long story short people… i’m quite tired… I spent 1200 bucks on a bunch of swords for my sister’s birthdays and christmases for the next two years because the entire brand is going away, and I had to get a bit tiffy with some really rude paypal people… had an extra unexpected guest who arrived about one thirty in the morning (we were already expecting one, so it wasn’t a total surprise…!) and then at about 9:45, my banking center had a bomb threat called in! We spent two hours in the heat watching as AA County cops and bomb squad, AA County Fire Department, and the Federal Department of Homeland Security peoples search the entire banking center before clearing it… (yeah, calling in a bomb threat to a member of the federal reserve brings in the DHS people!) And then to top it off, as a “sales and service specialist” stand-in (until I get my promotion to the SSS position at another banking center) I got hit with all the people walking in the building with the “OMG I saw the cops today!! Were you guys robbed??” which meant that I told the story over and over and over again! This was of course happening while I was playing phone tag with my corporate recruiter working out my final propotion wrinkles, just really small ones like what my salary will be, when I get to move into the new postion, etc. Did i forget to mention the freakishly wierd nightmare I had about a worm/centipedeish creature who was trying to bite me, and whose bites were deadly, which meant at best I started today with only about four hours of sleep?

Its only nine pm, but I will very soon be hitting the sack and bring this day to an end!

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about to collapse

What I am going deaf listening to::
Ender’s Shadow Audiobook by Orson Scott Card

So friday night was a bit hectic… it didn’t help that I had to work a ten hour shift right before heading up there! Now that I think about it, with the other book premieres I got a chance to sleep until about four or five, which explained why i could last all night reading… definately made a difference. I chose to go to the Barnes and Noble at PowerPlant in Baltimore, which could potentially be the largest book store in the state… its positively huge!! Anyways, Kev met me at my house, and I took a little mindless break before picking up Erin to hit the bookstore. I sillily found my HP robes and danced around the house in them… I even packed them in my purse in case I felt the absolute urge to wear them later. The trip up there was easy, and we found absolutely wonderful parking… I don’t think people realize the wonder of one way parking garages. Rather than having everyone go up and down the same slopes, some newer garages have opposite slopes, each going one way… every two ramps or so, they intersect for people to exit. I immediately went back to exit rather than go up five or six floors, and we found that NOBODY had parked on the exit side ramps… we were just one floor up, right in front of the elevators and stairs, which was closest to the street we needed to be on! It was fabulous thinking on my part… I might be a very smart girl afterall!
Anyhoo, the store was relatively quiet when we got there at eight, but we were certainly not the first to arrive… My sister and her boyfriend arrived an hour earlier, and landed us our relatively great spot in line, #103. Now that might not sound fabulous, but considering there were about two thousand people in line to buy books, I think 103 is good enough!
The night was beautiful weatherwise… we couldn’t have asked for much more at all… Twilight on the harbor was striking, and to show my point, I snapped a few shots of the Baltimore Inner Harbor for you folks out there…

This, btw, was the view we had from the sushi restaurant we ate at, sitting on the harborside balcony in that weather!! Just a short walk took us back, hands loaded with ice cream, to the sight that was Barnes and Noble. But then that was when the night got crazy… It turns out that the Japanese Anime Convention, OdiCon, was in town, so some of the crazier people were out for the party as well… there were people running around in all sorts of odd costumes… it would have been one thing if we were all in hp robes, but seeing some of the absolutely mental people there, I held back from pulling out my robes and just chilled as a muggle. About half an hour before the book was to be released, we actually went inside, but were shuffled and shoved around hurriedly. I had to fight my way to be one of the first in the “hundreds” group in the line, I had been shoved that far back. But in the end, I walked out with five brand new books and I only waited twenty minutes total from release to my escape from the store.

Was it worth going? Absolutely. Its rare for any kind of literary event to happen these days… booksigning sessions are rarer and rarer, and it is pitiful at the press and raves potential books get these days… if more book releases were like major movie releases, maybe people would read more! But on top of that, I knew friday night was historical, and I chose not a small bookstore, but a huge mob to be a part of it. Its a memory that will be tied to a story that has been a big part of my life the past seven years that I’ve been a HP fan. It is a literary revolution that has swept the world, and it has brought people back to the written word in ways not many have done since the dawn of the television and the silver screen. And its been a part of my journey.

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nostalgic

I’ve completed the last ever installment of Harry Potter, some mysteries came to a conclusion, some I don’t think did. All in all I’m okay with how it ended. I will not give out any spoilers here, and if any one comments, leave readers to find the answers themselves. I cried, I laughed, and i’ve mentally tallied up my favorite parts of the epic to include sections of book seven. But I’m not saddened with the knowledge that there will not be a new Harry Potter book to look forward to. My fascination with the series is partly due to the expansion of the world… most of my enjoyment of the world of harry potter is the extensions i write into it, not necessarily only the dogmatic limitations. Rowling created a world we can step into and find homes in, and it is that characteristic that makes a science-fiction/fantasy story really shine out above the rest. For me it always has been… Lewis, Asimov, Herbert, Tolkien, Card… and of course in that list is Rowling and Lucas. Heck, I’m just kinda glad she didn’t end the world as it would conflict with my extensions… it took me a while when Lucas changed around my version of the Star Wars universe to settle back into the prequels… I had nearly lost my fandom until I could negotiate a settlement with my own extensions and the prequel dogma.
alas, i still must sigh with the completion of this epic. I don’t think we’ll ever hear from the magical world of Harry Potter again, but just as Harry Potter swooped into literary history, so too will another tale unravel itself for us muggles to enjoy!

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*sigh*

Literally, two years… July 19th, 2005, when I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I’ve laid low the past couple of weeks on the internet, have refrained from visiting any website that might possibly leak anything on Harry Potter, and even have picked up other books to read patiently until then. Naturally my choices of books could have been better. Only someone silly like myself would go and start reading Stephen King’s “The Stand” one day before Harry Potter will be in my hands. But given how big a fan Mr. King is of Harry Potter, I think he’ll forgive me. For someone who has never finished one of his books, I strangely find Stephen King fascinating as a reader and literary genius. In his book critiques I’ve read, I’ve fallen for every book he’s lauded, and some of the greatest works he’s claimed as his inspiration I also share in my joy. So, I am determined to finish the book, if nothing else than my list of “unfinished books” is way too long!

I could go on for an hour or more on the events of the past two weeks, but to keep it short, as I’ve got to go to work *bah* I drove to Philadelphia with an AMUN staffer and we went to a Phillies/Cardinals game and went for actual philly cheesesteaks afterwards… the line to get the steaks was longer than getting in the game! But all in all I think the two of us had a lot of fun! This was of course only a few weeks after he also came up to Baltimore to go see the O’s and Yanks play. I’m not a huge fan of baseball, but I’m always up for getting out of the house a little bit. And its interesting to see how the real fanatics react with every pitch… I suppose I must look like that whenever i walk into a bookstore or the DVD section of any electronic store!

While I can’t go into them right now, I have seen the trifecta of summer movies… naturally Harry Potter on the Tuesday night premier, Transformers on the Fourth of July, and Die Hard 4. Gosh I miss going to the movies this often!!! They were all great in their own ways, even if HP was cut in half!!

I’m still patiently waiting for any answer on my work situation, but I am losing hope every day. *sadsigh*

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just try to cut in front of me in line!!!

What I am going deaf listening to::
Used To ~ Daughtry

So I started this post last week and managed to lose it (but long story short) I’m bringing it back because its actually kinda cool! I’m in the middle of cataloging my entire book collection, sadly most of which is going into boxes and storage, but being the anal-retentive/slightly OCD person, I want to know exactly where each and every book I have is located so I can find it when I’m suddenly on a whim to read Aristophanes or find out more about dalmations. I’ve completed 602 books cataloged and organized, and have about two hundred more to go. Not all of them were originally mine. Some have been inherited from family members who are a little more flippant about books. Don’t get me wrong, there are definately books that can be tossed or donated to the library without a second thought. But there are some that just need to be saved… they are just that awesome. One such book I found is “The Cuban and Porto-Rican Campaigns” by Richard Harding Davis. I think it was my maternal grandfather’s book. Like many of the books I inherited from him, it was published a loooong time ago, but until I opened up the credits page, I didn’t know how old. It was a first publication in 1898, the same year of the Spanish-American War!! Its a journalistic account first hand of a right-hand man of Teddy Roosevelt during the campaigns, which is in and of itself historical! (Remember, I have a degree in History!!) But what is really kind of cooler, this book has been such an influence that it is still being republished today!! Many books of the past get one publication and thats it… not enough sales, poor quality writing, a bad decision by the editor, etc. But according to Amazon.com a new edition was released in 2002, fascimiling the original to keep formatting and such. A quick search showed two booksellers selling the original London 1899 release (Mine is a New York 1898 release) for anywhere in the range of $35-$65, which is astronimically priced compared to the $1 my grandfather bought it for (and that was the “new book price”, he could have bought it for much less!)… So in short, I found a century old book in my house that is actually of historical significance and is the type of book historians go to for research on the Spanish-American War (First hand accounts? Absolutely!! no better type of resource!!)… it makes the historian and archivist in me just giggle with excitement!!

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nerdy

What I am going deaf listening to::
White and Nerdy ~ Weird Al

So, about a week ago I started getting these email messages like three times a day from my server stating that Wordpress is out of date and that I need to update. So I go ahead and update it, saving copies of all my layouts and customized themes, etc. And despite what some of the support forum posts stated about fantasico updating wordpress, it went off without a hitch. Except for one small detail. On my administration panel, I edited some of the PHP in the posting pages to include custom html for my avatars and my emoticons. Not wanting to rewrite five days of code, I put in a request to technical support to untar the backup and send me the files so I can copy and paste it, as the upgrade directions stated could happen. Instead they do not one but two sloppy restores, and at one point the blog’s database was gone. Thankfully they were able to restore it correctly, and I was able to reupgrade. Oh, and as it turns out if they couldn’t send me the files I wasn’t out of luck. I had a post I had been working on still under the old system and I was able to save the html code and put it into the new PHP files. For a while I thought it was all gone… it was only a three day minor panic attack, really… *sigh*

So eventually, hopefully i’ll update on the O’s/Yanks game I went to on thursday, my family’s incredibly lethargic saturday, and whatever it was i was updating last week (of which i’ve completely forgotten… this is why I’m supposed to update the blog… I have a horrific memory for these kind of things)
*Edit ten seconds later* Now I know what it was about!! I was about a unique antique book I found in my book collection… I’ll get back to that as well.**

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blehness

My television is currently diverting my attention with::
Standoff on me DVR!