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Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Mexicans |
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You guys have no idea. I feel like I'm on drugs cause I'm so happy this computer is ok now and everything's fine. I've got a bit to talk about, and Saturday's Harry Potter Event was so awesome, I'm making it a seperate entry so you don't have to read one big a** entry, you get two big a** entries, lucky you.
Let's start with Friday morning. I woke up thinking about the damn book, cursing that I didn't work somewhere they had been shipped so I could sneak a peak at something, especially since I found out later, two of my friends had had this privilege cause they work at Supermarkets.
The news had a pretty good report since it was hours away, and I even checked Mugglenet.com, which is like the biggest HP resource site you could ever find. These guys seriously love them some Harry Potter, and I love all their information, plus the design of the pages they built for the release of Half Blood Prince was so cool looking, they had a timer countdown until the Pacific Time Release date. All of this was fine and dandy, except Sophia and I had one problem:
We had like a coin-toss chance of getting to the midnight release. The odds were stacked against us, see we were originally supposed to go with a friend of ours, Amber, the Harry Potter Supremo Fan. But we found out later that her dad didn't want her driving us home that late past curfew, he didn't want her losing her lisence, and she was our only chance, it would be really late when we got out of there. At the release of the 5th book, we actually snuck out and made it back in time using the CAT Bus barely making it home around 2 in the morning like 10 minutes before our dad got home. That was one of the coolest mischief experiences I've ever done, racing the clock, even if it was just for the book.
But this was different, we weren't going to have any trouble, we had already told our dad about the situation, but when he left for work, he was under the impression Amber would pick us up and drop us home. By 1 o'clock that afternoon, this was no longer the case. So things looked hopeless, until Sophia checked the internet, looking for the bus schedules. She thought that maybe if we got outta there early, we could catch one of the last buses. We just wouldn't get to go the Barnes & Noble with Amber, we'd have to go to Border's by ourselves which was just a straight route up and then back down to home. We had 3 chances after the mindight release, so we figured it was our best shot just to tell Amber maybe next time. I called up Border's after Sophia had got the schedules down, and the guy told me they were already handing out tickets to get a copy of the book for people who hadn't reserved. That was our cue, we threw on our shoes and were out the door.
Luckily, the bus came at a reasonable time for the Route that it was, unreliable as it is, and the whole ride there were getting pretty antsy. When we got there, I scanned the store for any sign of activity, we were in the clear, but we had about 6 hours to go. Sophia grabbed our little reserve tickets. We had 6 hours to go, and we were already #63 and #64 on the list. Well, what can you expect from a series that had its last book sell 5 million copies on its opening day?
Since we had plenty of time to kill, we explored for a while, but we didn't wanna waste all of our Border's time until we had to be waiting, so we checked out WOW! which is this huge a** electronics and music store. I think it's like a combination of Tower Records and The Good Guys! Sophia found the new Gorillaz CD, but didn't have enough for both the book and the CD, so she sulked for a while, and I told her to gert over herself, until we stopped at GameStop, and I saw the new Kirby game, and I came up short myself. Well, you reap what you sow.
By then, it was getting dark, so we stopped at Starbucks for some liquid energy for the long night ahead, and headed back to Border's. I flipped through the 11th Series of Unfortunate Events Book, it was so funny how when I had all this oppurtunity, every damn book in the store looked so lovely. By 9 o'clock, the "wizards in training started to arrive", and it was kinda funny, most of the people cosplaying were adults. No Ravenclaw fans though, what a shame, all their dumb scarves were red and green.
Once the people started filing in, we noticed people setting up tables as we were sitting in the kid's section reading. On one side of the store there was a trivia table where you could win little tattoos and other little door prizes, and the other side was a craft table, and Bertie Bott's Bean Sampling. It wasn't too exciting, but I guess for the little size of the store, they sure did the best they could. Barnes & Noble I guess just was really in for this stuff like last year...
Funny how when we saw the corresponding tables, Blue and I split up, she went to work making stuff, I tried answering questions for little flashlights and Fantast Book Samplers. They had Kids, Adult, and Expert sections for each of the kinds of questions, and as big as of a fan as I was, the Expert questions were for true experts. They were from books that the story had made up, but fans had officially published, like Care of Magical Creatures. I won everything I had wanted, then went over to see what Sophia was doing.
When I got over there, they had added face painting, and Sophia had the Chinese symbol for "Dragon" on her left cheek, smiling and holding up several decorated paper bags with glitter and designs and other stuff. They had gluable letters, so she made bags for all of Team 8, and put stamps all over everything. She made one for me and her, with "Red" and "Blue" respectively, except she apologized abot mine. She couldn't find anymore red E's, so she took the end of an I and glues it under an F. You couldn't really tell if you looked far away, maybe we'll show pictures later.
She had ignored the Bean Table with her little artistic genius fit, so I examined the table. The lady was having fun getting little kids and naive adults to try the Soap and Grass flavors. Apparently there were two, new flavors, Bacon and Rotten Egg. I must say the Bacon one was really good if you expecting it to really taste like one, but I will caution anyone to try the Rotten Egg, they really put a lot of work in that one, no one I saw could stomach it without wanting to gag. I offered one to my oblivious sister, saying it was "White Chocolate". She didn't get a good reaction, but I did. She wasn't really happy, and she ran to get a "Butterbeer", these wannabe drinks they were selling. She told me later it was just Italian Soda and Hazelnut syrup, but it got rid of the taste of the bean. I happened to notice my heels were getting kicked a lot more when she walked behind me from then on.
When Sophia was back to normal, we sat back down and tried reading, by then we had about an hour left to wait. We had a good talk about the Butterbeer, since I had now bought one, and they announced over the intercom in hopes of trying to sell it again, always remembering to mention it was non-alcoholic.
"Oh no," Sophia cried out sarcastically. "And I was so looking forward to getting wasted at a book release too." It got a good laugh, especially from a guy sitting next to us with his daughter.
"Hey, don't go knocking down the alcohol, I've been up since 4 this morning, and I'm dead tired." As he said that, he pulled a little flask from his pocket, and took a swig, making sure no one but us were watching.
"Bravo, man, bravo." Sophia was clapping now.
"Heh, you're laughing now, but wait until you have kids who want you to drag you to these when you work all day. This becomes your best friend."
Huh. Maybe that's why my dad's a bartender.
Finally, at about 11:45, people started crowding towards the cashier counters. While we were waiting, I saw the girlfriend of a good friend of mine's, but I couldn't remember her name, and I felt so bad about it, cause it was real hard to talk to her. You ever have that kind fo situation, so to avoid any problems with it, you make conversation that would never need a name. She was telling us how she got such a high ticket number, so I volunteered to buy her book, and finally, when the book was on sale, we had to wait, a little bit, but not much, cause they wee going in groups of 25, so we were 3rd.
We were making awesome time, we got out around 12:15 since all 4 of the counters were open for the sale of the book. We dashed out, said, good-bye to Jason's girfriend, and headed for the stop. We did little jigs all the way there, finally to have copies in our hands.
Unfortunately, the cockroaches having their fiestas with the trash cans nearby were having their midnight prowl, so there was no sitting down and readin to be had. I tried to, but they were everywhere, and Blue was freaking out so bad she was pacing, she had sat down, and like 4 of them had decided to have a meeting right next to her ankles. We finally caught the 12:36 bus, right on time I might add. We tried reading again, but dammit for having no one on that bus, it was hot as hell. It was like 108 degress at midnight, God I hate Las Vegas sometimes.
When we finally got home a little after half past 1, we fixed up the house, did any chores we had missed, showered, and finally tucked in with the books. Poor Blue crashed though, I managed to stay up until about 6 that morning, then took like a 3 hour nap, then finished the book around 1 in the afternoon. Right now I'm re-reading it, Sophie still hasn't finished it yet. I enjoyed this little romp, and I can't wait until the 7th book, but now I feel empty since I'm done with the book, I'm not gonna mentio anything about since it will be hella spoilers, but I'm definetly satisfied, and also deeply saddened. Maybe I need a snack.
EDIT: I just realized how freaking long this entry is. Sorry guys. sweatdrop
Edible Substance · Wed Jul 20, 2005 @ 07:00am · 0 Comments |
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