Night in the Lonesome October

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.