The View From Kalamazoo

Finally! left B&N at 1:30 a.m. yesterday (after an 8:00 p.m. arrival, I’m not crazy!) with book and child.

Child looked adorable (I made her a butterbeer-cork necklace to go with her Quibbler prop) and very Luna-like. The girls were giggly and giddy and goofy. There were lines to stand in (and stand in, and how long have we been standing in this @#*&%! line?), lame (really lame) games for them to play, and once we were wrist-banded and numbered we (the girls and I and the other Mom and her Sis) cut it across the parking lot for Bilbo’s bread sticks and mixed drinks (and Sprite, obviously). And laptop showing Prisoner of Azkaban (we started in the B&N Starbucks, but it was crowded, loud, and neither girl reads well enough to watch the movie with subtitles alone). Around 11:00 p.m. we wandered back to the store, which was even more, unbelievably, packed than it had been when we left. Herded like cattle (moo), and ended up settling the girls under a display table to wait for midnight…they weren’t underfoot, could peer out at some of the costumes (some were really well done, others not so much. lots of muggles, of course…) and as we waited and waited some more for our number to come up (so we could stand in another line!) they lay their heads down and chilled out.

I waited to start reading (being old and needing sleep), and had many parenting-type interruptions (the kids wanted to be fed at regular intervals – can you believe it?!?), but managed to finish all 759 pages last night anyway. With a slight headache from eyestrain. LOL

No spoilers here. I’ve started commenting a bit on my lj because it has a cut feature, and have left them public entries, so if you’re looking for somewhere to chat about things (or if you’ve not read it but are desperate for spoilers for some nutty reason) you’re welcome to come visit.

[nerd] Yes, I did dress up – sort of. I went lazy and wore my MA graduation robes (with those ridiculous sleeves!) over jeans and a t-shirt I made for the occasion. Ink jet iron-on transfer paper and Photoshop are my friends. The design came from offhand online conversations with friends about our age and the presence of a lot of youth at the release parties (that eventually devolved into wicked comments I’ll not share here). So I pulled images from the web and made graphics of many of the adult characters for aforementioned friends, turning one into my Potterwear for the evening: a really fantastic photo of Rickman as Snape in a dark dungeon (very Diego Velazquez) over which I disclosed, in bright green print, that I am ‘Old enough to date Severus Snape’. Bwahahahaha. Lots of amused comments about it at the bookstore from other older-and-female Potter readers. [/nerd]