So. Harry Potter. I have read book seven (Deathly Hallows – and I will not spoil a single detail of the plot on this site, so don’t panic) . And I am satisfied. Not necessarily surprised by anything in the book, even the parts that were probably supposed to be big surprising twists, but I didn’t mind simply having all my hunches confirmed.
We’d debated waiting til Saturday morning to get our book, but we both decided that the chances of us going to a midnight book release party again (or, for that matter, caring enough about any other book to even consider a midnight book release) were pretty much nonexistent. So Richard picked up our armband for our place in line to get our pre-reserved book Friday morning at the Borders in Davis. By the time he got there, at about 11-ish, we were #281 in line. By the time we got there at shortly before midnight, people were still picking up armbands, and they had at least six groups of 150 people each already assigned. It was kind of a mob scene. Not as many people in costume as I’d expected – although there were a bunch of (very sleepy looking) kids in wizarding robes, so that was cute.
Anyway. We got our copy by about 1 am. I started reading while standing in line waiting to pay, and continued reading on the drive home. Richard went to bed, and I stayed up and finished the whole thing by a little before 4:30 am. Considering the longest of the series took me about 5 hours to plow through the first time I read it, 3 1/2 hours isn’t bad at all.
Richard’s been reading it on and off ever since, and I am doing my very best to just stay out of his way (although I admit to occcasionally wandering by to ask how far he’s gotten). Unfortunately for him, he didn’t get to just sit down and read it Saturday morning. I’ve been pushing pretty hard to blitz through as much of the remaining flooring as possible this weekend, because I am so incredibly sick of it not being done, so we spent about four or five hours yesterday afternoon finishing off the guest room, the guest room closet, and most of the hallway. We also discovered just why it is that they claim laying laminate flooring yourself is so easy. If that’s all the square footage we wanted to do, we could have slammed that down in less than a day. It was all the weird angles and curves and the sheer size of the space in the master suite that made all the previous floor-laying so annoying. There are only two small areas left to finish, and those have to wait until we figure out what to do about transition strips between laminate and tile, but the bulk of it is done, and it is finally feeling as if maybe there is a light at the end of this tunnel after all.
In between reading and flooring, we also went and got haircuts, and then finally swung by the Sacramento Food Co-op on the way home, since we’d yet to go there since we moved in. It looks like it’s got the same kind of stuff as the one in Davis, which is nice, and it’s definitely within biking distance (when we ever emerge from the quagmire of flooring and unpacking enough to inflate our bike tires and track down our helmets and actually purchase some baskets and locks). And it provided dinner in the form of lowfat hummus and naan, with a side of edemame from Trader Joe’s just to round things out.
Today I am really hoping that we can unpack and/or rearrange enough of the remaining boxes and random stuff so that the living room, dining room, and kitchen can be cleaned. The kitchen is especially important since we’ve got people coming over Tuesday afternoon to look at it and (hopefully) give us some ideas for how to transform it from its current state of ‘quite horrible’ to something far more functional in the near future. I am also returning the table saw to my knitting mom, because she’s going to be starting a new flooring project of her own later this week. I have conveniently arranged a little impromptu knitting meet-up with her and a few other knitting friends to make this happen, thus giving me an excuse to get out of the house, try to catch up on my lace knitting, and most importantly, leave Richard alone so he can finish reading Harry Potter in peace.
In all the excitement over Harry Potter, and the drive to deal with the laminate flooring, it probably has not been the typical sort of weekend one might imagine if one were going to celebrate a wedding anniversary. But in a way, getting that flooring done, and finally finding out what happens to Harry and Hermione and Ron and all the others in that little world, is just the kind of celebration I wanted. Six years ago yesterday Richard and I were married, and through all the craziness and drama of jobs and house stuff and cats and health and and everything that we have gone through since then, I still know with absolute certainty that it was the very best thing I have ever done.