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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Deathly Hallows Review

I was going to cross-post my entire Deathly Hallows" review here, but in honor of those who haven't read it yet, I will instead post a link to the review on my livejournal.

SPOILERS! Do not click this link until you have finished the book. Then, please feel free to click and read and tell me what you think.

Monday, July 23, 2007

harry potter party in boulder!

Photos from the Boulder Books Harry Potter party on Friday night!


Brandon Potter
Brandon tries on some eyewear at Boulder's version of Honeydukes, Powell's Candy Store

Owls at the Bookstore
Owls! In the bookstore! In the ballroom! That wee one on the left looked so much like Pigwidgeon to me! And he was blind which is why he's part of the rescue.

Potter Mania
Mayhem outside on the Pearl Street Mall. (If you look closely, you can see a very punk rock Tonks standing up taller than most of the crowd near the left edge of the main bookstore window.)


We made a list of all the characters we spotted and BOY were there a lot! Some of the best? There was a teenage couple dressed as Hermione and Harry that were SO good it was scary. We kept getting creeped out every time they walked by. Then there was a dad who was a pretty good family. There was another family — three of the kids had red wigs and were Fred, George, and Ron (with scabbers on his shoulder), there was an ickle wee Draco, a wee little Harry, and then mom was dressed like Tonks, with pink hair and dad? Dad had a wolf puppet on his head. We about died. It was awesome.

There was also someone dressed as the Knight Bus, a Howler, and three brooms (they were wearing grass skirts with broom handles sticking out the backs of their shirts, and nametags that said things like "Cleansweep" and "Nimbus"). There was also a troupe of death eaters complete with metalic masks like in the films, and a little Peeves dressed all in white, with a white face, and a brightly colored bow tie. There was also a Marietta with SNEAK in dots all across her face.

We also invented a game we called, "Not a Costume." You see, Boulder is a pretty unusual place to begin with, so there were some people who may or may not have been dressed up particularly for the party. The lady wearing a wreath of dried flowers and carrying a tambourine? NOT A COSTUME. The bloke in the stocking cap and silk waistcoat smoking an ENORMOUS pipe? NOT A COSTUME.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun. The bookstore was divided into "Houses." You picked up a Marauder's map from Platform 9 3/4 outside the store, then you had to go through each house and get your map stamped. Then you come back out and got to graduate with your Hippogriffs. :D It was fun, and I'm glad we went.

Friday, July 20, 2007

"Words? Words? Words."

I'm really worried that Harry Potter is going to end up like Hamlet. I mean, he's avenging his dead father, sort of in love with the girl next door, but unable to be with her, and more than a little mad. So, I have this bad feeling it's just going to end in a bloodbath. Cos in Hamlet? EVERYONE dies. Literally. Everyone. Horatio is the only one left, so it'll be, like, Neville kissing Harry on his now-scarless forehead and saying, "Goodnight sweet prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest," and curtain.

And I will be very peeved. And depressed for months, no doubt.

Note to self: buy kleenex before the weekend.

P.S. If JKR deals with Hermione and Ron with a line saying, "Granger and Weasley are dead," she will be hearing from me.

This is, if I may, a damn fine cup of coffee.

Watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me last night. Got it from Netflix cos we have Twin Peaks season 1 on DVD and want to rent season 2 and let me just tell you, David Lynch? Craziest filmmaker ever. I mean, he seriously even gives Salvador Dali and L'Age d'Or a run for his money. And Dali was doing crazy for the sake of crazy, whereas with Fire Walk With Me I got the distinct impression that David Lynch knew exactly what was going on and the rest of us just couldn't follow the plot.

Which is freaking scary.

In other news, I broke the 10k word mark yesterday on my WIP. This is good news for all. (I usually get to at least 30k before I start flailing too much and have to give up.)

Also, I had a dream last night which cast a boy I knew in high school as Oliver Wood. Quite what this says about my brain, I don't know.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

drive-by blogging

Quick link to a great NYTimes article of 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less. Not particularly low fat, but high-class and quick! These are going on my fridge.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Myspace might also be the work of the devil

This has been something of an odd week.

In the past five days, I've had two long-lost friends contact me on MySpace. Is some strange alignment of the planets responsible for this blast from the past? It has to have been a strange sequence of events that prompted both of them to come looking for me on MySpace at almost exactly the same time.

I'm not a big fan of MySpace. It's too busy, too flashy, too full of stupid advertising and a lot of even stupider people. I got a MySpace account originally because my brother in law started posting pictures of the baby there, and I couldn't see them without an account. Then, I attended a workshop at the SCBWI conference this spring where they talked about building a platform and how helpful MySpace could be for that.

I never really thought I'd use it. Right after I signed up, I did a little snooping around, I'll admit it. There's a feature where you can put in what schools you went to and what years, and it will spit out all the members that have put in those same details. It was a little weird, seeing those people. I felt a little stalkerish, and so I never contacted them.

I've now had four truly long-lost friends find me on MySpace and contact me. It's a weird feeling. These people were such a huge part of my life at the times I knew them, and since, they've all sort of faded into that tapestry of memory that stretches out behind us into the past. To have them reappear now is jarring.

It's not that I'm uninterested in talking to them, finding out what they're up to, seeing how they're doing. I think... I think it's just that I feel like I've overcome a lot since I knew most of these people. I didn't like myself very much in junior high and high school, and I probably wouldn't like how people saw me then. To be thrown back into those roles again is disconcerting.

I could ignore them. The internet is awfully good at distancing us from confrontations we don't want to have. It isn't as though I've run into these people on the street (a perpetual fear of mine whenever I visit back home); I could choose not to interact. But the curiosity is too strong. Why did they come looking for me? Why contact me when they could have just passed me by? Why now?

"Unfinished business," Allison called it, and I think she's right. I just wonder now how many more ghosts from my past are going to be paying me a visit, looking to put things right, wrap up whatever loose ends we had between us.