Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

back from Vegas

I’m back. I had a pretty good trip to Vegas, and the photos and a quick bulleted list are here. [Now dead, sorry] It was cool to see my sister and brother-in-law, and it’s always fun to go to Vegas with people who haven’t been there before; it makes everything seem new to me. Probably the highlight of the trip was seeing Blue Man Group again, this time in the 5th row of the center section. The lowlight was getting delayed on my way out because of the California fires. And also the last day was depressing, being by myself and being almost out of cash as I walked around without much to do. The weather was beautiful the whole time I was there, but I didn’t feel like doing much other than going to the movies and going to Denny’s. But now that I’m home, I wish I was back there again.

I’m still sick – it never really went away, and just got worse in different ways. I stayed home today and slept all day, which seemed to help a bit. Now I hope that two more days of extreme sleep and much more juice will make it clear up. I have a lot of stuff around the house to get done, and I am editing the glossary on paper, which makes for a good in-bed project.

I didn’t do anything special for Halloween. I was going to watch Psycho, and I started watching Motel Hell, but I don’t have the attention span tonight to stick with a whole movie. Instead, I flipped channels and ended up on a Friday the 13th sequel, the one in Manhattan (8? 9?). It was funny only in that it belongs to that sub-genre of cinema best described as “I hate NY.” There were all of these films in the late 70s/early 80s that formed my early impressions of the big apple, the kinds of things like showed the city as a total disaster, with people getting killed on subways, and every other building on fire. Now that I live in the post-Giuliani version of the city, it’s very amusing to watch these films. It’s almost like watching campy 60s movies about the futuristing 1995, with floating cities and rocket jet-packs and stainless steel robots. I need to hunt down a copy of Escape from New York and see if it measures up.

Not much else is up. CSI is on now, so I’m getting pulled in…