Halloween in June

Happy Thursday party people!  I am sad to report that I'm in a bit of a reading slump.  Well, not really a slump- more like hibernation.  Normally my travel weekends are full of bus/train time, so I steamroll through the reads, but the last few have been exceptions.  I've started Dorian Gray, but it has yet to jump out and grab me.  And my French class is taking up so much of my time that all I do nowadays is chip away at that damn French book!  Which is great- that's exactly what the doctor ordered- but it's definitely taken from my other reading time.  Not to mention I'm officially starting New York Bar Exam study efforts as of this week, so my days of shootin' the breeze are on the back burner.

One thing I am keeping current:  my podcasts and my curiosity!  I listened to a great NPR podcast yesterday about the Chandra Levy murder of 2001.  (Remember?  She was the DC intern who disappeared while having an affair with Congressman Gary Condit?)  NPR interviewed the authors of a new book about her botched murder investigation:  "Finding Chandra:  A True Washington Murder Mystery."  While I don't think I'll be adding the book to the list (really I feel like I know enough minutia after this podcast), it was fantastically creepy given that one of my favorite running routes lines the park where her remains were found in 2002.

My morbid fascination was reawakened this morning when Meredith-Vieira-from-whom-all-blessings-flow shared that Joran van der Sloot, the strapping young Dutchman who was the only suspect in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba, is currently being sought as the main suspect in the death of Stephany Flores, who died on May 30, 2010, in Lima, Peru- exactly 5 years after Holloway's disappearance.  He was just apprehended in Chile and is being extradited back to Peru as I type- gasp!  I will say that my instincts were right on with that sketchy character.

Last but not least, I was reviewing old trip pics last night as I was playing my new Philip Glass album ("Live from Soho"- not a huge fan of live albums, but it's the same minimalist classical we know and love from our sweet composer) and reminiscing my recent trip to Dallas, where I spent an entire day obsessing over the JFK assassination.  We visited Dealey Plaza, where he was shot, and spent hours in the Sixth Floor Museum, which is situated on the sixth floor of the Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald was perched when he allegedly assassinated our president.

X marks the spot where the fatal shot killed President Kennedy in his motorcade:

The rightmost window on the sixth floor is still cracked where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots:

A rare photo of my mother as a child available in poster size at the museum gift shop:

I had a weird dream about Halloween last night so I am on a serious roll folks.  Luckily these stories are old news and/or low on my creep-o-meter (which has an embarrassingly low threshold) so I won't need to sleep with the lights on tonight.  Any of you who know me know it doesn't take much...

Are y'all still asking yourselves why people pay for cable television?  Me too!

xo