Wish List: More Nerd Shirts

I can't think of the last time I wanted a t-shirt so badly!
"No Power in the Verse Can Stop Me"


This one is also adorable. "Wash"


Another excellent choice. "I'm a Keeper"

Harry Potter is a'coming

Only 8 days until I get to watch the next and final Harry Potter film. How sad and amazing and wonderful! I've had this delightful earworm stuck in my head for two days now - lucky me. ;)

And just a few days after the movie I'm competing in a Harry Potter themed quiz called the Geeky Cauldron. I'm rallying my friends David and Erin to help me to victory (because they're awesome, and because Joanna and Grags don't live here). When we win we will get a cash prize of anywhere between $200 and $500, depending on how many people show up.

I'm rereading Deathly Hallows now, plus going through Harry: A History again. Then I'm going to read Tales of Beedle the Bard once more; I read it once a long time ago, so I need a refresher course. I've been to these GeeksWhoDrink quizzes- they don't mess around. These questions will be obscure and difficult. Bring it on!

Poster Mash-Ups

I have just found this wonderful weekly feature on Empire Online. Each week has a theme and you submit a poster mashing the given theme with some random (hopefully clever) movie. I'm going to show you my favorites, most of which are Doctor Who, plus one great Harry Potter one. Most of the Harry Potter posters were sadly lame.

Doctor's Eleven

Ood Morning Vietnam

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Doctor Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Star Trek Regenerations

Hogwarts Express

Wish List: DVD Edition

I never realized how expensive is a season ("series") of Doctor Who. Luckily, Amazon has some good deals, comparitively. Here are just a few things on my Wish List (more to come):

Doctor Who, the Complete First Series, $43.99
Doctor Who, the Complete Second Series, $44.49

Doctor Who, the Complete Third Series , $44.49


Doctor Who, the Complete Fourth Series, $43.99

Community, Season One, $26.99

Interview with a Vampire, $8.99

Harry Potter, Years 1-6 Gift Set, $39.99 (I bought this for Mom's bday and she loves it)

Glee Season 1, $37.99 (maybe...)

A video that makes my heart sing

If you can watch this video without even a tiny smile, you don't watch enough good TV. There, I said it. Thank you Pajiba for sharing this with me. I will never need Prozac.



These are the ones I recognized (feel free to add those I missed in the comments):
Community
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Doctor Who (Doctors 9, 10 and 11, though I would have liked more Tennant)
(500) Days of Summer
Outsourced
School of Rock
Little Miss Sunshine
Dollhouse
Firefly
13 Going on 30
Modern Family
I Love You, Bro
Labyrinth
Love, Actually
Fringe (I think)
Pirate Radio (I think)
Pirates of the Carribean
LOST (only a short clip, but a great one)
Supernatural (I think)

(And by the way, someone please tell me the show/actor winking around the :45 second mark)
(UPDATE: The wink is the new Sherlock Holmes, which was what I thought...)

Like It's Quidditch

You will probably want to hate me for this, but don't. I'm too precious.

(CAUTION: Earworm)

Wish List: Harry Potter edition

I did a little window-shopping on Etsy this afternoon, and I found some super cute HP inspired products. How fun is this stuff?

Owl Post box


Baby Hat (and no, I don't need one yet, but I find cute baby stuff all the time that I want to secretly stockpile)


Wrock tee shirt (or almost anything from this Etsy shop)
To be fair, I'm not sure I would wear it out of the house much, for the exhaustion of constantly explaining it.


HP Themed Magnets


And finally, one for Grags:

Draco Mathers

I love when they do this:

Go Harry Potter, Indeed

It made my day, too, kid:

I work in a bookstore. Today a girl wearing a Team Edward shirt came up and bought five "for dummies" books. Later, a girl around the same age came in wearing a Team Harry shirt and bought a 700 page small print biography of Neil Armstrong. Go Harry Potter IMMD

ItMadeMyDay.com

Menacing Muggles

Funny video of me and Grags being the BIGGEST dorks around.

Sidebar: I HATE the way I look on video in basically every scenario ever. Either I'm simply not photogenic, or I have a completely unrealistic view of myself in real life.
Here we continue our nerd-journey:



I know, I know, I'm a huge nerd. But you're my friends, so what does that make you?

Excuse me?!?

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was knocked out of Box Office first place by effing G-FORCE?!?!?

WHAT THE FLAGNOT?!?

Harry Potter Day

HAPPY HARRY POTTER DAY!!!

Fun pics from the London Premiere of Half Blood Prince

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you some of the cast of the newest Harry Potter film. A few notes: Emma Watson is so classy, and that dress - WANT! And Matthew Lewis is not the pudgy, awkward child we met in The Sorceror's Stone...

Also, Miss Jessie Cave... no ma'am... just, shame on you...

TFLN Delivery

So, one of my guilty pleasures is reading "texts from last night" online. Often hilarious, often immeasurably offensive, so they cetainly aren't for everyone. And every once in a while, they make me spit out coffee. Today's delivery:
(917): I just ate an adderall and jelly sandwich in front of my mom. Homework time!
For some reason, it made me happy. Now, to be fair, when I took Adderall, it was a necessary prescription (please, dear God, let me back on!), and I get the impression this person may not have a legal script for said "homework helpers". But either way, I'm diggin' it.

For old times' sake, here is one of my favorites:
(818): I can only speak casual parseltoungue, im not bad though. just the general, "wheres the bathroom?" "open the chamber of secrets" that type of stuff

LURVE IT!

Oh, and by the way, 20 DAYS UNTIL HP: HBP!!!

Validation for my Other Side

Most of my life, I have been someone who did not mind messes, who left projects unfinished, who only remembered to pay a bill when it was shoved in my face; someone with little to no organizational skills.

While some of these qualities are still a constant battle, I have trained my brain to be freakishly organized about a few things. I keep an extremely detailed budget on file (really, it is a combonation of balancing a checkbook and planning ahead for major and/or consistent costs). Spreadsheets have become a bit of a crutch for me, but I just LOVE them!

Every week I get an email newsletter from AllEarsNet.com - they are a website essentiallly designed to help you plan vacations to Disney World (WDW), with some additional tips for DisneyLand and the cruises. The bulk of the newsletter is an article; sometimes these are completely boring or irrelevant to me, other times they are fun bits of history or trivia. This week, the article is all about a mom whose WDW vacay plans are always meticulously planned out on spreadsheets. Let me tell you, reading her article was so cathartic and validating! I have never been more proud of my own neurosis. As she discussed her specific design and her plan strategy, I got the itch to go look at mine from our last vacation. Mine may not have been quite so set-in-stone as hers, because I knew we would need spontaneity for Brad's first trip, but the idea and the feeling were the same.

Now I cannot wait to start planning our next trip, but I can't get much progress done any time soon. We are hoping to visit again next November; it would essentially be a birthday trip for me, which is why we would hop over to Universal to see The Wizarding World fo Harry Potter theme park, which is slated to open around that time! I have never been to WDW outside of summer, so this will be a whole new perspective ("A whole new world!") for me, and the WWoHP will be immeasurably wonderful.

Anyway, my point is that I cannot plan too extensively yet, as the park prices are not set for Nov 2010, and it would be pretty hard to set times/dates/prices for flights then, as well. But I can dream, and oh-so-slowly accumulate plans and tips.

Spreadsheet, here I come!

Half Blood Prince date Moved AGAIN!

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince will now open on Wednesday, July 15th at midnight.

I would complain that they keep changing things, but a)that is two days sooner, and b)this works better for my schedule. Now it will less likely interfere with Morgan's wedding plans. I was going to have to maneuver a midnight showing after a shower, but NOW I have all the time in the world!

So, who (that will be in Houston) wants to go with me? I know Andy wants to see the midnight showing, although he may regret inviting me along when he sees me outfit... whatevs. Hey grags, when are we getting shirts made?!?

Joy

I am not generally one to frequent Buddhist book clubs, but I know a good quote when I hear one:
"Whatever joy there is in this world,
All comes from desiring others to be happy;
And whatever suffering there is in this world,
All comes from desiring myself to be happy." (Buddhist Indian saint Shantideva )

Oddly enough, I found this quote on a message board where a battle has been raging on for over a week now. It concerns "The Role of Religion in the Potterverse", and some are taking the side that JKR's faith influenced the telling of this story and the quality of the characters. Others believe that there is no religious influence, only moral. And some (well, one long-winded man) want to fight for the right to claim those religious beliefs are from other or all religions, not Christianity.

It is actually a very interesting conversation to follow, even if I find my eyebrows raised frequently.

New Harry Potter info!!

First of all, great info on the Sectumsempra scene, via The Leaky Cauldron:

Also of note in the magazine are comments from actor Tom Felton on the infamous Sectumsempra scene in Half-Blood Prince. Tom says of the emotional confrontation between his character of Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter (Dan Radcliffe): "It was great. We spent a week in this misty bathroom set, rolling around in the water having all sorts of fights. Its a longer sequence than it is than in the book." The article continues: "There is blood-but also some fleshing out. This film develops the character further than before," he says. "We take the chance to explain why he's such a complete cretin, that he's not just doing it for the sake of doing it."

Another article on Leaky explained an extended trailer which was released at ShoWest. The details are incredible:
Cinemablend also has a longer article on the trailer. Most of what was described seems to be what we saw in the recently released trailer at the beginning of the month, with the footage of the attack on the Burrow, and the Inferi, however it does seem there was at least one new, and rather plot revealing, piece of dialogue, as they state "Dumbledore also has a line of dialogue that definitely isn't part of the book-- "Voldemort has chosen Draco Malfoy for a mission."

I am a whole new kind of excited!

Morning Realization

So I'm sitting at my desk. I'm going over documents and drawings to send to the customer, which is *oh* so exciting. I really want to take my shoes off (which I very often do), but we have international customers in the building, and I don't want to look silly. In my new desk setup, my feet are very visible to everyone who walks by me, and I am in a heavily trafficked area. I'm eating my fruit and yogurt parfait, complete with yummy granola sprinkles.

And I suddenly realize how incredibly blessed I am.

Really. I complain about this job (plenty), but I make a decent wage. I have health benefits. I get to carpool and save money on gas and tolls. I have the option to earn overtime. And I occasionally get a free sandwich (mmm, Jason's Deli).

I have the love of an amazing man. Brad is truly a blessing to me and to my family. He has a great family, whom we get to see soon. We are really developing similar passions; lately we have spent our free time studying wine, learning the regions and the varietals, how to pair with food, etc. And there is a pretty good chance that we are buying a house in the next few months!

I have wonderful friends. There is always someone who wants to watch a chick flick, grab a beer, obsess over Harry Potter, reminisce, go to an Astros game, go to the Chocolate Bar, play board games, or even put me in their portfolio. They bring me such joy in so many different ways.

I can spend a long time complaining. It is quite easy, most of the time, to feel heavy with burden. But all it takes is to sit back and really count your blessings, and your frustrated sigh turns into a giggle at somethign as simple as a text message.

I pray that you can sit back today and count your blessings. I promise you, they outweigh your burdens. Put down your stress about jobs, about relationships, about money, about weight, about time, and pick up the book.

Messiah's Muggles

Hello Friends!

For those of you who do not know, my friend Grags and I have a blog / podcast dedicated to our Christian viewpoint on Harry Potter. Yeah, yeah, we're dorks, but we rock, so love it. Please go check it out, especially if you love Harry Potter, Jesus, or heck, even if you just love me! Listen to the podcasts; our overwhelming dorkiness is sure to bring a smile to your face:
www.messiahsmuggles.blogspot.com

Let me know what you think of it; Grags has updated the site and it is all spiffy and shiny now!