my weekend
Jul. 18th, 2005 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verbminxOn Friday, I made my last run to the library in a week that was full of library runs (because I KEPT FORGETTING TO TAKE THINGS BACK). I had a $5 fine, which will close your card off in this area. I am such a library addict that I couldn't deal with that, so I paid off $2 so that I could use my card again. However, the clerk who took my payment cleared the whole fine. This has happened to me once before. If it ever happens again I need to see if it's the same clerk. I'm not sure if it's easy to accidentally clear an entire fine when only a partial fine is being paid, or if it was the same clerk both times and he just "likes" me, or what.
There's this old man who stands outside the library asking people to sign his petition. The petition is to get a pet right-wing cause on the local ballots, and I'm not into it, so I always refuse. When I was leaving on Friday afternoon, he said cheerily, "What will it take to get you to sign my petition?" and without missing a beat, I replied, "CANDY." He laughed and said he didn't have any, and I smiled regretfully and said, "Oh, well!" It defused the whole thing nicely. (Although, honestly, decent ice cream would also have been perfectly acceptable.)
My mom came home from work upset about something stupid; we went out for dinner and then picked up Tom and went out for ice cream, because I am an obsessed addict, especially about this one shop. It used to be in Davis Square in Boston, but they moved to Columbus a few years ago to be closer to the owner's in-laws; I don't know whether they closed their Boston locations or sold them as franchises. Afterwards, headed over to Pottersville, which was... not as awful as expected, but still pretty crowded; the main problem was somewhere comfortable to sit.
There was a happy energy in the air. 2 years ago I didn't reserve a copy anywhere, but dropped in to a few store parties to see if you could get a copy if you hadn't reserved one. (No.) The stores all felt terribly... close. Stuffy, overheated, crowded. For some reason the store I was in the other night wasn't nearly as bad; the temp was decent, there was enough personal space, and I had #132. While waiting, and reading the new issue of Shojo Beat, I was surprised by two of Tom's co-workers (including the evangelical one who considers himself super-conservative, though he isn't quite, and who I would never have expected to see there). Talked to them for about an hour, then got my book and came home.
NOTE: INTENSELY BORING PARAGRAPH TO FOLLOW.
If you pre-ordered from Borders you also got a coupon for 25% off any one item with the book purchase, so I got a storage box I've been wanting, just letter-size, a place to hide papers away so I only have to file them every couple of months. I forget where I read that organizational tip, but it suggested that you keep your fileable papers in a small box and only file them when it starts to fill up. The box I got is by PaperChase, striped in many colors, with a grip-hole on the front, and a lid. Most of what I'd file is stuff I've printed out, and that's either writing research (or stuff I think might be useful in that vein in the future), craft patterns (like stuff from Knitty), or things that are more random. I printed out all this year's Guardian Summer Reading Lists, where they asked people like William Boyd, David Mitchell, Zadie Smith etc what they planned to read, for example. I've also printed out notes on how to take notes and notes on specialized techniques for writing Art History papers. Basically, I need to just have fewer loose papers lying around my room without having to run two levels downstairs to file everything right away.
Then, of course, I stayed up until like 7AM, between reading HBP and being online.
There is very little to say about Saturday. I didn't get much sleep and was out of it all day, and kind of grouchy. I napped for maybe 30 minutes partway through the day, watched an episode of Pretear on Anime Network On Demand, drank a lot of tea, and tried to read. The momster and I went out for a drive later in the evening.
I got a good night's sleep but, of course, woke up still feeling pretty tired; this is the way my health is in the last month or so. Hung around the house all day today, taught my mom the basics of how to use iTunes, took a much-needed shower. Talked to Tom when he got off work, and we decided to go see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, although I'm going to be seeing it AGAIN with my mom later this week.
What did I think? Well, I really loved the first version, and this one is a little too glossy. But overall I liked it and recommend it and will probably have other things to say about it later. There are a lot of entertaining film references in it: I caught refs to the first version, to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, This is Spinal Tap, Busby Berkely musicals, and an unmissable and hilarious 2001 tribute. I'm not sure about Elfman's music for the Oompa-Loompa songs, though... they seemed too modern-pop.
Now I'm home and getting ready for BED BED BED. Yes, I tried to get ice cream before coming home, but the ice cream shop decided to close 10 minutes early. Suck! I'm such an addict.
And I still haven't finished the new Potter, and honestly, it's not anywhere near as good as the last 2 or 3. It is most similar to Chamber of Secrets, and indeed, it's kind of a bookend to that, where you find out what was really going on and where some situations are echoed. Apparently JKR wanted to put much of the book's material in COS and couldn't fit it in, something that becomes really apparent when you read HBP. But she has at least made an effort to answer a lot of minor questions that people have had, and to insert the answers into the text invisibly, by which I mean that they come up naturally & aren't forced. Lots of people will have "aha!" moments about lots of small things that they've wondered about.
There's this old man who stands outside the library asking people to sign his petition. The petition is to get a pet right-wing cause on the local ballots, and I'm not into it, so I always refuse. When I was leaving on Friday afternoon, he said cheerily, "What will it take to get you to sign my petition?" and without missing a beat, I replied, "CANDY." He laughed and said he didn't have any, and I smiled regretfully and said, "Oh, well!" It defused the whole thing nicely. (Although, honestly, decent ice cream would also have been perfectly acceptable.)
My mom came home from work upset about something stupid; we went out for dinner and then picked up Tom and went out for ice cream, because I am an obsessed addict, especially about this one shop. It used to be in Davis Square in Boston, but they moved to Columbus a few years ago to be closer to the owner's in-laws; I don't know whether they closed their Boston locations or sold them as franchises. Afterwards, headed over to Pottersville, which was... not as awful as expected, but still pretty crowded; the main problem was somewhere comfortable to sit.
There was a happy energy in the air. 2 years ago I didn't reserve a copy anywhere, but dropped in to a few store parties to see if you could get a copy if you hadn't reserved one. (No.) The stores all felt terribly... close. Stuffy, overheated, crowded. For some reason the store I was in the other night wasn't nearly as bad; the temp was decent, there was enough personal space, and I had #132. While waiting, and reading the new issue of Shojo Beat, I was surprised by two of Tom's co-workers (including the evangelical one who considers himself super-conservative, though he isn't quite, and who I would never have expected to see there). Talked to them for about an hour, then got my book and came home.
NOTE: INTENSELY BORING PARAGRAPH TO FOLLOW.
If you pre-ordered from Borders you also got a coupon for 25% off any one item with the book purchase, so I got a storage box I've been wanting, just letter-size, a place to hide papers away so I only have to file them every couple of months. I forget where I read that organizational tip, but it suggested that you keep your fileable papers in a small box and only file them when it starts to fill up. The box I got is by PaperChase, striped in many colors, with a grip-hole on the front, and a lid. Most of what I'd file is stuff I've printed out, and that's either writing research (or stuff I think might be useful in that vein in the future), craft patterns (like stuff from Knitty), or things that are more random. I printed out all this year's Guardian Summer Reading Lists, where they asked people like William Boyd, David Mitchell, Zadie Smith etc what they planned to read, for example. I've also printed out notes on how to take notes and notes on specialized techniques for writing Art History papers. Basically, I need to just have fewer loose papers lying around my room without having to run two levels downstairs to file everything right away.
Then, of course, I stayed up until like 7AM, between reading HBP and being online.
There is very little to say about Saturday. I didn't get much sleep and was out of it all day, and kind of grouchy. I napped for maybe 30 minutes partway through the day, watched an episode of Pretear on Anime Network On Demand, drank a lot of tea, and tried to read. The momster and I went out for a drive later in the evening.
I got a good night's sleep but, of course, woke up still feeling pretty tired; this is the way my health is in the last month or so. Hung around the house all day today, taught my mom the basics of how to use iTunes, took a much-needed shower. Talked to Tom when he got off work, and we decided to go see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, although I'm going to be seeing it AGAIN with my mom later this week.
What did I think? Well, I really loved the first version, and this one is a little too glossy. But overall I liked it and recommend it and will probably have other things to say about it later. There are a lot of entertaining film references in it: I caught refs to the first version, to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, This is Spinal Tap, Busby Berkely musicals, and an unmissable and hilarious 2001 tribute. I'm not sure about Elfman's music for the Oompa-Loompa songs, though... they seemed too modern-pop.
Now I'm home and getting ready for BED BED BED. Yes, I tried to get ice cream before coming home, but the ice cream shop decided to close 10 minutes early. Suck! I'm such an addict.
And I still haven't finished the new Potter, and honestly, it's not anywhere near as good as the last 2 or 3. It is most similar to Chamber of Secrets, and indeed, it's kind of a bookend to that, where you find out what was really going on and where some situations are echoed. Apparently JKR wanted to put much of the book's material in COS and couldn't fit it in, something that becomes really apparent when you read HBP. But she has at least made an effort to answer a lot of minor questions that people have had, and to insert the answers into the text invisibly, by which I mean that they come up naturally & aren't forced. Lots of people will have "aha!" moments about lots of small things that they've wondered about.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-07-18 05:09 am (UTC)Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-18 05:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-18 05:27 am (UTC)(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-07-18 06:14 am (UTC)also, you're being owned if you think a certain character is evil. there are a million clues in the book before the incident happens that show how it's being setup. read the post on my lj, I've detailed it.
I also have to disagree about the overall quality of HBP. I think it's a billion times better than OotP, which was so tiresome to read, and formulaic. far less school assignment shit, and not more whiney harry.
I'm refusing to even download charlie and the chocolate factory, just on principle. this is a movie that did not need to be remade, and only did so to try and make money. as much affection as I have for johnny depp (and I don't have as much affection left for tim burton, who by now seems more and more like a musician who only knows 2 or 3 chords), I really hope this movie bombs, and hollywood somehow gets the hint that we don't want to see remakes anymore.
(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-07-18 07:04 pm (UTC)Agree about the 0wnz0rship - it COULD go either way, but a lot depends on the fact that GUESS WHAT HARRY PEOPLE DON'T TELL YOU EVERYTHING. Could definitely be read both ways. I think the signal event is that the "evil" one doesn't kill Harry when he has the chance: ONLY HARRY CAN KILL VOLDEMORT. So the dead character is basically acting all Obi-Wan.
I much preferred OotP to HBP, though. I'm not going to list why. And I'm not quite done with HBP, still have a few chapters to go. The one thing I can say is that it consists (admittedly on JKR's part) of a lot of material that was left out of CoS, and it feels patched-together to me; there isn't nearly as much story meat in it as there was in the last few books. If you disagree, you disagree!
(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-07-18 07:13 pm (UTC)Alas your hopes for bombing are not coming true; it had a bigger opening weekend than Pirates of the Caribbean and has generally gotten good reviews. I thought it was fun, but it's not my fave movie this summer; I didn't find it as consistently delightful as Howl's Moving Castle, for example.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-19 06:42 am (UTC)