Harry Pottermania

This past weekend was pretty fast-paced. Thursday we left for Stockton to stay with my family. Once there, we started off the Harry Potter festivities by seeing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the movie theater with my sister Colleen (her second time seeing it - everyone else had already seen it). It was an okay movie, but it felt a bit too rushed. The next day, Gilda called Barnes & Noble to find out when the Harry Potter book 7 party started since we had seen conflicting times listed. They said the party started at 8pm but that they were starting to hand out numbers for the midnight lines to get the book at 3pm. So we got there around 3:30ish and after an hour or so in line (Gilda mostly holding our place while E and I wandered inside), we procured four tickets for the family (we ended up having tickets numbered in the high 180's/low 190's range).

Later that night, we had a hard time getting E to sleep so the rest of my family went there ahead of us. E , however, would not sleep and not wanting to place a burden on my grandparents (at whose house we were staying), we ended up taking her with us to B&N. There, we met up with Colleen, Drew (my youngest brother - Jordan had to work that night), my mom, and Gabriel (brother-in-law). They had commandeered a couple of tables and some chairs in the Starbucks cafe area and were courageously guarding them. So when we got there, we took shifts guarding the chairs while others went to check out all the other stuff going on. My sister Andrea was working at B&N that night and was doing facepainting for all the "kids" (really, most of the people in line seemed to be pretty old) and they were handing out cute glow-in-the-dark Harry Potter glasses that looked extra cute the few seconds E allowed them to be placed upon herself. There were also some great costumes about. All in all, there were well over 1,000 people in there, some of them looking very hot and/or tired as the night wore on. When they actually started calling numbers, the lines went super-quick and we were out of there within 15 or 20 minutes after they started.

By now, of course, Gilda and I have both finished the book and it's by far my favorite of the whole series. I was pretty happy that I had correctly predicted the basics of the ending! You can really see the Christian and Lewisian influences come to fruition in this last book (I've heard more than once that Rowling has said that she's a Christian, and this is more obvious in this last book than in any of the previous ones - strange, then, the accusations of some well-meaning people (who probably have never read the books) that the books are "evil"!). Highly recommended.

Party pictures forthcoming.

(UPDATE: Pictures are in our Flickr Photo Banner to the right. Click on the pictures and see a larger version. Let's say we had some fun... and E was too cute... but now, a week and a half later, we're still "paying" for it in messed up schedules and sleepless nights. blah)