Sunday, July 17, 2005

Oh, btw, my new favorite British word is "snogging." Though, I suppose, I don't get to use it in context anywhere much at all, but it just makes me laugh everytime I hear it. I guess the book kind of did that too...gotta admit there's some funny humor in the book!
Okay...OKAY...I'm SORRY...I haven't updated this in well over a month! I've been nagged about it too, but I've just been too lazy to update.

So...my NEW news...comes to...NOTHING! Just working, volunteering at the aquarium, reading books, and lounging around the house. I was going to write all my lovely stories about work, but there's just too many and it'd take forever in a day to write them and not everyday I get interesting/grumpy/rude customers. So...bypassing all of that....

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is WONDERFUL. I finished it yesterday (Sunday). I promise not to give any spoilers. I worked the release of the book. I worked till 2am on Saturday and had to be back at work at 3pm on Sat. I didn't fall asleep till around 4am and slept SOLID till 1pm. What really did me in for getting the book done in less than 2 days was...I stayed up till the wee hours of the night last night. 5am! I closed Sat too, so...I didn't get home till around midnight.

The book is excellent, but there's a few things I'm pondering about and obviously I have that feeling of things are unresolved, obviously. Can't wait till the 7th and last one comes out in 2 years! Till then...I'm going to reread the the 6th book, again, to see if I missed anything and then go back and reread 1-5 in order with 6th as the last one to see if I can see anything new. I am slightly confused on the so-called connection between the 2nd book (Chmaber of Secrets) and this book. I see it and I don't. Maybe I made it into a bigger thing then it was, but none-the-less it is time to start figuring out new things and new ponderings of what will happen.

As for the release night it was...NUTS...I went in my "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good" t-shirt and my HP scarf that my mom made me (which looked REALLY good). I had to be at work at 6pm and activities started at 9pm. The activities were crazy...I'm glad I wasn't in our kids area because it was just PACKED with kids. I got a lot of posters from various books (The Eldest, by Christopher Paolini comes out in the end of Aug and that poster is pretty cool!). They were pretty cool activities, but it was hard to do with so many kids. At 11pm we kicked everyone out and had them line up for the release. My mom and I had gotten tickets at 9am (when the store opened) and we were numbers 62-64! This guy camped out in front of the store last night...he got to the store at a quarter till 5am! Our workers don't even come in till 5am M-F!! He was nuts... Though we had 62-64 in our numbers, it only took us about 15 minutes to get our tickets. Each ticket represents one book and some people had reserved more than one copy. When we reopened the store we actually blocked off the rest of the store and had tape on the floor so people would "flow" in a line the right way. We had all 6 registers open (I worked at one of them) and we had 3 people handling books/tickets. 1 person to punch their tickets, one to put the ticket with the "reserve" sticker facing up on the book, 1 person to get the books from the boxes. The customer would bring their books to us and we'd check them out. We went through 400-500 people in a little over an hour! It was unbelievable how fast and seemless the process was. People were complimenting us on how well it went compared to book 5, which I hear was a DISASTER and people were at the store way past 3am. In that 24 hrs we sold about 1,000 books.

Whelps...I believe that's it! I shall waddle along to bed now since I work tomorrow (or today, I suppose) at 1pm. Hope everyone is doing well!