harry potter party in boulder!

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



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


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.


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.

"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.

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.

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.

marmot under the car!

marmot under the car!
Originally uploaded by LacyLu42.

marmot!

marmot!
Originally uploaded by LacyLu42.

Squash Flowers

Squash Flowers
Originally uploaded by LacyLu42.

notes on a life

• Zucchini plant has its first blossom opening! Lettuce ready to harvest. Green onions coming along well. Tomatoes going gangbusters on the front porch in late-afternoon sun. Strawberries died. :( BUT! You-Pick-Em berry farm discovered in Brighton, offering strawberries and rhubarb this month! Expedition imminent.
  
  
• The Guide at work goes to press tomorrow evening. I get the final color proofs tomorrow and plan to spend the day scrutinizing them for any last-minute changes, typos, etc.
  
  Oh, and did I mention that we still don't have a decision from the Bureau on a cover? That bit is giving me a bit of an ulcer. Three days 'til we go to press and they sent a photographer to the zoo because they didn't like any of the photos the zoo photographer sent us to use. (Remind me to tell the "attacking elephant" story someday.) Also, damn your run-off elections; we're holding a page back so that we can slip in the names of the city council after the city decides who they're going to be.
  
  
• Business trip to Dallas is planned for next weekend, except that we don't know what hotel we're staying at yet. I kind of hate traveling by the seat of my pants like this. On the plus side, I'm getting to do several things I've always wanted to do in Dallas: the Women's Museum, the Sixth Floor Museum, and Shakespeare in the Park. And on Friday? I get to spend the whole day shopping. For research. God, I love my job.
  
  
• Met with a new writing group last night. All children's authors, several published with small presses. All considerably older than me; when I said that I had been writing since childhood, they said, "And that was what? Ten years ago?" I kind of hate it when older people judge me because I'm young. I'm not even THAT young any more, for goodness' sake. They all shut up when I mentioned that I edit a travel magazine for my day job.

Looking forward to a calm weekend of berry picking and pie making before the crazy sets in.

close encounters of the marmot kind

OK, so I realize that it's been roughly 17 million years since I updated this blog (OK, less than a month), and while some things have been going on, none of them have seemed important enough or pressing enough to blog about.

Then I remembered, this is a blog; it's supposed to be about my cat and what I ate for dinner. Right?

Onward with the self-indulgent navel gazing!

Overall, we are very happy and well. The Husband has started his new job with CU medical center and has dubbed himself "Lord High Vampire of A Thousand Mice," mainly because his job entails the exsanguination of a whole lot of mice. (Not TOTAL exsanguination, just some each week.) He seems extremely happy to finally be back in a lab.

I myself am still loving my job all to pieces. Sometimes, I find my good fortune at just stumbling into this position baffling. I'll be traveling to Dallas on my very first business trip ever on June 20th and I'm very excited about it. LOTS to do between now and then, including booking travel if we ever figure out how to get the new reservations system to work.

Also, I get a corporate American Express. I feel like such a grown up.

~*~

We've also been trying to take advantage of the fine weather and get out and do a few things. On Sunday, the Mister and I decided to take one of Colorado's scenic byways, the Trail Ridge Road through Rocky Mountain National Park, which is the highest paved road in the country. We stopped at the visitor's center at the very top, and found out that the tundra wildflowers, which only have a six-week growing season, had started blooming, so on the way down, I asked the Mister to pull over so we could have a look.

As we pulled off onto a pullout, I saw a marmot not ten feet from the side of the road. Excitedly, I pulled out the camera and rolled down the window. The marmot hurried right up to the side of the car! I started squeaking and snapping pictures as he stood right up on his hind feet, not a foot from my window. (Pictures to follow.) Another car pulled up behind us, probably seeing the antics of the marmot.

Then, he got down and walked under the car.

We weren't really sure what to do at that point. We sat in the car for a few minutes, trying to look out all the windows to see if he'd emerged on the other side, but to no avail. Then, the car behind us pulled up alongside, and a very nice Australian couple told us that he had gone under, near the back, and was now trying to climb UP into the wheel well, or on top of the exhaust.

At this point, we REALLY didn't know what to do. We both got out of the car, and started trying to make loud noises, though we didn't want to scare him out into traffic! We were both wary that any moment, a Ranger would drive by and stop us for molesting a marmot.

Alas, a ranger did not drive by, though we began to wish for one. The marmot moved out of the rear wheel well toward the front of the car, and then proceeded to try to climb up into the engine bay! I found a stick on the side of the road, and we started hitting the ground and the side of the car, still trying to tell the marmot that this was not a good place to be.

By the way, he was HUGE. Easily once and a half the size of our cat — probably 10–15 pounds of marmot.

Finally, the Husband popped the hood of the car, which startled the marmot enough that he got down onto the ground, and I yelled for the Mister to roll forward, slowly. He did, and Mr. Marmot was left blinking at me in the sunlight. We stared at each other for a moment. I said, "Shoo!" He continued to stare. I moved around to the left, trying to go around him, and suddenly, he bolted, racing back onto the tundra from whence he came.

I got back in the car (after photographing the wildflowers, as they were the original reason we stopped) and we drove for almost half a mile before realizing that the hood was still open.

It was more of an adventure than either of us had counted on.