Ho hum, there’s nothing going on! Waiting for phone calls, letting an e-mail draft sit on the back burner so I say the right things, and getting the bills in the mail can all wait a little longer. In the case of the laundry, it can wait a lot longer.

So I’d rather write. But what’s to write about? I know that my novel’s going to turn on what main characters Mike and Daisy discover while reading “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” but I got hung up on reading that and researching poison, so that can wait for the weekend (or a reward when I do get the laundry going).

No, obviously, a blog post would be best. But I spent a while fussing about the topic before I came up with the solution in the headline: I turned to page 13 of the Tribune and found an old-fashioned Chicago Daily Tribune header and a sub-header, ON OCT. 25 …

There followed, coincidentally, 25 story ideas, all things that happened on various Oct. 25s from the year 1400 (the death of the writer Chaucer) to 2005 (U.S. military deaths in the war in Iraq totaled 2,000 that day, which was listed before sports news that day, the White Sox and Astros starting Game 3 of baseball’s World Series, which ended after midnight in a Sox victory).

Ideas to the right of me, ideas to the left of me, I also read that in 1854, the Charge of the Light Brigade happened on this date. The English brigade of what the Tribune states as “more than 600 men, facing hopeless odds, charged the Russian army in the Battle of Balaclava and suffered heavy losses.”

Wait, just a sec — “more than 600,” it says? I guess they’re arguing with the poem written weeks later by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

 Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

 Rode the six hundred.

I guess I get a bit carried away about that brigade. Can you blame me after reading Rudyard Kipling’s “The Last of the Light Brigade”? Just the thought of more than 600 soldiers being there, when “the six hundred” are remembered, bothers me.

But this is the kind of reading and writing adventure that awaits in your favorite paper, web site, or other listing of “on this day in history.”