hale pupule

Tonight, it's two moments while I was watching Glee. One was Becky saying to Will, "Give me chocolate or I will cut you." The other was a HP&tDH commercial when Ron said, "Is there no one we can trust?" and then the next thing you see is Snape. (Hee.)

What can I say? It's been a dull Tuesday; that's the best I could come up with.

voxangelus wrote a ficlet off a prompt of mine and posted it at hpcon_envy, and you can find it here.

My prompt was Brandon and Elinor Snape and Trelawney and a tea set. Bittersweet and worksafe.

Protowilson has really done it this time. Go here and see some gorgeous, somewhat-NSFW Snape fanart.

If I rec a serial drabble on the Digest, Shiv will pull out her dragon eye at me, so I'm reccing it here. Please, PLEASE go read Melusin's What Goes Around ...., which is a serial drabble at TPP. Rated Teen, five chapters posted.

Summary: Down on his luck, Snape returns to Hogwarts to seek employment. Will the Headmistress give him a chance?

Headmistress Hermione has freed the house-elves, of course, and while I doubt she'll end up regretting it, I don't think she's thought of all that freeing them might entail. Chapter five has some delightful developments along that vein.

Fanfic pet peeve number uno:

HOGWART'S

The next time I see this, I shall scream. And if you ask what's wrong with it, I shall thump you.

So what bothers you in fanfics?

She just pimped these at Potter Place, but I was so touched by one of the drabbles that I wanted to rec it here, too: The Twelve Drabbles of Christmas, by Lady Whitehart.

My favorite was "Mistletoe." Go read them all!

Headdesk: I wore my "I See Thestrals" t-shirt last night. (I didn't come up with the joke; readingpoemomm wrote Harry wearing one in her story Incentive.) And ONE person got it. From everyone else, I just got a bunch of weird looks.

*sigh* Well, I thought it was funny. Maybe if it hadn't been ten years since The Sixth Sense, more people would have got the joke.

The party was dull. In previous years, people showed up early and there were a lot of kids. The owner had someone to read the first chapter out loud to the crowd (everyone who could fit inside the shop), had a raffle and games, and played the movie soundtrack music quietly in the background. But last night there were very few kids and no games or other activities. People bought stuff and milled around. That was it. My tendonitis was bothering me -- and I am wretchedly uncomfortable at parties anyway -- so I'd brought an ice pack with me and left it in the car. After a couple of minutes of milling around, I went back out to the car, read Persuasion, and iced my hand until 11:50-ish.

I have lots of the paint/textile medium mixture left over from painting my t-shirt; I need to see if I can touch up my older Weird Sisters t-shirt before the paint dries out. (I'll post photos of both ... as soon as I find my camera.)

For those of you who went, I hope you all had fun at your midnight release parties! And for the rest of you, I hope that your door was the first one the UPS man came to this morning.

Cradle Robber and I e-mailed about six times yesterday -- theories and plans for picking up the book, mostly -- and she's going to Borders today with her two oldest kids. She reads the books out loud to her five kids, and when they're done reading out loud, she keeps on reading. And her husband has reconciled himself to the fact that she gets first crack.

Cradle Robber is so clever. Her hubbyman travels a lot on business. She decided he should read the Harry Potter books, and like me (ages ago), he shrugged the idea off at first. So CR packed his suitcase and carry-on bag for a week-long trip, and packed ONE book for him: Sorcerer's Stone. He was in Brazil or the Czech Republic before he realized that it was all he had to read. He came back home and begged for the second book. Isn't she smart?

Drove to the local art warehouse after work yesterday. They are having a HUGE overstock sale on artist canvases. I've bought about fifteen in the last two weeks, and the warehouse has so many of them, all of the art books are crammed messily against the wall. Mountains of canvases and boxes, piled twelve feet high. And the discounts -- $20 items are going for $5! $15 canvases are going for $3 or $4. Seriously; if any of you know (or are) artists who live in the Orange County area and you/they want to stock up on canvases, you might want to visit the Art Supply Warehouse in Westminster while the getting's good.

Still not finished with DH, but my location will tell you how far along I am. I'm heading back to the recliner now.

Chocolate, Kleenex, and caffiene are purchased.

"I See Thestrals" t-shirt is waiting for me to wear it.

Going into work early so I can come home and take a nap (after a beta job).

I shall spend most of my shift out in the library stacks, away from the computer, and if I have to be at the computer, I shall listen to QI episodes instead of surfing LJ.

Happy reading, everyone. See you on the other side.

Finished GoF today! It's interesting, some of the fanon assumptions that get blown out of the water by reading the Potter books again. I'm drawing my own conclusions here, but this just makes sense to me:

I think it was an early mistake of JKR's to have McGonagall ask Dumbledore how he knew the cat was her, when later on, he's revealed to have been her Transfiguration teacher. (Who's the most likely person in the world to have taught her how to transform?) Nevertheless, it's canon that she never told him. Is it safe to assume, then, that any pre-PS/SS romance between the two of them doesn't exist? (But that doesn't include any romance initiated after 1980!)

Also, about the Dark Mark tattoo. Wizards recognize the Mark in the sky above the campgrounds, after the Quidditch World Cup in GoF. But not even Sirius knew why Severus was clutching at his arm when Barty-as-Moody dropped a hint about spots that don't come off. So Snape's brandishing it in front of Fudge at the end of the book was especially dramatic. (You go, Severus!)

Those are the two I can remember right now, though I do remember that there were more events that occurred that made me think, "Oh, I've been assuming such-and-such was general knowledge because of fanfics I've read, when really, the opposite is true!" For those of you who have been re-reading the books before DH, have you noticed anything like that?