 for it early this year so that’s not too bad.

Aquafina and Hostess Cupcakes

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Can anyone tell me why xkcd is so incredibly awesome? Each comic is greater than the last and today’s is my new favorite.

Lately I’ve been listening to a podcast called Welcome to Mars which is actually a 12 part radio series that some guy produced for some station. Between 1947 and 1959, the future was written about, discussed and analysed with such confidence that it became a tangible presence. This is a story of weird science, strange events and even stranger beliefs, set in an age when the possibilities for human development seemed almost limitless.

Subscribe to that podcast here. I’ve only got a couple more episodes to listen to. I still listen to lots of podcasts, but I’m too lazy to post names or links to any of them. I need to update my list in the sidebar.

On Saturday I went on a hike with some people, which included finding a few Geocaches. One was in a tree, about 12 feet up, so you had to climb it to retrieve the logbook. I was happy that Holly did that so I didn’t have to. Another one was inaccessible because of overgrown thorns and brush. And the 3rd was the coolest Geocache I’ve ever seen. You had to pop the cap off of an aluminum fence post, then pull on a bolt that was stuck in the side of it. The bolt was attached to a long piece of wire, which pulled a pole up through the post, knocking the cache out of the top. It was like something you’d see in the Goonies. I took a video of it and I’ll post that on here later if it doesn’t suck.

Today I spent most of my day in Portland. I ate a lot of Pez. Caught up with some really old friends on Myspace.

Flash mobs, Mormons and other things

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A few weeks ago while on a hike with the kids and a few others from the hiking group, I met a guy who was involved with an area Geocaching group so I joined it a few days later. Turns out, these people pull occasional flash mobs in Albany and Corvallis with a surprisingly large turnout. On Saturday morning, me, Payton and Spessa’s kids drove to Target to cheer for shoppers coming to the doors, as if they were winning a race. They had a finish line banner for them to break through and there were a few signs that people were holding. I was going to make some posterboard signs, but instead I decided to whip up these buttons to hand out to the winners:

Here’s a picture of the flash mob crowd several minutes before the event started:

This is us, lined up on either sides of the doors, waiting for the next victim:

And here’s a father, running towards the finish line with his son in his hands, thankfully not tripping and falling on the way:

I managed to get a parking spot close to Target so I could point my camera out the window of my car as the event happened. I also tuned my scanner to Target’s frequencies, hoping to hear employees talking about us, but I only heard one thing which I think was related to us and it wasn’t that hilarious. I had a digital recorder with me to record the sound up close.

Even though I told the other guy with the camera that I was videotaping from the back of my car, which I pointed out to him, he decided to stand directly in front of my window for most of the flash mob, rendering my already spotty video even crappier. If I’d known there would be such a large turnout (at least 40 people) for this event, I would have just held my camera with me since I’d probably be unnoticed in the middle of the crowd. I was only expecting maybe a dozen of us to show up. Here’s my video:

Everyone had a really great time with this. Most of the customers entering the store seemed to think it was hilarious. A lot of them ran through the crowd, reveling in the cheers, raising their arms in victory and breaking through our finish line. Some took pictures. Others were too shy to deal with large crowds screaming at them, so they went to the side of us instead.

I was really hoping for some conflict with mall security, Target managers and/or the police. Especially the security guy that works at Target who doubles as their floor sweeper. I would have been thrilled to have been asked to leave by any of those people. But only the Target manager came out near the beginning, asking who was in charge and what we were doing. I told her corporate said it was okay, but she ignored me. After a couple minutes of questioning us, she smiled as she ran through the finish line and back into Target as we all cheered for her. For the rest of the event, quite a few Target employees gathered at the doors to watch us from inside.

Fifteen minutes later, we quit on our own. It’s too bad we couldn’t have continued for another 15 minutes, but I guess the organizers wanted to keep it short to lessen the chance of us getting on everyone’s nerves and/or getting thrown off the premises. It was a great time and I can’t wait for the next one.

11/11/2008 EDIT: A picture of the mob was in yesterday’s newspaper with a short paragraph about the event. This seems counterproductive to a flash mob. Isn’t the point to weird people out without them ever knowing who you are? Here’s the picture, click it to enlarge:

click to enlarge

11/13/2008 EDIT: PabloMac uploaded his video and it has considerably less ass in it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whTkx-63AeM

Later that day, the Spessas and I took the kids to the Wunderland, which is a nickle arcade in Salem. They left this afternoon, and I took Emily and Payton to Springfield with me since I needed to visit Best Buy. While we were there we saw Madagascar at the theater. It’s a movie I didn’t necessarily want to see, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

On the way out of Best Buy, the security alarm went off. I did what I always do in this situation – I yelled to the kids, “RUN!!!” and I bolted out the door. I was hoping for a chase, but it never happens. The only place I’ve ever been chased was at Wal-Mart where the old lady at the door walked after me (running would have been too strenuous on her) saying, “Sir? Sir? Please come back!” (By the way, I wasn’t shoplifting at Best Buy. They just forgot to deactivate my tag since I bought it from the return desk.)

On Friday afternoon I came home and decided to check my mailbox which is out on the sidewalk. I rarely check it since all my mail goes to my PO Box, and it was filled with a huge pile of junk mail as usual. As I was opening the box I spotted 4 young men in suits getting out of their car. Mormons! I had one of those movie moments where I’m frantically trying to get the key into the lock to escape the impending conversation. I wasn’t quick enough, though. As I pulled my junk mail out one of them walks up and cheerfully says, “Hi there!”

“Hey.”

“That’s sure a lot of mail you’ve got there!”

“Yep.”

“How are you doing today?”

“I really don’t want to talk to you. Bye!”

“Do you know of anyone who might need help from us?” he asked as I turned to leave.

I quickly walk back to my house. As I shut my door I turn to notice that they didn’t see which apartment I went into. A minute later I watch as two of them begin knocking on every door in the complex. The other two, I assume, went into the other neighborhood.

So I did what any other normal person would do. I took off my pants, put on the weirdest pair of boxers I own (red ants all over them) and grabbed my video camera. When they knocked I ran down the stairs, quickly shoved my cat into a closet to keep him from running out the door, flung open the door and screamed, “I am the true lord of the dance! No matter what those idiots at work say!” and then I slammed the door on them. I videotaped it all, of course, and you can click here to see the video.

It’s hard to see their expressions in the YouTube video, so here’s a frame capture from the DV version.

I’ll leave it up to the viewers to decide what emotion the one on the right is feeling. I like to think terror, but it’s probably more like WTF. WTF is an emotion, right? I went upstairs to my open window afterwards and listened to them for several minutes while they giggled about me. I was surprised to hear one of them repeat what I said to them verbatim. I wonder if they visited any of my other neighbors afterwards and asked them about “the weird guy.”

If you’re wondering why I shouted what I did, you should listen to this song, especially around the 30 second mark. Well, I guess that doesn’t explain why really, but at least you know what the reference is from.

Night in the Lonesome October

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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:

painted plates

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.

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